How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel »

Posted by Dan Peskin

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.

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One

First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.

Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.

We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.

Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.

I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).

In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:

=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)

You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.

The Impression That I Get

No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.

The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.

Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.

If You Ain't First Page, You're Last

Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.

The More You Know

The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.

Mo Money Mo Metrics

Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.

Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.

Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.

One Report To Rule Them All

Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.

There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:

The master report.

Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.

Pivotal Success

Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.

Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.

Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.

This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.

For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.

Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.

The final product.

Conclusion

Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!

Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.

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The Hidden Factors in Accomplishing Your Online Marketing Goals - Whiteboard Friday »

Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Please note that we shot this week's Whiteboard Friday on a brand new video camera and we still need to work out a few kinks. I apologize for the slight purple tint on the Whiteboard.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today.

So in terms of impacting all of these items, there's traditional stuff that we know, we talk about. So things like, oh, and the click-through rate for the search results, I know that position matters. I know that getting a rich snippet matters. If I can have little stars next to mine; if I can have a picture, a photo, or a video, that usually increases click-through rate. I know that if I'm in special kinds of results, that can either increase or decrease my results. I know if I've got a listing and an indented listing below, that can help me. I know that with subscriptions to RSS and e-mail, I can test different buttons, different versions of the entry form; different calls to action. On links that I click, I can test different titles. All this kind of stuff, there are those traditional testing kinds of things, right?

So in that traditional CRO, that's been covered a ton of times. We don't need to cover this because you often know a lot of the things that are in there. You can find them. They're well-documented. The subtle stuff, the weird stuff is oftentimes around just two questions.

Number one: Does the product or service or thing that you want me to do meet my needs? It could be as simple as: Do I think when I click on this result in the search engine that it will answer the question that I originally asked? But there are so many subtleties that are involved in that, that we never think about, that doing traditional kinds of CRO testing and optimization, we'll never get there.

The second question is: Do I trust and like the brand and/or people behind the brand? This goes to fundamental marketing and branding awareness, and it is so pervasive in all the things that we do, whether it's in web marketing or in offline marketing, and yet oftentimes ignored by marketers like us, who operate in the inbound world of SEO and social media and content marketing and these kinds of things, because we're so analytics driven, that we see a lower click-through rate than we want, a lower conversion rate than we want, a lower subscription rate, a lower sharing rate than we want, and we think, hey, let's test these traditional types of CRO things. Sometimes the problem or the optimization tactics are at a much deeper level.

Let's start with the product/service meeting the needs. There's a bunch of things that go in here. Uptime and reliability is one of the biggest ones. So essentially, if I click a website and it is not speedy, delivering the things that I need, and consistent, I'm going to learn not to trust it, and I'm going to be less likely to click it. This is why you see things like speed being a factor, webpage load speed in Google's rankings, granted a very small factor, but certainly a much bigger factor when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm going to click this, and boy, it's going to take a long time."

I'll give you a good example. I personally think that a lot of the writing at Forbes is pretty darn good. Same with The Wall Street Journal, same with Bloomberg online. But they almost all have interstitial ads and very, very slow page load times. At least in my experience in the past, those websites have done that for me. Almost always have the interstitial, almost always takes a while to load, and then I have to wait through the interstitial. I hate it.

So if I see something else in the search results, a site in social media, I'm going to be less apt to share it. I'm going to be less apt to click on it. I've learned through the conditioning that those brands have given me that the uptime, reliability speed issues are problems.

Same thing with pricing. So I think Radian6 is an absolutely phenomenal product. I've heard great things about it, met the CEO, know some people there. Terrific product. Way too expensive! No way that I can justify affording it. Right now, I'm using Google Alerts and some combination of Google searches that I do every day, some other brand monitoring stuff that SEOmoz is working on in beta, the Blogscape Project, which of course I get kind of alpha access to.

Pricing is wrapped in there by necessity. When you worry, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm attracting all these visitors. They're not converting or they're not taking this action." They may have heard, or they may know, or they may have seen that your pricing simply doesn't match their market, or they have fears around that. That's why I'm such a big fan of transparency here, because I think that you will weed out and save your salespeople time, and save your customer service people time, and save your website bandwidth, if you're transparent about this most of the time.

Features and perceived features. Features is: Do you do the thing that I want you to do? When I'm talking about features, I could mean in software. I could mean in a product, like I'm buying a digital camera, I'm buying a car, I'm buying a whiteboard pen, I'm buying a subscription to a software service. I'm looking purely for information. The features are: Do you do the things that I want you do to? Oftentimes, that comes through brand perception as well.

So I know that a lot of the times when I visit an eHow type of website, that it doesn't have the features that I want, which is a reliable source that I know I can trust. Wikipedia's the same way. I only semi-trust Wikipedia, and I trust it on some topics and not others, and I always want to back it up with something else from some reliable source where I know the person there or I know the brand there, because Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, and I don't necessarily know who's behind it.

So those types of brands, and this is even true sometimes at About.com, where the writers in some categories are phenomenal. Southern food, I think is terrific. Some of the digital marketing ones are good. Some of them are mediocre. It's a trust factor around the features and the perception of features. Perception of features is often very different from actual features.

We find, for example, when we survey customers of SEOmoz that they have no idea that we actually will help track their Facebook pages, Insights data over time, and their Twitter data over time. Many people don't even know that Open Site Explorer and SEOmoz are offered in the same subscription. So this is clearly a problem that we have had on perception of features, not even on actual features.

Presentation. The way and the style in which the features and the information and the pricing and reliability and the uptime, all of that is presented is another big one. The thing about presentation is that it's a layer that impacts everything else, not just up here, but down here as well. It's often done terribly, terribly wrong on the Web.

Because it ties so much to the, "Do I like and trust these people," let's talk about those. This question, when you ask the question, "Do I like and trust the brand, and the people behind the brand," that goes to a bunch of inputs that are very, very far removed, all so far removed from traditional CRO stuff. That's things like design and UX, which we talk about many times here on Whiteboard Friday and on the site. Higher quality, more professional, more consistent with what your audience is looking for, just does a fantastically better job than, "Oh yeah, we bought some stock photography of some people in an office working, and don't they look attractive, don't they have perfect skin? And now, you know, that's our homepage, and then there's Services, and Contact, and About. Great, we have a professional website!" No, you don't. No, no, you don't!

Design UX isn't just about that. There are other inputs like domain name and brand name. One of the biggest reasons that I'm often against exact- match domains is because it is so tremendously hard to build up any sort of branding. If you name industries, you will very, very rarely hear that the generic, exact-match domain for what we call that industry is a market leader, a brand leader, and because of that and also because, to be totally fair, a lot of people in the domaining sphere and the affiliate marketing and SEO sphere noticed the power that these had in Google and abused them tremendously. So now consumers have an association, particularly savvy consumers have an association, a brand association with exact-match domains. That is, "Oh, that's probably a low-quality site. That's probably not the real brand. I don't know if I can trust it if I click on that," versus actual brand names.

I'll give you some very good examples. In the world of office supplies I've heard of Staples, right? I've heard of OfficeMax. I've heard of Office Depot. But if it's OfficeSupplies.net, I'm sure someone owns that domain. It could even be someone awesome. Maybe it's a great site, but if I see it in the search results, I'm going to be mighty suspicious. That suspicion just naturally creeps in. That's why domain name and brand name are so tied together in the perception of trust and can substantially impact things like click-through rate and conversion rate and subscription rate, etc.

Accessibility of contact information. It's funny, I was just on an e-mail thread yesterday night, and some folks in the SEO sphere said, hey, have you ever heard of this particular - it was an enterprise SEO software provider. I went, "No, I haven't heard of them. This is the first time. Let me go check out their site." I see they try and say a few futures, but there's literally nothing, no one mentioned on the site; no people who are using it, no people who are associated with the brand. The contact information is "Fill out a contact form" or "Here's our office." I think it was somewhere in the United States; I can't remember exactly where. But other than a mailing address and a phone number, there was no human being listed, which made me very suspicious, because why would you not show off the team? Like, here's the exec team behind it. Here are our engineers. That kind of transparency is natural in the software world. Something's weird if it doesn't exist there.

Being able to find that information - a phone number, e-mail, contact forms, here's our Twitter and our Facebook, and these kinds of things - you just expect those from web companies. When they don't exist, you become highly suspicious.

The authenticity of the content. One of my favorite examples is there's a brand that's been doing a ton of fantastic infographics. I think it's MBAonline or MBAeducation.com, one of the online education providers with a very generic name. They really do great infographics. They sponsor some awesome stuff. Sometimes they'll get featured on a Mashable or even a TechCrunch, or something like that. Tremendous work, excellent work getting that brand out there.

But I always look at them and think this doesn't have a relationship with what the services that you're trying to sell, which is you're an affiliate for a bunch of online education providers, which can be a little bit of a nasty, sort of spammy, aggressive field. The challenge here is, hey, yes, you've got the infographic, you've got the link. But when you're trying to tie back into consumers and earn their business, those of us who are savvy and sophisticated, we sort of get a funny feeling, like something doesn't match up. The content is not authentic to the brand. Why is it being produced?

I think a great example of this is OkTrends, which is OkCupid's blog. They essentially have dating content that matches up with what people are looking for from their site. So, here's how to optimize your dating profile, and by the way, we're a dating website. Great, makes perfect sense.

Hey, here's an infographic about the rise of Twitter or Twitter click- through rates or something - and by the way, we're an MBA online education provider. Why is that? It seems like it's just for the links and attention and awareness and has nothing to do with the actual brand. Highly suspicious, particularly in spheres that are very aggressive.

Industry reputation, word of mouth. I'll give you another example. So, there was another provider that was mentioned on this string in the SEO enterprise space. No, I'm sorry. It was another enterprise software provider, but not in SEO. There were some comments of, "Oh, hey, should we use this? Should we use this other one?" Someone remarked on an e-mail thread, "You know, the CEO of this particular company has treated women employees very badly."

You would never find that on the Web, right? That's not information that you're going to see. If you start searching for reviews, you won't find it on their website. It's something that's word-of-mouth only, but it's made its way to enough influencers that now that is an influential thing in the perception of, "Do I like the brand and the people?" Very frankly, I trust this source, and I know the source knows the CEO there, and I don't. I'm probably not going to buy from this particular enterprise software provider, even if they meet my needs up here. This is the type of stuff that influences conversion rate, that is so subtle and so hidden, that you're never going to realize it from a traditional CRO-type of perspective. And yet, it pays huge dividends to go and investigate this stuff and understand that perception.

The final one that I'll mention here is familiarity with the brand and social proof of the brand. A great example here, go to SurveyMonkey's website. If you're not logged in, the homepage is a woman from Facebook, her picture, she's a statistical analyst there, and she's giving an endorsement to SurveyMonkey. Now, Facebook is a phenomenal brand; they're very well-known. Their business practices are respected. People know that they're a great data-driven company, and so the fact that they trust SurveyMonkey strongly suggests SurveyMonkey must be a great provider. So, they've created that social proof, and they're using a brand that you're familiar with.

When you combine those things, it's absolutely excellent and incredibly powerful. When I go to websites and I see a lot of social proof from either people that are anonymous or people that provide only their fist name or people that I don't know, it's less powerful. When I have seen a brand, six, seven, eight times on the Web, at a conference, in various types of ways - I've heard from someone over e-mail, I know someone who's used them, I've had an experience with someone from that company - those types of things strongly influence these. Building up all of this builds up your conversion rates and builds up all of these metrics that you think about as an online marketer, and yet, we often have so little control or so little even ability to judge and record these things.

What I want to suggest is that, to those of you who are doing web marketing, when you're thinking about these metrics, remember that these are all inputs. Don't necessarily use them as excuses, but make sure that you're taking some action on them. Make sure that you're finding ways to measure them. Make sure that these aren't the reasons why your rates over here are low, rather than the stuff that you focus on, because it can be incredibly frustrating to find that, hey, the reason that we're not making good sales is because no one is familiar with our brand, and we don't have the right social proof, rather than, oh, it's because I didn't write the title tags correctly, and I don't have a compelling description for the content, and the page isn't optimized well. It doesn't have a good flow and conversion process and funnel. Sometimes these two things are mixed up together, and I worry about those hidden factors.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?! »

Posted by evolvingSEO

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.

The 80/20 Value of Titles

Recently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I've seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral. He touches briefly upon the importance of your title for click through rate and sharability, but in this post I'd like to take a more in depth look at titles and how they help spread your content. (By the way, this is my first YouMoz - woohoo!)

In my opinion, the elements of writing click worthy titles deserve more attention. In the wonderful marketing book "Made To Stick", the Heath brothers note that any good news or editorial writer may spend 80% of their time crafting the title (or "lead") and then whatever time they have left on the body of the content.

For those familiar with 80/20, what this means is, the size of the title compared to the actual content (and time spent crafting it) disproportionately affects the success of that content. It's one small piece of text with a lot power!

Note: to clarify, I am not necessarily referring to the title tag exclusively. I'm referring to simply the title of a page, post, article… which as you will see below can be the same as your title tag, but doesn't have to be.

A Quick Analogy: The Internet As a Highway

If your webpage was a store on the side of a busy highway, the title's job would be to capture attention and get people in the door. As many of the right people as possible. If you've ever driven on Route 1 heading into Boston, MA, you know what I mean (see photo).

Lots of people may pass by your links, tweets and shares, but few may actually stop to come in and check things out.

I hope this little analogy illustrates the extreme importance of crafting a clickable title - and that you will join me as I suggest some ideas for making your titles more clickable. Let's go!!!

7 Ingredients of a Click Worthy Title

Assuming all other factors neutral for the moment, let's look at what I think are 7 most important ingredients of your titles;

1. Curiosity
2. Benefit
3. Emotion
4. Tangible
5. Appearance
6. Sound
7. Expectation

Ingredient 1: Curiosity

Your title should be clear enough that people know what they're going to get when they click, but also leave an element of curiosity - so you almost can't help but to click. You just have to find out what's on the other side. Some examples of elements that can entice curiosity;

Curiosity A: Unexpected

How do you make something unexpected? Combine two things that usually do not go together, like this;

"Diet Coke" is not something you usually expect to see in a post about SEO. 77 thumbs up.

Curiosity B: Incomplete Thought or Question

Pete's title here makes me curious, because he asks an open question, which I wonder how/if it will be answered within the post.

Curiosity C: Present A Conflict (Plot)

Rand does a great job here of introducing curiosity because there is an inherent conflict; a choice requiring resolution. Which one will he choose and why? Which do I choose and can I offer an alternative opinion? Will I agree with him?

Curiosity D: State What Something Isn't

I'm left thinking; It isn't? What Is? Do I know them? What's John going to say?

Ingredient 2: Highlight The Benefit

Benefit is congruent to differentiation. On the whole, people will visit a page because there is some sort of benefit to them. Useful content, entertainment, or even content that will make them look good if they share it. Why should someone click and visit your page? What are they going to get out of it? Some examples that imply benefit;

• How to…
• 7 Ways…
• Find Out How…
• Introducing…. (implies newness)

These are all common elements of a title that hint at benefit. Like this;

Providing a clear benefit is also a way to differentiate your content from others, in that you're implying it holds unique value that can't be found elsewhere. I also like "face-off" - there's a lot of meaning (visual, emotion, tension, etc) packed into those two words.

Ingredient 3: Elicit Excitement/Emotion

People also act on emotion - excitement, fear, hope. Your title should conjure the right emotion in viewers. I don't think people always click purely on emotion, but emotion can certainly support the other ingredients. Things like;

Thanks for the tweet Tom :-) I think the emotional aspect (as in this case) can apply more to social media - the title you might craft in a tweet of something, such as Tom's "ridiculously awesome" text here. Some other emotional words are;

• killer
• amazingly
• fantastic
• FREE
• mistakes
• mind-blowing
• surprising
• staggering
• surprisingly
• uncommonly
• unusually
• myths
• irresistibly
• seductively
• tempting
• uncontrollably
• unexpected
• unbelievably
• astonishing
• astoundingly
• remarkably
• insanely
• stupidly
• wicked
• viral
• epic

You get the idea :-)

Note that adverbs (ending in "ly") are quite popular. Honestly, I'm just using the thesaurus for a lot of those :-) But if you're fine with describing your own work in such glamorous words, go for it! I typically reserve this for something I'm really confident about, or if I'm referring to something else, like a product review.

Also;

• Exclamation points!!!!!!
• ALL CAPS - You MUST Read This NOW
• ——–>Arrows. The Best Post Ever —> Read Now
• *Asterisks* - I Just *Love* The Ideas in blah blah blah….

Just remember that not all special type characters work well across different platforms (social, blog themes etc) so use carefully. And they can also get annoying quickly, so use sparingly.

Ingredient 4: Make It Tangible

The Health Brother's book "Made To Stick" talks a lot about making your ideas concrete or tangible. I highly recommend going to this page of resources and downloading the free PDF "Made To Stick Success Model" (and read their book!)

Great example here though by Mike King;

I'm sure we all get an instant clear picture in mind of the "Cat In The Hat", as it's a familiar tangible graphic. Also keep in mind that, in Mike's case especially, a great post can naturally lend its self to a great title.

Ingredient 5: Appearance & Length

Although, in my opinion, not as important as 1-4, but if you can get your titles to look aesthetically pleasing, even better. Like this;

I like what Neil has done here, however intentional or not. The title fits on one line. It looks pleasing graphically, and its seven words long (which is supposedly the recommended length of a title or headline).

Ingredient 6: Sound

I don't know about you, but I "hear" myself saying the titles in my head. Just like appearance, this is of secondary importance, but if you can put an artistic touch to your titles, it makes them that much better.

I'm going to use Neil's title (noted just above) again as an example here. It sounds nice. It has a poetic ring to it.

• The alliteration "Lessons Learned".
• The "esss" sound in "Lessons" and "SEO" fit nicely
• as well as the "sea" sound in agency.

Can you tell I am a musician?

Again, the appearance and sound of your title is secondary, I believe, to the first four ingredients, but in my mind if you can get all 7 elements into a title, you're a freakin' genius. :-)

Ingredient 7: Expectations

Don't advertise "the best burger in town" and then have it be a veggie burger. It could be the best veggie burger that ever existed, but you set the wrong expectation. This is where you need to have some serious alignment and harmony between what you promise in the title and deliver with the content.

For this, I'd like to cite an example where the wrong expectation may have been set;

While honestly, I've only skimmed this post, the 17 thumbs down and people's comments (some about the title directly) illustrate the point that you don't want misrepresent the content of your post. Whether intentional or not, this post unfortunately seemed to do that. But conversely it did get quite a bit of attention (101 thumbs up and promotion to main blog) so it was a well-written title, just may not have been best aligned with the content.

So some questions to ask yourself to double check this;

• Does the title match the content? - What would YOU expect to see on the other side if you read the title? Does it match in what you imply the benefits will be?
• Does it imply content type? - Do you use the words "photo, video, graphic, interview, read, slideshow" etc implying what the core content type is going to be? Does that in fact match what's in the post?
• How long will it take to consume? - Do you call something a "complete guide", implying extensive length, when it is just a short overview? Do you call something a "quick recap" when in fact it's an in-depth look? Or say "7 steps" when in fact that's only a piece of the whole content?

Finally, note that you don't have to have all of these ingredients all of the time. Certain content may be more inherently exciting, or other content more controversial and thus evokes more curiosity.

Breaking The Rules

There are, of course plenty of exceptions to these ingredients in the real world:

Exception 1: Created By Influential Person/Business

If Rand or Danny Sullivan or Avinash posts a new article, there is an inherent trust and reputation built in. I think the concept of authority is explained well in Rand's post about thought leadership. Along those lines, when Roger (@SEOmoz) tweets out the newest blog post, since this is coming from a popular SEO company, Roger's reputation can boost up click worthiness and thus, the title is not quite as important.

Exception 2: Extremely Noteworthy or Newsworthy Content

During the time of SOPA or the Google (Not Provided) dilemma or now SPYW, if you were to post something with a decent title that was timely, this would be more likely to get clicks, just by nature of it being a hot topic.

Exception 3: Rebellion / Pure Artistic Liberty / Don't Care

Obviously there are sectors of the web or moments where you just want to throw your hair down and crank out an over the top, creative, artistic, rebellious title. Of course, as I'm now typing this, those sound like they'd get some good clicks as well! They just won't follow the "formula".

I shamelessly use my own example;

When I was first getting my SEO blog going, I didn't care so much about getting tons of traffic, because I knew I was just starting to blog about SEO, and thus it wouldn't be my best content. It was more for practice, and to have some content there to build upon. So why not have some fun right?

And as I imply, the "ingredients" as described above do not always have to follow this formula, depending upon your audience and industry and even goals.

Where / How The Title Appears Around the Web

When you come up with a great title, where do you put it? Should it always go in your title tag? Header?

Most often, some version of your title is going to be in three places;

1. Title Tag
2. Header (which should be the H1)
3. URL (in a "clean" format, with hyphens etc).

But there are exceptions and considerations. A balance needs to be found between what will appear on-site, in the SERPs in social media or even bookmarking. Some things to keep in mind about each;

1. The SERPs

1.The title tag IS the anchor text in the SERPs (unless Google decides to change it).

I know this is basic, but SO important to remember when we're composing the title tag not only for rankings but CTR. Doesn't help if it ranks but no one clicks!

2. (In My Opinion) The Title Tag Should Be 50% for SEO and 50% for clicks

What do I mean by this? Good practice technical SEO (for ranking) says to put your most important keyword/keyphrase in the title tag, and as close to the front as possible. I'm speaking more about blog posts in this case, but I feel that if the keyword needs to be towards the end, or split up/modified in some way, to create a click worthy title, this is essential. Obviously if you're trying to rank a page for an extremely competitive keyword in the e-commerce space for example, this is going to differ, but that case may be extreme.

3. URLs - This is where you can win for rankings!!

Look at the URL in Avinash's post;

His TITLE (with "change or perish" is click worthy) but his URL does not need "change or perish". Keep your URLs as clean, focused and optimized as possible. This again is simply my opinion and experience and what I would recommend to clients in most cases. I even recommend switching the order of your words in the URL to get the keywords in the front of the URL, if this was not possible in the title tag.

The header will likely NOT appear in the SERPs, unless it ends up in the description.

2. Twitter

What I find unique about Twitter is, the link anchor text is not the title, which differs from most other places on the web. Thus why I like Twitter as a tool for experimentation, because you can change the headline easily just by writing a new tweet, but it is important to know where the title can come from.

Via The Tweet Button

Normally, what will auto-fill by default is the title tag;

Yet another reason to optimize your title tag for CTR!!!

You can of course control to an extent what text auto-fills via the tweet button, and I recommend starting with the Twitter documentation for this.

What The User Inputs

Often it's the case that people will create their own text to tweet a link, but in many cases they will just copy your page header (this is what I do anyway if just sharing quickly) because it's the easiest thing to do. In many cases, your CMS (WordPress for example) will make your title tag and header the same thing by default (and also add the website name at the end of the title tag).

Twitter and URLs

This is an interesting and outlying example that Rand pointed out, where the URL can potentially help CTR. That is, when you hover over most URLs in Twitter, you can see the full URL as you hover;

Very useful, and this for me will make or break a click 100% of the time. I always hover before clicking. Obviously this is limited to desktop/laptop devices :-)

But here you can see that is not always the case, and in this case I am much less likely to click;

3. Facebook

Ahh… Facebook and the Open Graph. This is where things get interesting for sure. I remember when I first was learning about the Facebook like/share/recommend buttons, I was confused how it all worked. In short though - you have to properly add the Facebook open graph meta tags to your site to control what appears when people use Facebook share buttons, and even to an extent, when people simply cut and paste a link into Facebook.

And I would highly recommend reading this post and especially —> this post by Aaron Friedman on Search Engine Land for more details on controlling your Facebook titles around the web.

4. Google Plus

As expected, Goolge Plus uses your title tag for the title of a link when sharing;

It's OK to share stuff about Facebook on Google Plus right?

So to conclude for implementation, in general:

• Write Title Tags for CTR with enough SEO to help rankings.
• Write URLs mainly for SEO but descriptive enough for clicks. Keep them clean looking.
• Write Headers that closely match your title but also look and feel great on-page.
• While all three elements should contain your core keyword, the three elements do not have to be exactly the same.

Analyzing The Effectiveness Of Your Titles

While an in depth technique for measuring CTR is out of the scope of this post (it still seems CTR is one of those Holy Grail metrics for SEO - deceptively hard to calculate average CTR and even actual CTR for specific sites. Not just in SERPs, but everywhere around the web. If SEOmoz developed a way to truly and accurately measure this, I would use it! Do you agree?) .. I can however point you to a few resources, which can help you get a basic feel for how your CTR is going;

Bit.ly Data

There are many options for URL shorteners, but I personally use and like bit.ly, so we'll focus on that here.

First, I recommend reading bit.ly's documentation on how they capture data and display metrics.

Secondly, Rand mentions how if you add the + (plus) sign to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see the stats for that link. This is awesome!!

For instance, take someone like Tim Ferriss, who has a relatively high amount of followers on Twitter. I can take a link he's shared on Twitter and see how many clicks its received. Not only that, I can look through his entire list of publically shortened URLs.

That said, I'm sure there are technical geniuses who can figure out a more robust method to measuring and using publically available data like this, but just eyeballing it is worthwhile, to study what titles have been effective.

External Resources

Click Through Rate For Twitter - Rand wrote a great post, which attempts to measure Twitter CTR in conjunction with some other interesting metrics.

SERP Turkey - The new tool by Tom Anthony, which allows you to test CTR in the SERPs. Admittedly I have not tried it yet, but would also like to say it deserves more attention! Richard Baxter wrote about it here in a fantastic post about how search intention may influence CTR.

Practice Writing Titles!

A/B Test Titles

Again, using bit.ly, you can;

1. Create two (or more if you want to go nuts) short links to the same article.
2. Tweet them both using two versions of the title in your tweet - try to keep other variables as similar as possible.
3. Look at your bit.ly stats and see which one got more clicks and shares.

This isn't to be scientific, as much as to practice and have fun!!

Re-Write Other People's Titles

I love this one. I regularly will compose tweets to other people's content and write my own title, use bit.ly and measure the clicks. Again, we're just having fun and practicing here, not necessarily being super scientific.

Write Ten Titles in 60 Seconds

Sometime you just have to get those ideas moving. Try setting a timer and jot down ten titles as fast as you can!! Just do it!! The creative moment can be a powerful thing.

Study Non-Web Sources

As Gianluca pointed out in his comments to Rand's post, look at how newspapers and editorial print publications compose titles. This is not a new concept, in fact as you'll learn in Made To Stick, the idea of crafting a lead has been around a long time!! You can gain a lot of inspiration from non-web sources.

Try Identifying the "Ingredients" Of Any Given Title;

• Curiosity
• Benefit
• Emotion
• Tangible
• Appearance
• Sound
• Expectation

Inspiration & Resources

The Class I'd Like to Teach - 37Signals - Love this little piece by co-founder Jason Fried. He talks about writing a "one sentence paper" but the spirit of it certainly applies to titles.

6 Tips for Improving Twitter CTR - Get Elastic - Fantastic article with a wide variety of suggestions for improving CTR in Twitter (not just Titles), but things like link placement, length, word types etc.

Irresistible Headlines - Jonathan Fields - I confess, a few of my "ingredient" ideas for titles came from this post, and although Jonathan's SEO tips are pretty basic, there's some fantastic idea in this post. One interesting suggestion he makes is that the use of numbers, specifically the number '7' has shown highest success.

Anything You Want - Derek Sivers - Founder of CDBaby, Derek Sivers (I think) is brilliant at tangible little headlines. His work in general is of inspiration. But specifically, in his book "Anything You Want" he tells an interesting story about the value of user feedback when sending out huge bulk emails to their mailing list. If one sentence was slightly unclear, they'd get thousands of confused replies back, that would take $5,000 of man-hours to respond to. Many of us do not get this type of feedback loop from our webpages and titles. If something is unclear or uninspiring, all we get is silence. He makes the point - imagine you were to email thousands of people your webpage/article - would you get lots of confused replies back? To that I'd add - imagine your title was the subject of the email. Would it get opened?

Made To Stick Resources - The Heath Brothers - Previously mentioned a few times in this post, I probably learned the most about crafting a good title and making your words and ideas stick from their book. Highly recommend you check it out!

The Thesaurus - One of my favorite SEO tools!! Helps you find that perfect word.

Final Thought: Titles Are Timeless

Perhaps what I love most is the skill of crafting a click worthy title is timeless. While so many things in SEO change so fast, this is at least one facet that is deeply rooted in the past, and will thus endure for a long time.

To me, it's worthwhile and inspiring to step back and identify these timeless elements in a field that changes so rapidly. And it helps me remember that, despite the strong technical aspects to SEO, there is plenty of room for art and humanity. That, and we'll still all have jobs in 20 years :-)

What Did You Think?

As mentioned, this was my first YouMoz. *Wild Applause!!* Perhaps a bit overdue by my standards (I'd drafted and scrapped two posts prior to settling on this one). I would LOVE to hear your comments, suggestions and questions below: I will respond to all, promise :-)

You can also hit me up on Twitter.

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The 10 Golden Rules to Attracting Authority Links »

Posted by neilpatel

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

In the world of link building, getting an authority link to your site/blog has been one of the most important aspects of growing your blog. Back in 2009 Page Level Link Metrics and Domain Level Authority Features accounted for over 46% of your pages own authority:

In 2011, that percentage has dropped, but only by 4% [42.58%], suggesting that link building will continue to be a critical factor to your blog/website’s success.

But we pretty much know that not just any link will do. The better the site the link is coming from, the better the link.

That’s why your link-building campaigns need to be built around attracting authority links. But how do you do that? And what exactly is an authority link? Let me explain.

Absolute and relative authority links explained

There are two types of authorities. There are the absolute authority sites like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Google’s blog. These sites are also labeled “informational” authorities versus navigational authorities like DMOZ.

On the other hand, you also have relative authority sites. These are sites run by bloggers or webmasters that are authorities in a niche. Bloggers like Robert Scoble, Dooce or Mashable are authorities in their markets. While the link juice they’ll give you if they link to you is not as high as what an absolute authority site could give you…they are definitely worth attracting.

But how do you actually get a link from these sites? Here are the ten golden rules to attracting authority links.

Rule 1: Write content that attracts Editorial In-content Links

The most fundamental tactic of attracting authority links is to write content that is worth a link. What does this content look like?

• Cornerstone – this content fills an obvious gap in the web information world that you fill with expert advice, detailed posts and well-reasoned arguments. This content will also define you, so it’s important to establish up front what your blog/site is going to focus on. This is also a large portion of the content you share.
• Personal content – About a quarter or less of the content should contain personal stories about yourself that helps your readers to understand who you are and where you come from. My How Being a Patel Made Me Somewhat Successful is a great example. It stays within the cornerstone content of the site, but it gives you a peek into my personal life.
• Spicy content – This is a small fraction of your content and is made up of controversial posts you write about. Typically you attack a high-profile idea or person or explain why something popular is really dumb. These are for linkbait purposes typically, but generally also give your readers an idea of who you are.

Building up a blog/site with this kind of content will take time, so you may not pick up a natural authority link out of the gate. Better yet, once you have a solid archive of content, approach these authority sites and ask for a link. Give them a good reason, which could be one of the following:

• You wrote about the author and now he might be interested in sharing with his circle the blog post that you published.
• You wrote a post that works well with a series that he wrote our compliments it. You could even critique something he or she did, which might spark an across-blog debate. If that sparks a firestorm of other responses…then you’ve won!

Rule 2: Fix other people’s broken links

Links die all the time. People shut down website or pull web pages. When these documents or sites vanish all the links pointing to them are dead.

For example, if you work through a web page by a publisher who links out a lot and the page is a few years old, you are bound to find at least one or two dead links on that page. Work through the entire site and you could find dozens.

Mashable is a good example of a site that links out a lot and will probably have a lot of dead links on older pages since they tend to report on startups that don’t always last.

You can easily solve this in 2 ways:

• Manual - Make a list of all the dead links you find, then approach the author of those pages. It’s better if you focus on one author/one person and offer several options for content instead of having to contact different authors for each dead link. That can become an administrative nightmare.
• Link validator – Use a tool like the W3C’s Link Checker to find dead links on a website or blog. It’s pretty easy to do. Here are the steps I took to check Mashable.

Drop link into sub form:

Choose your options:

Click “done” and then wait 644.47 seconds:

You can then work your way through the status report:

From that report you can build a list of dead links, the pages that need to replaced and the authors you can approach if it is a multi-author site like Mashable.

Rule 3: Create a desirable image library

If you have high-quality images on our site, you can use those images as an incentive to get people to link to you. Imagine you have a gallery of large, high-resolution pictures…well, then offer a contact form that allows a person to grab the file and linking code right there on the page.

You don’t have to go all out like a photl.com:

Or freepixels.com:

The last site specialize in photos, for you though being a content publisher looking for ranking juice, you could build a sub-domain devoted to photos like these.

Here’s what you have to do, though.

• Hire a decent amateur photographer - If you are not a good photographer and to keep it inexpensive you could hire a local photographer who is good but not really good to charge outlandish fees.
• Use your phone - Now a days, however, most cameras on smart phones can take high-quality photos. It’s often the skill of taking a good picture…like having the right angle and light…that a decent photographer should know about. In any case, the better the photos, the more likely you will get interest in the images.

And to help you benefit fully from this tactic, keep this in mind when building a library of images:

• The higher the quality of each image the better link building potential these photos will have.
• Search out affordable ways to take pictures. This could mean hiring a inexpensive photographer or buying a decent smart phone with a great camera.
• Each image should be posted on its own page.
• The delivery service should be as easy as possible. Test different set ups and use the one that makes adoption easy.
• Add images on a schedule, whether one a day or once a week.

Rule 4: Offer to write a column or do a guest post

Giving a publisher practical, highly-researched content as a guest post is a great way to get links to your site from him or her.

Keep in mind this tactic typically be easier to pull off for those relative authority content sites than absolute authority sites due to their blogging policy. But if you have a guest posting strategy that involves focusing on building links, traffic and exposure via guest posting on a select few relative authority sites, you’ll eventually have an arsenal of content that you can pitch to the absolute authority sites.

Some authority sites like Open Forum or Huffington Post have so much need for content that you can usually get a post on there. But you typically still have to provide a portfolio of posts so they can understand what level of writing you are at and not just someone off the street.

Here are some resource to help you write, submit and get published guest posts:

• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Writing Your First Guest Post
• Neil Patel’s Guide to Writing Popular Blog Posts
• Write a Guest Post for I Will Teach You to Be Rich (while Ramit Sethi focuses on tips on how to write for his blog…they are valuable for any blog, really.)
• Why Submit Your Best Posts as Guest Posts?
• How to Land a Guest Post Without Fail: 21 Secret Tips

Rule 5: Go to where your target audience hangs out

As bloggers and people of the internet we often forget about all of the face-to-face connections that can provide us with valuable links from relative or absolute authority site publishers.

For example, travel to conferences and hook up with some of the people you want to influence and convince to link to your site. Don’t be a pest to these people, but hang out, be cool to them, and then leave them alone for the rest of the events. You then need to go to the after-event event at the bar. This is where you can make things happen by simply buying them a drink or two.

If you really want to take it to another level, offer to take them out for dinner and pick up the check. During that dinner suggest they link to you in some purposeful way…perhaps you offer to create an infographics or a beginner’s guide.

But even if you don’t get some agreement like that you can say as you grab the check, “No, let me get this. You give me a link or something.”

That way the person thinks, “A $50 dinner for a link? You got it.”

Rule 6: Fill gaps in content

As I mentioned above, when you are talking to content publishers, ask them what content they are missing…and offer to create it for them. It could be a video interview of Guy Kawaski or a periodic table of the fundamentals of link building. It could be an idea they’ve had for an ebook.

Whatever it is, offer to create it for them.

Once you create the content you will get the credit as a link back to your site. Make sure you offer content that you can create professionally and will attract people who are in your target audience. Creating a weight-loss calculator for a site when you are in real estate will drive traffic to your site…but it will be the wrong traffic. You might as well done nothing.

Rule 7: Contact big media at the right time

When you are trying to attract the attention of big media sites like CNN or The Economist, knowing when they publish their content is important.

For those sites who are less tied to a content schedule, like a Drudge Report, you will not need to know when they publish their links because they do it pretty much as the story breaks.

Still, having some kind of bead on when that time is will improve your chances. Here’s a guideline to follow:

• For many absolute authorities like the one I mentioned above, you can be certain that they will plan Monday’s content on Sunday.
• Around 6:30 am to 9:30 am, the media staff will put together a list of their top 15 stories for the day. This is the news list. Contacting them during this time is more likely to influence their decision even more than if you called or emailed them the day before.
• The next step for the media staff is to present the completed list of news stories to a team who will then decide which stories will get front page billing. This usually happens around 9:30 am to noon. This is your last chance to send anything. Do it now, because unless you have something spectacular, sending anything over after 1 pm will end up in the trash.

And even if you do get coverage…it won’t be a lot and it probably won’t be a link. Late content entries are typically reduced to the show that doesn’t impact SEO at all.

8. Approach government or education sites

A sure sign of an authority site is a .edu or .gov. This could be a link from a college like Harvard or Stanford or a link from the White House or Usability.gov. Getting those links are not always easy.

One example is to look for ways you can register accounts with these institutions. For example, Harvard has The Harvard H20 Playlist Project. It’s simply a series of links to books, articles or content that hopes to spark content.

Simply create a playlist and add a link to a useful post inside your site.

Creating meaningful, researched content or break an interesting story and these sites might naturally attract these sites might link to you. Examples of content that you could write that might actually grab their attention include:

• Write a solid, thorough review about one of their programs, pulling in information from historical data sets, current events and future predictions. This will likely catch their eye.
• Sponsor a student event. This will not cost very much.
• Volunteer to be a guest speaker for graduates.
• Approach their business school and offer to be a case study.

The kind of content you could create that would attract a government link could be:

• Create a community page/sub-domain on your site that supports some club or event in your city.
• Create content that supports some sort of charitable cause.
• Put on an event. Not only the .gov sites will approach you, but the local press will do so as well.
• Run for an office in your community. The commitment is usually low, so it’s not like you will be consumed with it.

In some cases you will just have to approach these institutions. When you do, you are more likely to get an answer however, and a positive one at that, if you inspect their site, identify the content gaps and then offer to fill them.

Again, it’s going to be important that you have something to show that you can pull off the content professionally, so don’t try this tactic until you have a good catalog of posts in your archives.

9. Buy links without penalty

It’s no secret that buying links violates Google’s policy and the penalty can be very stiff. So you may be wonder why I’m suggesting you buy links.

There are ways to buy links that will not be a violation of Google’s policy. Here are two:

• Donate to a charity – Depending on how much you donate, some organizations will display you name and donation amount on their sites.
• Offer to pay influential bloggers to post on your site – The content is simple. Give an authoritative blogger some kind of incentive like cash to write a post you can post on your site. In all likelihood they’ll link to it once it’s published.
• Fund research – Sometimes when you fund research projects people will link back to your website to show people who provided them with the funding. It’s their way of saying “thanks” and showing appreciation.

As you can see these examples are based on an exchange of value between two people and their websites that can relate to the relevancy of content…so it’s an ethical way of buying links.

Rule 10: Know the difference between a good and a bad site

Finally, one of the most fundamental rules to link building is knowing the difference between a good website and a bad one. This might sound obvious but it’s sometimes easy to get tricked into asking a site that looks like an authority but is in reality spammy.

What are the elements that determine if a website is a bad one? Here are five ways:

• Negative PPC – If you come across a site that has SEO links based on pills, casinos or porn, then it’s not a good site to get a link from.
• Link overload – Also avoid sites that have a high link-to-content ratio. Anything above 20% links to 80% content is probably too high.
• Keyword stuffing – Some sites that rank high in search engines will be notorious for keyword stuff. You’re first clue is the title description. If it looks like someone treated it like a keyword meta tag, they are probably employing spam techniques elsewhere, too. Perhaps it’s in the footer, behind images or in the source code.:
• Ad overload – These sites will be like a sore thumb when it comes to the number of ads they have. They’ll have ads down both sidebars, above the header and multiple times throughout the content.
• Poor content - Another clue this is not a great site is the low content-to-ad ratio. This one can be tricky because even absolute authority sites can push the limits when it comes to displaying ads. Look at Marketing Pilgrim, for example:

• Poor design – Does the site look like they used a free theme? Are the fonts irregular in size or shape? These are usually signs that someone has not spent anyone on the site…which is a signal they could be spammers.

Conclusion

Trust me when I say that you will not be wasting your time if you invest it in attracting authority links to your website or blog. Remember: nearly half of what determines the rank of your site is based upon the types of links driving to your site. Hopefully this guide has given you the tips and the tools necessary to help you succeed.

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

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Find New Keywords: Simplifying Keyword Research »

Posted by Karen Semyan

In December, we rolled out branded keyword rules and metrics to campaigns to help you segment your branded traffic. Now, we’re excited to introduce a companion feature to make your keyword research easier: Find New Keywords. With this feature, you can view keywords sending you organic search traffic, filter on your brand rules, and determine if you want to track them in your campaign.

First, the basics.

You’ll discover the Find New Keywords feature in a tab under your Manage Keywords section. (This feature requires that you connect your campaign to Google Analytics, so if you’re not connected to GA, you’ll find instructions on how to do this on the Find New Keywords tab.)

But wait, where did the Manage Brand Rules page go?!  We’ve moved your brand rules page into a tab under Manage Keywords, as well, so you can easily move among these sections as you manage your keywords.

Now, on to the hunt for new keywords!

1. View the top 200 keywords sending you traffic that you’re not currently tracking.

Why stop at 200? We want to make it easier for you to add the keywords that may be most interesting to track because they are branded terms or common words heavily associated by searchers with your site. After that, you can go straight to GA to manually grab more terms. If we see high demand for showing more keywords, we’ll consider showing more terms in the future (so let us know what you think!).

2. Decide which keywords are candidates for tracking.
We show you a number of factors:

• Keyword's position or "rank" in your current list of 200 keywords sending you organic search traffic.
• Keyword’s traffic from the last week and last four weeks.
• Branded vs, non-branded keyword filters, based on your brand rules.
• Quick access to a full keyword analysis for keyword difficulty and full SERP analysis.

3. Add keywords of interest to your managed keywords list.
With some information in hand about the keyword’s relationship to your brand, traffic, difficulty, and SERP analysis details, you’re on your way to finding some keywords of interest to track.

One thing to note: If you are tracking all 200 (which we don’t necessarily recommend–please make your choices carefully), you’ll see a message telling you to check later for new keywords that have moved up the list.

We’d love to know what you think of the feature, so let us know! Leave a comment right here, e-mail help@seomoz.org, or share a feature suggestion in our feature request forum. Happy keyword finding!

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The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service »

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

If you're reading this blog, congratulations! You are a customer of SEOmoz. I've probably personally spoken to at least a few of you, and provided help and support to many more of you. Have you ever wondered how SEOmoz supports 15,000 PRO members and over 250,000 free members and blog readers? After all, Roger can't personally answer every email we receive here. He's not Santa Claus! Instead, the six mozzers that make up the Help Team answer all of the emails, phone calls, and chat requests we get every day. I want to tell you a little bit more about them and give you a look at the way we've built the SEOmoz support channels to meet our overall goal: to provide the best customer service on the planet. It's a hard goal to reach, but I can't think of any more worthwhile endeavor.

The Help Teamsters

Crissy Hall

Crissy is old school! She came to SEOmoz in the spring of 2010. Back then, the Help Team was just Sarah Bird (our COO) and Crissy, and I joined soon after. She loves the fact that she’s been able to watch our team and SEOmoz grow since she started. Things are always changing with our site and tools, and as she says, it keeps us on our toes! Her favorite part of working at SEOmoz is the balance between fun and productivity that makes our team and company such an amazing place to work. Crissy spends her time helping users with their tool and billing questions, planning kick-ass Help Team outings (we made terrariums together last month), and helping the Marketing & Ops teams keep track of our weekly membership reporting.

When she’s not in the office, Crissy likes to take her son Sam on adventures around Seattle. She likes to sew up a storm, particularly to make clothes for her toddler (instant gratification, according to her). In the "warmer" Seattle months she rides her bicycle, named "Tom Selleck," to work and back.

Megan Singley

Megan's been a help teamster for a little over a year now and loves connecting with our users. With several years of experience in customer service, she really strives to make every interaction with SEOmoz users a positive one. Besides responding to emails, calls, and chats, Megan plans and organizes our weekly software demos and investigates billing issues to keep any possible fraudsters at bay. She's also been known to do some writing, whether it be on the SEOmoz blog or in product messages throughout the site.

When not at the MozPlex, Megan likes to watch The Daily Show and Battlestar Galactica with her cat, Lily, and her awesomely-cool-fun-amazing neighbor across the hall, me! (Those are her words of course.) She also enjoys reading anything she can get her hands on (lately, it's been The Hunger Games series) and even started a library for the office. On weekends, she hangs out with friends (including lots of fellow Mozzers), goes dancing to anything from funk & soul to 90's hip hop, and cooks as much as possible.

Kenny Martin

Kenny joined up last year and is one of our few Washington natives! He grew up in a small, sleepy Northwestern town, thus is afraid of the sun. He compensates for a lack of natural energy sources by drinking copious amounts of black coffee. Kenny spends most of his time pursuing the TAGFEE dream by diagnosing tough technical issues, getting his hands dirty with a little web design, and filming each week's Whiteboard Friday.

He never wanders off too far away from his MacBook and for this reason alone his girlfriend mistakenly thinks he loves it more than her. It's probably because most of his spare time is spent designing websites or leaning about some fantastic new technology on the internet. He also loves the Daily Show, puppies, pizza, and tacos.

Nick Sayers

Nick joined our team in September last year and got up to speed lickety-split! Like the rest of our team mates, he answers customer emails, phone calls, and live chat questions. Nick has also spear-headed our new help documentation project that gives customers the resources learn anything about SEOmoz's tool set. This effort makes our company more scalable by answering customers' questions before they call, write, or chat with us, which gives them more instant gratification, as well. Needless to say, he spends a lot of his time creating screencasts and typing up FAQs. Nick has a passion for educating and helping others, so is constantly looking for new resources to show SEOmoz's customers.

Nick enjoys film, video games, reading, and cooking. He is an avid reader of anything from Eastern Philosophy to some of the nerdiest sci-fi/fantasy novels ever written. When not at work, Nick is usually spending time with his wife and partner in crime, Becky. On most nights, they cook new recipes together, play an unhealthy amount of Left 4 Dead 2 or Skyrim, and watch movies. On the weekends, Nick and Becky explore Washington and go to retro theaters. Nick is also involved in independent film-making and has produced, written, and directed a feature film and many shorts. On the sci-fi geek front, Nick has a huge collection of memorabilia from the Alien(s) films. He also has a cat named Ash after Bruce Campbell's character in the Evil Dead series. Of course, this means Nick calls her Evil Ash when she is bad.

Chiaryn Miranda

Chiaryn is the newest addition to the team, having been here for about two months. Don't let that fool you though: she's caught up real quick-like! She's been doing customer service for a long time and is working on learning new things about SEO every day. What better place to learn, eh?

When she's not in the office, she likes to make art and take photographs. She's been working on a sketchbook that will be going on a national tour. She also likes to take trips around the beautiful Seattle waterfront with her camera. When she can, she tries to take candid portraits. Check out some of her artwork on her Art House Co-Op page. She's also an avid movie fan, with a particular love of horror movies, and reads as much as possible. In her words, she'll gobble up pretty much any nonfiction book you put in front of her. That's why we call her Turkey Miranda! Just kidding - that's not why we call her that.

Aaron Wheeler

If you've made it this far, you've probably figured out that this is me! I started at SEOmoz in the summer of 2010 and am loving every minute of being here. A couple months ago I became the manager of the Help Team, which means I do what I can to support the lovely members of our team, and provide our customers with the best service on the planet. It's a tough goal - we have very discerning customers - but a goal I think we can eventually fulfill. Some background: I studied sociology and cognitive science at UC San Diego, but starting doing SEO after graduating. Turns out that ranking for attorneys in San Diego is tough work! I left San Diego early 2010 for Seattle, and eventually found my way at SEOmoz.

Besides working at a place I love, I enjoy reading (currently Steve Jobs), watching great shows (currently my third run of Deadwood), and seeing my favorite bands in Seattle's historical music venues (this month: Junip, Nada Surf, and The Asteroids Galaxy Tour). I also enjoy trying out vegan recipes with my girlfriend, Holly Haymaker, who has the coolest name in the world and a whimsical interactive e-cards site, to boot!

What Do We Do?

You know how, sometimes, you have a question about our site and tools? Or about your account or payment? We're the people you call, email, live chat, and post to our help forums for. Unlike huge companies with call centers and many tiers of support and different people doing phones and chats, though, everyone on our team does everything. It's a great way to keep everyone fully informed about site issues and keep our support fresh and agile. That's not all we do, though! Let me show you all of the ways we keep our customers happy:

Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System

When you send an email to help@seomoz.org, it gets forwarded to our ticketing system. We use ZenDesk, the same help desk software used by companies like Groupon and Box.com. ZenDesk allows us to manage customer emails, assign them to specific people, and easily share them with engineering and product so we can get answers to questions quickly! This is important because we receive over 2,000 emails a month: way too many to respond to from a single email address effectively.

How Does It Work?

When we receive an email, the sender gets an email back with a ticket number. As you see, it gets added to our queue of tickets to reply to. We try to answer 80% of tickets within 8 hours, but if it's a situation where someone has a billing problem or can't access their account (lost password, etc.), we try to answer even faster than that. Our goal is for each member of the Help Team to answer 20 tickets per day. If we don't have the knowledge to answer a question, we'll send the ticket to our engineers and product managers to get an answer. If it's a bug, we let the customer know and open a bug fix with our Triage team. They assign the bug to an engineer, who fixes it and lets them know. Triage sends it back to us when it's fixed, and we email the customer and close the ticket.

When we close a ticket, we send a one-question survey through SurveyMonkey asking how happy we made a customer with our customer service. We try to make 90% of our customers happy, and 30% of our customers delighted. Sometimes, though, we fail to satisfy a customer. When this happens, we ask for the customer's email address and ticket number so we can get in touch and make it right. I've found that when a customer has had a bad experience, reaching out to them to make it right almost always turns the situation around.

Phones: Not a Phone Bank

We get a relatively small amount of calls at SEOmoz: about 100 to 150 a week. Makes sense, as most SEOs do their research online. =) We don't have a sales team and don't do phone marketing, so the only employees that really have phones here are in Operations or the Help Team. We get a lot of calls from potential customers asking about what we do, though we do get a few from PRO members, too. Here's a chart with our phone stats for last week:

How Does it Work?

When a person calls in to SEOmoz, they usually start out talking to Hillari, our fantastic office manager. She makes sure they're not a spambot and, when they're a lovely customer, transfers them to the Help Team pool. The first available person picks it up and starts helping! Pretty straightforward process, as you telephone users know. After the call is over, we try to create a ticket and follow up with the customer to make sure they had all their questions answered. If it's an SEO question, we refer them to the Q&A or to our list of recommended SEO consultants.

Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It

When potential customers are browsing our software sales pages, they often have questions they want answered now. Same thing goes for existing customers with questions about a payment or their account status: these are the kinds of questions people want to know the answers to quickly. Live Chat comes to the rescue! Instead of requiring a customer to call or send in an email, we usually keep someone logged into Live Chat throughout the day so customers can get help immediately. This leads to happier customers and cuts down on our ticket and phone levels. We use the awesome chat widget SnapEngage, and installed it to a few choice pages.

How Does it Work?

Kenny coordinated with SnapEngage to create a custom view of the widget. When you click "Chat Now," it pops up a dialog box that displays three FAQs, and has a field for the email address of the customer and the question they have. When they've typed those in, all they have to do is click "Message" to open a ticket, or "Live Chat" to start talking! Interesting point: we didn't always have those three FAQs. Adding them reduced chats about these topics about 90%. Yay for preemptive answers!

After we finish chatting with a customer, the chat transcript is automatically added to ZenDesk as a ticket, where we can save it for future review and for long-term tracking. We can also follow up with a customer there. If we're offline, or if a customer chooses the "Message" option instead of the "Live Chat" option, it creates a ticket from the get-go instead.

We can also track the types of computers and browsers people are using when they chat with us, which helps us diagnose the issue faster and get an idea of what our average customer needing immediate support looks like. The chart to the left is a look at last month's chatters.

Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly

We maintain both our customer service and API forums through the SEOmoz help desk. We've also started adding all of our tool documentation, videos, and walkthroughs here to make them all available in the same place. This makes our Help Desk a one-stop shop for looking at frequently asked questions, checking out known issues with the site or tools, and just generally getting more knowledgeable about how to use a PRO subscription to its fullest. It's also where we ask customers to submit feature requests.

How Does it Work?

When a customer has a question, they can go to our Help Desk and do a search for the answer, or browse existing questions and documentation. Many of the forums are straight-up questions and answers, but a lot of them are longer-form pages that are part of our documentation project. We want to document the bejewels out of our tools! Yes, there will always be questions from customers, but the more information you can put in their hands early on, the more happy they'll be, and the more scalable our service becomes.

One cool feature: the Feature Request Forum has a voting system so customers can vote on the features they want to see most. Our product team reviews this feedback to get an idea of what to prioritize and what to put further down the roadmap. It's a great way to get customers more involved in SEOmoz's future!

This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies…

We do a bunch of other stuff to help our customers, and it's hard to get it all down in words! We give weekly software demos to help new customers get the most out of PRO,

represent at MozCations,

give tours of the MozPlex and help out at MozCon,

and bake plenty of cookies (you gotta help your fellow mozzers out, too!):

All in all, it's a wonderful life. SEOmoz has the best customers around, and there's no other place I'd rather be. I'd love to share more with you and hear your stories about great customer service, as well as get feedback on what you'd love to see more of in the customer service biznez. Please feel free to write me in the comments, shoot me an email, or tweet me at @aaron_wheeler. See you around the site!

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5 Steps To Bootstrapping Your PR Efforts »

Posted by AndrewDumont

Public relations is just one of those things. 

It's something that every company knows they should do, but only see two ways of making it happen — hire an expensive PR firm or cross their fingers and hope for the best. The latter is, well, not really much of a PR strategy. There is a third option, however.

Bootstrapping.

I've written in the past about how to bootstrap your PR efforts, but never really dug into the nitty gritty. It's a time intensive process, but if you're up for the challenge, getting coverage in some of the top outlets in the world is possible, and even likely. I've tried many methods, failed many times, and ultimately boiled it down to this process.

Here it is, Moz family.

Step 1 - The Mirror Check

The first step is what I like to call the mirror check, something that gets glossed over far too often. You need to put yourself in the mind of a writer. People don't want to read shit stories, and writers don't want to write them; it's a simple relationship. Before you dig into the rest of the process, make sure you've got a story that you'd be interested in reading. Honestly. If you can't look yourself in the mirror and say that you would love to read what you're pitching, hold off. 

Save your time, and more importantly, everyone else's.

Step 2 - Building Your Publication List

Once you've got a solid story, it's time to start building your list of publications. I've found it helpful to break it into larger categories, such as tech blogs, mainstream media, local press, niché publications and so on. That'll give you a good outline to begin digging into the specific publications you're looking to reach out to. 

It's important to note that PR isn't a numbers game, as many think. It's a quality and relevance game, not a shotgun spray. To determine relevance, you really need to engulf yourself in the content of the publication — read at least 5 articles. Without reading the content, you aren't able to truly understand the writing style and typical news they cover. Once you've done this, add only the publications that would be interested in your story, and omit those that wouldn't. It'll save you time when we get to the next step.

Step 3 - Finding the Right Contact

This is so important that it deserves its own step. Again, it's all about relevance, even more so when you're looking for the right person to pitch your story to. What's the sweet spot for one writer, may be completely irrelevant to another. If you pitch the wrong one, well, you blew your shot. You've got to dig deep on this step. Here's the info that my list usually contains:

The first three fields are fairly self explanatory, then we get into the meat of it. The "relevance point" refers to the overlap with the writer's past work. A good way of finding the right person to pitch your story to, is to go to the publication and search for relevant content.

For example, if I'm looking pitch an article on company culture, the best way to find the right person is to search the publication for the term "Company Culture". Crazy, I know. This will bring up a great list of past content that you can dig through to find the writer that normally covers the type of story you're pitching.

Once you've got the right person, the real investigative work starts happening. Depending on the publication, when you click the author's name, you're usually taken to a page with their contact info, bio, social profiles and the like. If you're not as lucky, you'll have to resort to a good ol' Google search (or Bing search :) to find what you're looking for. 

For each author, I like to make sure I've got at least their Twitter handle, Linkedin profile, Facebook profile and personal site (if they have one). What this allows you to do, is not only track down an email address in most cases, but it also allows you to gain a good understanding of their personality. Make note of things they like, what they've done recently, where they're located — it's all publicly available, and goes a long way in making you stand out. Like anyone else, writers appreciate when you take the time to do it right. Drop these hints of deep research in your pitch.

Finally, if you aren't able to track down their email address, use tools like Rapportive to help in guessing the right contact address. If it clicks and data appears, you've got the right email address.

Step 4 - Crafting Your Pitch and Subject Line

A lot of people mess up on the pitch, the eventual email that gets sent off. They get wordy, dance around the purpose of the email, attach a press release and ultimately fail miserably. Like this kid. The pitch needs to show relevance, be compelling and maintain brevity.

To provide an example, here's a pitch that I've used in the past:

Step 5 - Let it Rip

Or, you could make it rain. Whichever you prefer.

This is the culmination of all the work you've put in. Obviously, you can't always time your news in the case of product launches and breaking news, but I've found that Sunday evening is a great time to put it out there. Most folks are lazy, and they aren't willing to put in the time on a Sunday, this leaves a nice window for your pitch and a Monday release date in most cases. It's not a necessity, but it may give you the best odds. 

Also, this sounds obvious, but make sure you're ready for responses to your pitch. If the writer is interested, you'll hear back and they'll want more info. Respect their time and get back to them as soon as you can.

The rest is out of your hands.

Some General Don'ts 

Before we wrap this up, I want to go over some general don'ts with PR. By no means is this list comprehensive, but it'll steer you away from the big screw-ups.

• Avoid the Embargo - Generally speaking, writers don't like embargoes. It's a liability and a pain in the ass that many would like to avoid. Send your news out when it's ready and available for consumption.
• Lose the Press Release  - In my mind, the press release is dead. They're bloated, impersonal and a thing of the past. If you just want links on Yahoo! news, sure, go for it. It's not going to give you the coverage that's really valuable, though. At the very least, make sure not to attach a press release to your pitch. Do it for me, please.
• Don't Double Pitch - Don't send the same pitch to multiple people at the same publication. It shows that you're just firing off as many emails as you can, and it's a sure way to get you ignored.
• Skip the General Address - Most publications recommend that you send to a generic email address like news@publication.com, it's the catch-all for poor pitches. People that don't want to see success usually go this route, it's the easy way to spray the shotgun, but it rarely yields results. Use it as your last option, but not the default.
• Put Down the Phone - This may be unconventional for most folks that do PR, but I believe that we live in a digital age, where phones are a secondary thing. Sure, if there's interest, hop on a call by all means. But don't do your pitching via a phone call. It catches folks off guard, and makes the encounter confrontational, with only a few seconds to tell them what they want to hear. 
• Don't Suck - Most importantly, don't suck. Be a good person, not someone that's just on the hunt for links. Provide the writer with value, help them do their job and be awesome. It's amazing what good intent can do.

Conclusion

Executing on a PR push is time intensive, and demanding of finesse. It's why PR firms demand upwards of $15,000/month, with no guarantee on output. I'm not a public relations pro. By no means is this the end all be all of PR processes, but it's what I've found to be successful in landing press — earning coverage in Wired, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable and many more.  That said, what worked for me, may not work for all. 

As with everything in tech, iterate, iterate, iterate.

If you run across any specific questions as you're working through it, feel free to drop them in the comments or just shoot me a line, I'm always happy to help. 

Go forth!

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Strategic Link Building: Why You Don’t Need To Outrun Lions »

Posted by oline123

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.

One of my favourite SEO anecdotes goes like this: two men are walking through an African game reserve when they come across a lion, one of the men calmly puts down his backpack and slips on the running shoes he has been carrying.

The other man chuckles and says, “You’ll never outrun a lion."

To which the other man calmly responds, “I don’t need to outrun the lion; I just need to outrun you."

SEO, contrary to popular belief, is not about ‘beating Google’ or ‘cracking their enigma code’; it is about beating the competing websites on the keywords that matter to your business. This means SERP analysis and competitor analysis should be key components in shaping your SEO strategy.

I am not advocating creating a carbon copy link profile for your site by building competitor links like for like. This methodology is about learning from their site and link profile in order to close the natural search gap; understand what is working (and to a certain extent, the limits); and then eventually to outmanoeuvre them.

In this post, I am going to explore a number of different eCommerce verticals and identify what I think makes that SERP ‘tick’ as well as the different link building tactics which can be utilised to ensure natural search dominance.  

I wholeheartedly believe that when it comes to link building, quality and sustainability are the ‘end game.’ Google will eventually fully understand the true quality of a link. However, different markets have different ‘requirements.’ If you understand what it takes to rank in the market you are trying to target then you can ensure you are working strategically rather than adopting the “throw links at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

I will also be exploring how analysing the counterpart market in a more SEO-advanced country can help you understand the future of your home market.

The Data

Far too often in the world of SEO, sweeping statements and all-encompassing judgements are made with little evidence or data to back it up. This is just a snippet of the research I carried out which helps to underpin the conclusions I make later in this post

SERP 1 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com.au

According to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty tool, this keyword has a 71% difficulty rating.

On the face of it, this would seem like a highly competitive keyword to try and target.

The number 1 result (http://www.oo.com.au) has over 36,000 external links, a high domain authority (59), and a domain mozRank of 4.9. A seemingly challenging keyword target. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be easy; however, if we dig below the surface, we can get a clearer picture of just how OO.com.au is ranking which can help shape our link building strategy.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 84,683

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 7.35%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools. Cemper (the makers of Link Research Tools) guard their link power algorithm closely, but they have said that the link power is usually measured by looking at the number of links pointing at that page. A buried page in a rubbish web directory is likely to be considered low power as there will be very few links and certainly very few good quality links pointing at that page.

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 77.01%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 73.37%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 89.13%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .au domains according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 25.7%

Social Metrics

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 465 Facebook Shares and 10 Google +1s

*Note – with regards to the social metrics, the figures are for social signals pointing at the homepage of the sites and have just been included for comparison purposes. 

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

An immediate takeaway from this mini-study is that it would seem social signals aren’t weighted that heavily in this particular SERP.

Despite the furore around social media, this data right here proves that links should be your immediate focus and social should be a part of your SEO strategy in a long term sense. Google will undoubtedly get smarter on the social front; not only that, but also as competing websites become more social, there will be a natural progression towards social signals carrying more weight. No site wants to be left behind when/if this happens. Building links, certainly in this niche, is still the activity which delivers the results right now however.  

To rank for this particular keyword, it could be argued that two particular factors appear to be the most pertinent: link volume and anchor text. This would seem to go against common wisdom that link quality is the overriding factor as, in this scenario, and according to Link Research Tools’ automated analysis, the vast majority of links pointing at the websites which rank highly are of ‘low power.'    

Whilst some would say, high quality links are what you need to rank; for the keyword “online shopping,” you need to mix high-quality links that deliver longevity and stability with less powerful links that have the right anchor text in relatively large volumes.

Conclusion

In this scenario, suitable link building tactics include:

• Thematic/ quality article submissions – despite Google’s Panda update, we still notch up good results utilising quality and thematic article submissions as a way of generating volume and anchor text specific links.
• Guest Posting – a proactive link development campaign which involves content placement on niche and relevant websites in return for a link.
• Infographic Promotion – developing an engaging linkable asset like an infographic can be a good way to generate high volumes of anchor text links by including an anchor text attribute link at the bottom of the graphic which automatically gets placed when somebody uses the embed code. Obviously, in some situations, this will be removed by a webmaster using the graphic on their website, but we have seen this work successfully.
• Shopping Directory Listings – numerous submissions to good quality general and shopping directories still provide value in conjunction with other link development tactics.
• Social Bookmarking – another link building tactic which is seen as low quality, but when used with other methods can deliver the kinds of results you need.

Remember, the methods discussed above do not constitute recommendations across the board as they are very much SERP-specific; you will see the need to tailor your tactics as we explore other SERPs.

SERP 2 – ‘online shopping’ Google.co.uk

On to our second SERP. For this one, I have chosen the same keyword; but this time, we’ll look at the UK SERP.

According to SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool, this is a terrifying 87% difficulty score. :)

ASOS.com, which ranks #1 in the UK for the term ‘online shopping,’ is similar to OO.com.au in Australia. It's a real juggernaut of the retail world with over 157,000 external links pointing at the domain; a domain mozRank of 6.26; and domain authority of 85. How on earth do you go about competing in a SERP like that then?

Link building with strategy ensures you are focusing on the SERP-specific metrics that appear to matter.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 2,678,561 (this is skewed by Amazon.co.uk which has a colossal 15million external followed links).

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 0%

In this SERP, anchor text doesn’t appear to be a ranking factor at all. Indeed, to demonstrate this a little further, I continued with my research, and the 16^th result had 1.2% links containing the anchor text ‘online shopping.’ Other than this result, the others were 0% anchor text.

This in itself would make building a great deal of anchor text links very suspicious indeed and likely very ineffective if you are looking to target this particular keyword.

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 30.23%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 61.73%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 91.61%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .uk domains according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 28.46%

Social Metrics

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 1393 Facebook Shares and 73.85 Google +1s

In comparison to its Australian counterpart, this SERP has a much higher average number of Facebook shares and Google +1s.

This bigger social signal sample appears to allow Google to make ranking decisions which are much more closely aligned with what the social signals are telling them rather than weighting link metrics so heavily, as is the case with the Australian SERP we investigated above.

Does this mean social should form more of an integral part of efforts to rank for this term? Almost certainly, but that doesn’t mean link metrics should be forgotten about.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

On the face of it, this SERP appears very brand heavy with limited options for a website looking to break into the top 10 for this keyword, so what can be done? And what kinds of tactics are likely to be effective?

We would look to deploy combination link development and social tactics in order to help clients rank for this term.

• Linkable assets – think Evolution of Western Dance Music,  why witty job titles are all the rage,  12 awful Christmas presents, and Why Bill Gates is selling nuclear power to China. Linkable assets or linkbait come in all shapes and forms, not just infographics as the above examples demonstrate. Even news stories can be turned into link generation machines with a great title and the right composition.
• Contests – great competitions and creative contests can generate a great deal of social attention and will usually attract links from blogs, forums, competition directories, and more.
• Discount codes – a well-planned and properly seeded discount code or saving coupon can have a dramatic impact on the number of links you generate and the social activity you see around your site.
• Blogger Partnerships – reaching out to bloggers and industry website owners by contributing your content, expertise, or even products for them to try can be a very effective way to build high numbers of good quality links; particularly as many bloggers read other blogs so the feature can very often have a viral effect.
• Online press – if you have a product that you can create an engaging story around then generating online press is often easier than you might think. 

This SERP is also a good example of a fast-paced environment where ongoing activities are vital in order to stay ahead of competing sites.

The chart above looks at the number of referring domains linking to some of the top 10 results in the UK SERP for the keyword ‘online shopping.’ It gives a snapshot of the quarterly growth or decline in links from unique referring domains. This helps to give a more accurate reflection of the link profile as number of backlinks can be misleading if, for example, there are multiple links from the same site. 

As I am sure you will notice, over the past 5 years, the sites have all followed near enough the same pattern. Only once or twice does a site rise or fall above the general trend: presumably as a site has a promotional push or something happens which causes a reduction in the number of unique referring domains.

This emphasises the importance of on-going link development and SEO campaigns. It also highlights an opportunity, because Google has recognised that there is, in some respects, a fault in their algorithm; there is nearly always a lag time between a page being important and useful enough to mean it should rank and when it has enough links to compete in that SERP.

In response to this, Google developed ‘Query Deserves Freshness’ or QDF which means a page doesn’t need as many links as the incumbent sites that rank if the page is generating a good number of fresh links. Google, logically, has determined that fresh links might indicate a more relevant page than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stale links.

The internet is a dynamic place so it makes sense that a link profile should be constantly developing.

So in this particular scenario, we would also look at link building tactics that deliver fresh links in great numbers as an attempt to beat the incumbent sites on velocity rather than volume.

This makes tactics like contests and linkable assets such as infographics highly suited to ranking for keywords like this. It also makes it that much more important to coordinate your efforts to ensure maximum link and social impact.

SERP 3 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com

The final SERP we will take a look at is ‘online shopping’ in the US which, according to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, is extremely competitive and more challenging than any of the others we have looked at.

The top result, Overstock.com, has a domain authority of 90; a domain mozRank of 6.52; and nearly 300,000 external followed links, so this certainly looks the most challenging SERP to conquer.

As a side note, you might have seen the spot of bother Overstock.com got themselves into early on in 2011; it was encouraging links from college websites. Anyway, it cleaned up its act to the satisfaction of Google who released the retailer from the “sin bin” in late April 2011.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 6,860,105 (this result is skewed by Ebay.com’s nearly 30million links)

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 0%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 3.75%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 48.4%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results =65.81%

Link Locality

Analysing the locality of the links is a little more challenging with US SERPs because of the worldwide nature of the .com domain. We don’t know whether the link originates from the USA or elsewhere in the world.

Social Metrics

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 19,708 Facebook Shares and 1441 Google +1s

Links over time

Similarly as we analysed the UK SERP of ‘online shopping’ for ongoing activity over time, below is a graph showing the non-cumulative view of referring domains pointing at the top 5 search results. You will note that Overstock.com and WalMart.com have largely mirrored each other in terms of link profile growth and decline over the past 5 years, and it could be argued, therefore, that they have been tussling in a competitive sense — vying for the top search engine positions.

This graph once again highlights the need for on-going activities to maintain and enhance positions as competitors react to your SEO. That isn’t to say that you need the same or even a greater volume of links in relation to your competitors. For example, Forever21.com ranks better than WalMart.com, but has fewer domains linking to it. But as the graph highlights, there is a need to be building or encouraging links on an ongoing basis. Overstock.com, at the start of 2011, acquired links with greater velocity than competing sites like Forever21.com and HSN.com, which likely contributed to their #1 position for this competitive keyword.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

To come out on top in the US SERP – natural or certainly a natural appearance is the name of the game.

Link quality is paramount in order to rank for this keyword. There are next to no ‘low power’ links apparently contributing to the rankings of the top 10 results. This is different to the other SERPs we have analysed, because in the case of the UK and Australian SERPs, there are sites that are still very much enjoying prominent positions helped by low quality links.

Social is an equally important factor as we can see the top results have a much higher average Facebook share and Google +1 count — in terms of the remaining 7 top 10 results — than the other SERPs we looked at.

Also, in comparison to the other SERPs we have looked at, the distribution of links is also an important factor; it is natural for a website, particularly an eCommerce website, to have links to various sections and categories of the site rather than the majority of inbound links pointing at the homepage. Given this and the fact that Google is stepping up its efforts on unnatural linking patterns and communicating these warnings to site owners, I would think that HSN.com, which has a very high percentage of links to the homepage, is at least inviting a manual review from a Googler.

It could well be argued that the US SERP is the guinea-pig-lab-experiment for Google. This would seem to align with the way they roll out new features, e.g. US >> English Speaking Countries >> Rest of the world. If this is the case, the US SERP is probably the UK SERP of the future and so on.

It is also easier for Google to work more legitimate signals like social into the ranking algorithm and tuning down others in a Google.com SERP because there are more data points which would make the results more consistent with their quality expectations. In the Australian SERPs, there are sub-1000 social shares in most cases; whereas in the US SERPs, there are in most cases many thousands. Google, at this point, could not tune down link factors too much in the Australian SERPs because it would likely send the search results crazy as most sites that deserve to rank haven’t got the social signals in place to react to a switch of that kind.

My theory is that the difference in SERPs isn’t just down to a Google whim; it’s also the market as a whole.

What can we take-away from all this?

There is a trade-off that needs analysing…

Studying each of these SERPs as we have certainly raises the question of strategy.

As an SEO, you have to be strategic with your budget and resource allocation. Depending on your market and how ‘SEO-advanced’ it is, these factors will impact how and what you need to do to rank now and also continue to rank into the future.

It is a case of balancing appropriate financial investment, short term results, long term stability, and mitigating risks. Identifying not shortcuts, but fast and safe routes to the top is what any good SEO does.

Clients and agencies are fearful of low-quality link building; but as the data above suggests, in some markets, this is still a very effective tactic.

Although you don’t need me to tell you, only a fool is still freewheeling off the back of low-quality links alone.

From the above, we can deduce that in the US market — arguably a more ‘SEO advanced’ market — lower quality links are starting to wane in terms of effectiveness as the social signal dial gets turned up a little. So for anyone reading this in Australia, you could say that the US is our canary down the mine; and therefore, learning from what is working there and balancing it with what works here presently is the smartest strategy to adopt.

However, Wil Reynolds argued a strong case that — even in markets like the US – links are still the dominant factor and not necessarily good quality links either; in fact quality and social signals don’t appear to impact rankings as much as you might think.

Balance your link building tactic portfolio – adopting a combination approach

You are likely familiar with the Boston Matrix, which is an established tool for analysing the product or service portfolio of a business.

Below is an adapted version of the Boston Matrix, which should help you to visualise and more effectively plan your link building efforts. Thus, ensuring you are getting the results you seek now whilst being mindful of future developments.

A balanced ‘portfolio’ is essential. Too much in one area can be hampering short-term success; too much in another area could be jeopardising long-term stability.

It is a balancing act, and what might seem like extra ‘paperwork’ is actually a quick and effective planning tool that can also help clients to better understand your approach.

How to use the matrix

1. Understand the segments (see below).
2. Categorise your tactics (depending upon your market).
3. Assign a percentage of your budget to each one (understand your own or your client’s objectives and expectations and then assign accordingly).
4. Monitor regularly (SEO is a constantly changing environment, and as such tactics will likely move through all stages of the matrix at some point).

• New recipes

This is the ‘development kitchen’ for your link building efforts – where you explore new tactics which might or might not be providing value.

By new tactics, I am not specifically talking about ‘unheard of in the industry,’ but perhaps just new to your market or your site. Some verticals still have very few infographics, for example.

• Consume in moderation

This segment is for tactics which offer medium to long-term value, but little in the way of short-term gains. So it should be consumed in moderation if you are looking to maximise return on investment.

• Staple diet

This is the bread and butter segment and likely to be where most resources are allocated. You know these tactics work, and they provide short-term gain without compromising medium to long-term stability.

• Fruitless

The graveyard of link building tactics. Obviously, it is up to you when you feel that a certain tactic is no longer pulling its weight. It can be an idea to keep a track of the ‘fruitless’ tactics and perhaps a note as to why; then if things should change, you have the option of pulling it back into your portfolio via the ‘new recipes’ section.

Furthermore, Google’s crackdown on unnatural link patterns means that now is definitely the time to be varying your anchor text to ensure your site’s profile is as natural looking as it possibly can be.

Overall conclusion

The overall conclusion we can draw is that link building is certainly not a one size fits all approach. Different SERPs, keywords, and markets require very different strategies.

You also need to be thinking SERP-specific when it comes to link building tactics. Certainly, there are other ways to view link building, but this is just the way I look at it so as to make it more tactical. Some would argue that by looking at what competitors are doing, you are always going to be chasing their tail. I would say this isn’t the case; as with my proposed methodology outlined above, you are learning from their successes and their mistakes. Then you are executing, using your own well thought out tactics, which should close the natural search gap and then outpace the competition over time.

An interesting point, up for discussion and testing, would be whether a company can leap-frog the lower-end link building and overcompensate with the more legitimate tactics and get this recognised and rewarded by Google. My instincts and research tell me no, but I would love to hear from you in the comments if you have any data or experiences that would go against this.

By David Klein, Founder and Director of Orange Line - SEO and online marketing specialists based in Sydney, Australia. Visit us for more information about our link building services and methodology.

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Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization »

Posted by Geoff Kenyon

The ‘over optimization’ of anchor text has been coming up a lot recently in conversations that I have been having and has been the subject of a few recent blog posts. For the sake of this post and to quell any arguments stemming from the phrase ‘over optimization’, I am, for this post, defining the term as: building too many links with targeted anchor text such that they a) no longer provides value or b) actually takes away value – basically you’ve built too many targeted links and you’re not seeing your rankings increase.

When I have talked to people about this recently, I have suggested that a 7:3 ratio of non-targeted: targeted anchor text would be a good frame of reference for emulating a ‘normal’ link profile. I got curious about this though and decided to do some research. I looked at product and category pages on ten different websites - these websites are all large national and international brands/ecommerce sites that are well linked to. Between the ten sites I analyzed the anchor text associated with 28 category pages and 31 product pages.

For each of these pages, I downloaded the anchor text report from OSE and looked at whether the ‘Number of Linking Root Domains Containing Anchor Text’ were optimized or not. Specifically, I looked at if the anchor text had the following attributes:

• Brand Name - The brand name is the anchor text, e.g. Giant Bicycles
• Branded - The brand was included in the anchor text (these did not include anchors that were the brand name), e.g. this cool company, Razoo
• Keyword Branded - The anchor text combined a keyword (exact/phrase/partial match) and the Brand Name, e.g. a ton of motorcycle helmets at Dennis Kirk
• Exact Match - The anchor text exactly matches a keyword, e.g. Downhill Bike
• Phrase - The anchor text contained a keyword phrase or partial match anchor text, e.g. the monthly mountain bike magazine I get
• Random - The anchor text does not contain the brand or any keywords (or partial keywords), e.g. this website
• URL - There were no actual anchors, it was just a URL, e.g. http://www.malibuboats.com

I chose to only look at the number of domains linking with these anchors as site wides can disproportionately skew these ratios pretty quickly.

Finally, I looked at the sources of the links and did not include pages if it looked like they had links manually built.

Ok, now on to the interesting part.

Targeted vs. Non Targeted Anchors

Across category pages and product pages, I found that 34.6% of links were targeted (targeted anchor text collectively refers to exact match anchors and phrase while non targeted anchor text is everything else).

Here is a breakdown of this distribution:

Here is a simpler breakdown, consolidating brand related anchors:

Category Pages

If we take a more in-depth look at category pages, we find some variance from the collective distribution above. The data shows that only 25% of links to category pages are targeted - people are less likely to link with good keywords to your category pages.

Looking at the ‘other’ anchor text distribution, the number of links for branded and URL anchors increase 5% and 7%, respectively. Most of the gain in the branded links were keyword branded links.

Product Page

The product pages show a higher proportion of targeted anchor text, making the targeted and non-targeted distribution roughly equal.

Looking at the distribution of anchors for product pages, we find that there are more links with exact match and phrase match links to product pages than to category pages. Exact match links jumped up about 7% and phrase match jumped up about 4%.

So What Does This Mean

For a lot of people, this means you should probably decrease the amount of targeted links you are building and add in some varying anchor text. It is important to keep in mind that this research, while it was time consuming, is by no means exhaustive, so you shouldn’t take this as fact. That said, I think it gives a pretty good rough estimate of what normal might look like. I like to be a little more conservative so, especially with the product pages, I will probably keep trying to stick to the 7:3 ratio I first mentioned.

If you have been doing a lot of SEO work and are still having trouble ranking, this is a factor that you might want to look at as you may need to start building different anchors to balance out your profile.

The sites sampled spread several industries. Your industry will probably look a little different, as such, you should do your own research and determine what 'normal' looks like for your industry. To do this, just pull the anchor text report from OSE for sites from the SERPs. If all the pages ranking have a lot of SEO'd links, look at those sites and try to find non optimized pages and use those to help establish your baseline.

To help you do your own analysis, I made a Google Doc that will help you calculate these percentages.

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Want Guest Post Links? Find Them Via Twitter [TOOL] »

Posted by Ethan Lyon

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.

For a long time I’ve been pulling an RSS feed from Twitter for the query: “guest post” OR “guest author” [TOPIC] into my Google Reader. Every morning I would check it, blaze through 15-20 URLs — most of which were the same URL being tweeted. Then, I'd record the best guest post opportunities, reach out to bloggers, publish a guest post and get links. It was a great strategy and resulted in a lot of guest post links.

Although having an RSS feed was a bit more efficient than performing a Twitter search every day, it was boring, time consuming and I just really didn’t like doing it. Things you don’t like, don’t last.

So, I made a tool that does all the heavy lifting. This tool pulls the same RSS feed that I had in my Google Reader into Google Docs, finds all of the t.co URLs, enlarges them, eliminates duplicates based on domain, and presents them in a nice package.

Because it has helped me tremendously, I thought it could also help out other agency SEOs and small business marketers / owners.

How to use it

1. Go to http://ow.ly/8×9gF.

2. Make a copy of the sheet.

3. Type a one word topic that most describes your client / niche in cell B1.

You’ve likely chosen a topic too narrow if you’re seeing an error.

4. You’ll notice a bunch of t.co links populating cell A2. Wait five seconds (I know, tough, right?) and they will change into unique URLs.

5. Copy 5-6 URLs:

6. Paste them into Ontolo’s Link Reviewer: http://ontolo.com/link-building-url-reviewer

7. Click “Review URLs” and watch all of the URLs open in new tabs in your browser:

8. When you find a viable linking opportunity, paste the URL in column D:

9. Because no one expects you to remember all of the linking prospects in column D, it will tell you if there’s a duplicate in column F:

10. Now, add your link prospect’s contact info in column G.

11. Go to your calendar, create an event about an hour after you wake up that says, “Find Guest Posts Via Twitter” and add this link: http://ow.ly/8×9gF in the event. Set it to repeat every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

12. Lastly, perform outreach. Use John Doherty's Twitter outreach article as a base and start building links!

Parting Remarks

Because the guest post opportunities are curated by Twitter users, it could pick up posts that might not explicitly say guest post in the title or even in the body of the article, yet be a guest post. So it should help you uncover some gems that you might not find via Google.

Next Versions

In next versions, expect to see Google Blog Search, multiple queries and URL analysis. That’s what I had in mind but I’d love to hear what you would like to see in the next version of this tool.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post / watch the video and hopefully you can benefit as much as I have. Looking forward to your thoughts!

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How to Increase the Odds of Your Content Going Viral - Whiteboard Friday »

Posted by randfish

Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don't forget to leave your comments below.

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Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let's talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I'm talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it's in a blog format and it's got nice width. It's not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it's in a separate type of format. So let's say you've got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, "You know what? I'm actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that's the focus of the page." So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they're looking for, that there's compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they'll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you've got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you're going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that's interesting, that draws in the reader, that's relevant, you're going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you've learned that you're putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you've got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that's shared on major media websites, where it's the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It's almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I'd also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you've got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you'll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, "Oh, let's make this content say inbound startups, and that'll be my slide share presentation." So now you don't have to remember some long URL. It's just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can't control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You 're going to shrink down the title so that it's easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, "Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool."

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I'll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, "Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We've got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that's happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?" And I wrote back and said, "Yeah, I really love this. I think it's excellent. I don't even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I'd be happy to share it." This person didn't specifically ask me for a share and I think that's why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that's your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They'll also give you feedback like, "I don't really think this is going to play well," or "If you did this, it'd be very interesting, but I don't see what you've done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn't share it." Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you're not hitting it out of the park with this content. You're going to have to do something else, try something else. That's great to know before you hit that publish button.

There's a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you're thinking, boy, I just can't get these people to share what I'm producing. I don't know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I'm going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I'm going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I'm going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it's produced because you write back to them and you say, "Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live."

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can't directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they've tweeted, said on their own blogs, you're getting quotes from them, you're getting data they've shared, you're using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, "Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we're going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it's appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?" That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you're doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, "Oh, I'm going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much." Or, "Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you." Then when you publish, you can say, "Hey, we hit publish. It's now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that'd be great. Here's the shortened link or here's a tweet you could retweet." This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I'm going to mention here - topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that's from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what's going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it's being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let's say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there's usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you'll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you'll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you're emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, "Kenny, I know you've got a small Twitter account. It'd be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask." Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you've hung out in a bar before, you've bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you're going to get that. I think that's a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that's not B2B Facebooking. That's personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that's going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don't do Monday. Don't do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That's when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don't necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you're sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who's reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It's going to be different for everyone. So don't just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you're going to share with this one guy and he's going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+'s ripples, where you can actually see, it's almost like this. It'll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you're carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Are You Wasting Budget With Online Press Release Distribution? »

Posted by Tim Grice

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.

The title of this post may come across a little contentious, however I hope by the end of it you understand where I am coming from.

Over the years, I have been privileged enough to work with some large businesses that can afford to throw big budgets at online marketing. One of the first tasks I undertake is a meeting to discuss previous strategies. As my main focus is natural search, one of the things I always find interesting is discussing link building strategies carried out by previous agencies and internal SEOs. This can be quite enlightening, but really worrying at the same time, you begin to realise fairly quickly why SEO gets such bad press.

One of the things that always makes my head spin is companies who invest in pumping out online press releases through well-known services for the sheer purpose of building links!

"So, what's your link building strategy?", "Well, we send out press releases every week and get thousands of links!” fantastic. You realise at this point the road ahead is a long one.

This is my opinion and you can disagree with me in the comments, sending out press releases through services such as PRnewswire or Marketwire is not a link building strategy, in fact paying for these services alone is nothing but a waste of time and money.

So, I did a little research as I wanted to confirm my long held belief, asking 20 different SEOs to give a rough figure as to how much each of their clients spend on Online press release distribution. I have to say even I was shocked by the figures (a quick thank you to all those who responded, cheers guys).

As you can see 40% of clients were spending £2000 - £3000 a month on press release distribution alone, even at the most expensive rates that’s 6 - 10 per month. Do you really have that much to talk about? On top of that, 2.5% were spending over £5000 per month on press release distribution, that figure is staggering!

I work with some very big brands and they would struggle to fulfill that quota. When I asked why this amount was being spent each month, the same answers came back, "The MD/CEO/Marketing Director believes it to be a solid link building strategy". I know this isn't large enough to be a meaningful sample, but it gives you a slight insight into the minds of some fairly big organisations.

Why is it a Terrible Strategy

I'm sure you're all aware that a good link building strategy should:

1. Follow natural linking patterns
2. Be aimed at acquiring links from unique domains
3. Incorporate social signals

So let's go through this step by step:

Is it natural?

You're sending the same content out to multiple hubs, with the same links in the same anchor text which automatically updates within seconds. Natural? Nah, at least not on its own.

Links from unique domains?

Sure, the first time you send a press release out all your links will be from unique domains. Maybe if you use multiple distribution services you will get plenty of links from unique domains. However if you use these services month after month, all you're doing is acquiring low quality links from the same domains over and over again.

Incorporating social signals?

Erm… nope. The only way this could develop social signals is if someone actually read these releases and referred back to your site through twitter or Facebook etc…

So alone press releases are not a good link building strategy. To emphasise the point a little more I monitored a recent press release that I distributed:

Out of just over 300 hubs precisely 299 were in my report from the distribution service. A month later I checked OSE where I found 36 unique linking domains, out of these only 11 were indexed in Google and my Google alerts account only picked up on four of them. Personally I think this is some indication as to how Google value these types of links.

It's not All Doom and Gloom

I guess I better get a little more positive before I start receiving nasty emails from some of these distribution services and press release fan boys :). I honestly believe that press releases can be used to benefit rankings!

I am sure some of you won't agree, but I am a firm believer in creating 'noise' links, but we'll go into that in a little while. Press releases can be used effectively as part of an integrated link building strategy.

Now I know there are other elements but I just want to cover a few of the basics:

1) Creating the Bait

So many people think link bait has to be absolutely amazing, never before seen, wonderfully awesome content. Slight exaggeration but let’s continue… Link bait in my opinion has more to do with the site publishing the content than the actual content itself. Sometimes really average content can garner tons of links simply because the site publishing it has some authority. I have seen terrible content flying around Twitter or Facebook for the simple reason that it was published on the Telegraph or New York Times etc…

So as budding SEOs, the first step to creating link bait isn't thinking up the idea, instead it is making relationships and reaching out to the right people. Getting great content on the right publication just about guarantees some decent links, of course the article published will have to refer/link back to the site you are targeting.

2) Creating noise links

What's the first thing that happens when you get an article published on a well read and well respected publication? It gets scraped hundreds of times.

A very quick example:

I had a link from the White Board Friday on 'Links in Old Content' (Thanks Cyrus). My site went on that same day to receive over 50 pingbacks! Up to date it is over 100! Thanks SEOmoz :)

In my opinion all these type of links (scraped links) help to raise the link profile and authority of my site. So what is the harm in giving them a push once in a while?

Google knows these popular websites get scraped and creating more of them if you have a link from a strong site, is not going to harm you and in my opinion it helps.

So provide some unique commentary of your own on the article and publish to your favourite newswire, article directories and content hubs. My personal advice would be to use plenty of variation with your anchor text as not to upset any of the algorithms.

3) Guest posting

Yes it's old news, but a really important aspect of link strategy; you should be constantly building a list of blogs you can write for whenever you want to push a new peice of content/link bait. Be proactive in reaching out to relevant bloggers. Feed them genuine content, not just a rewritten article you copied from ezinearticles. You want to make sure that when your story goes live on Fox News you have plenty of friends who will cover it and link back to your site as well as the publication. Guaranteed link bait :)

4) Social signals

Last but certainly not least is creating the right social signals and utilise all your resources.

As well as regularly reaching out to bloggers you should also be reaching out on Twitter and Facebook. When the time comes your new friends will be more than happy to tweet, stumble and share your ultra link worthy content.

You will also notice that content on highly authoritative resources is almost always more likely to get shared, and more sharing = more links.

So back to press releases…

Using them as a one dimensional strategy = waste of time, money and energy.

Incorporating them into an overall link building strategy, utilising them only when the content is worth sharing = winning formula.

Heading a team that builds thousands of links every month through viral and social promotions gives me some tremendous insights and I have seen the above strategy work time and time again in boosting rankings and overall organic traffic to a website.

One caveat I'll add - If you're the super industry authority and have a large readership, keep your best content for yourself.

There are lots of tools, tips and techniques out there that will help enhance a link building campaign. However we need to figure out how they fit into our overall strategy and not just throw budget mindlessly at well sold services.

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Face-off - 4 Ways to De-personalize Google »

Posted by Dr. Pete

Just over a week ago, Google launched a massive change to search personalization, Search Plus Your World. Along with this change came a new toggle switch to shut off personalization. Below the Google search box and above the results, you’ll see something like this:

The default, person icon is personalized results, and you click on the globe to shut off “your world” (I won’t comment on how little sense that makes). Of course, we already had personalized results and a handful of ways to shut them off before, so what does “personalization” mean now, and do any of these de-personalization methods actually work? I thought it was time to put that question to the test.

The Methods

I actually started with 6 ways to de-personalize, but ended up excluding two of them for the final test (more on that below). The original 6 were:

1. De-personalization toggle
2. “pws=0” parameter
3. Signing out
4. Signing out + “pws=0”
5. Incognito (Chrome)
6. Incognito (IronKey)*

I’ve already discussed the new option (1) above, but I thought it might be a good review to talk briefly about the other options. Here’s a quick primer:

(2) “pws=0” Parameter

If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you’re familiar with the “pws=0” de-personalization parameter. By adding it to the end of a Google query URL (“&pws=0”), you can theoretically remove history-based personalization. A simplified URL would look something like this:

(3) Signing Out of Google

This one’s pretty straightforward. Just sign out of your Google account. Unfortunately, the Google interface has been changing a lot lately, but if you have Google+, click on your avatar in the top bar, and you’ll see an option for “Sign Out” at the bottom of the menu.

(4) Signing Out + “pws=0”

Option (4) just combines (2) and (3). Sign out of Google, run your search, and then append the “&pws=0” parameter to the URL.

(5) Incognito Browsing (Chrome)

Google’s Chrome browser has a built in “incognito” mode that supposedly removes any traces of your browsing activity, such as cookies or search history.  In Chrome, click on the wrench icon in the upper right, and you’ll get an option for a “New incognito window”:

(6) Incognito Browsing (IronKey)

While Chrome’s incognito mode does seem reliable, there’s something about trusting a Google product not to pass Google data that just makes me itch. So, for my “control” condition, I used another incognito browser, a version of Firefox that runs directly off of my IronKey USB drive.

(x) Stand-alone Crawler

Originally, I was going to use a stand-alone crawler (PHP-based) as the control condition. Unfortunately, my crawlers all run out of a different state from a different C-block of IPs, so I decided to confine the test to only methods I could use directly from my office setup.

The Dry Run

I’ll discuss the search queries and metrics more below, but I initially did a dry run of 5 queries, and I ran into a couple of issues and insights that caused me to scrap that data and start over. Briefly, here’s what I learned:

Google’s Toggle <=> “pws=0”

As I was collecting data, I realized that switching Google’s new de-personalization toggle was actually adding “pws=0” to my query URLs.  If you add it manually to the URL, the toggle switches itself. Options (1) and (2) are functionally identical, so I only used the de-personalization toggle in the final test.

Queries Change Frequently

I originally ran each option one-by-one, recording the data. By the time I was done (15-20 minutes), the Google results for the control had sometimes changed. I realized that I would need to run all of the versions of each query as back-to-back as possible and then collect the data. In the final experiment, I ended up using multiple windows and 2 PCs on the same connection.

Signed Out Data Didn’t Change

There was no measurable difference between options (3) and (4) in my pilot data. Adding “pws=0” to a signed out query didn’t seem to have an impact. So, I dropped option (4) in the final test. This left 4 methods:

1. De-personalization toggle
2. Signing out
3. Incognito (Chrome)
4. Incognito (IronKey)*

The Data Set

Given the labor-intensive nature of collecting this data, I decided to use a set of 10 popular queries, pulled from Google Trends Hot Searches list for 1/17. I purposely picked popular queries so that they were more likely to be personalized and/or have social results. The point wasn’t to measure how much results are being personalized, but how well methods to remove personalization work. The query list was as follows:

1. paula deen
2. jerry yang
3. seattle weather
4. victor martinez
5. mary tyler moore
6. betty white
7. jenelle evans
8. wisconsin recall
9. wikipedia blackout
10. girl scout cookies

The original #10 on the list was “school closings”, but I decided that had too much of a local SEO aspect, so I bumped up #11. Localization is a completely different issue these days (shutting off “personalization” doesn’t shut off localization), so I decided to avoid any searches that had clear local intent.

The Metrics

To compare the SERPs across methods, I tracked three different metrics, as described below:

(1) Total Results

This was a count of all non-paid results – organic, universal, and social. News, images, and TV/movie results all counted as +1 each. In other words, if news had 3 items, it was +3. If there were 6 images displayed, it was +6. I did this for two reasons: not only are these counts variable, but Google is now mixing in social images with regular image results. For example:

Here, a search for “jerry yang” (former Yahoo CEO) shows 9 image results, but 4 of them are coming from the new social integration.

(2) Social Results

I did a separate count of social results – anything with the person icon next to it. As with total results, social image results each counted as +1. So, in the Jerry Yang example above, that set of image results would count as +9 total results and +4 social results.

(3) Ranking Change

Finally, I calculated the shift between each pair of organic rankings. This ranking “delta” could range from 0-100, and was calculated with 3 simple rules:

1. Result in same position = +0
2. Result moved positions = +|change|
3. Result fell off entirely = +10

So, if the #2 result in the control SERP ended up in #5 on one of the other de-personalization methods, it would count as +3 (change was always positive, regardless of the direction). If the #2 result fell out of the Top 10 on the comparison SERP, it would count as +10.

The Final Test

Sorry, that took a bit of explaining. So, in the end, I measured 3 metrics across 4 methods (counting the control) and 10 search queries. There are actually 5 “methods”, since I also measured personalized results, for comparison. The following table shows mean total results, social results, and change for each method:

So, what does it all mean?

(1) Logging Out Won This Round

Logging out seemed to de-personalize results the most. Granted, this came from only 10 queries, and the difference between logging out and Chrome’s incognito function was only 1 query – where logging out matched the control. I should also note that I had to run the logged-out queries on a different machine (same network and IP). So, practically, I'd call logged out vs. Chrome's incognito a tie.

(2) Chrome’s “Icognito” May Not Be

I’m hard-pressed to trust a tool Google built to be free of Google’s influence. That’s not conspiracy theory – it’s just common sense. Two of the queries showed different results for Chrome’s Incognito browser than my IronKey control. You could argue that my IronKey browser wasn’t actually a “control”, but in both cases, the Chrome Icognito results mirrored the de-personalization toggle results. Ultimately, no de-personalization method 100% matched the control condition.

(3) Social Results Are Limited (For Now)

Every method of personalization shut off the new social results, but even with a solid Google+ presence, my social results were limited. Four of the queries returned social results, ranging from 1-3 results (including personalized/social images). Keep in mind that these were all trending queries with a much higher than average likelihood of having social mentions.

(4) Universal Results Are Independent

The total result count only varied in one query – universal results (news, images, etc.) appeared and remained fairly stable for all forms of de-personalization. When personalized/social images appeared, these seemed to displace regular image results, keeping the count consistent. The same happened with organic results – social results replaced the organic results.

The Verdict

Google's new de-personalization toggle does seem to remove social results, and it's fairly effective for de-personalization, but it's not foolproof. Unfortunately, no method seems to be completely personalization free, and I'm willing to bet that situation only gets worse. It's interesting to note that, no matter what method I used and how radically I cleared my history, ever method still localized me to the Chicago area (even the IronKey incognito). While I didn't cover localization in this experiment, it's yet another way that what you see may be different from what your clients see.

Third-party tools and crawlers should still remove most personalization, and provide one way to standardize the numbers you use for reporting. My best advice is to pick an outside source (or even more than one) and stick to it over time. At the same time, supplement ranking information with search traffic and conversion metrics. You can't trust any one method to show you "real" rankings, and the very idea of "de-personalized" results may become little more than myth over the next few years.

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Comparing the Top 4 Retargeting Companies »

Posted by JoannaLord

For the past year retargeting has been getting some serious attention. I've been fortunate enough to speak on it at a variety of shows, brainstorm over coffee with some cool companies and even blog about how to use it and how to leverage it for SEO.  No matter who I am talking with or what the venue the number one question asked is "Who should I use for retargeting?" 

Over the past two years some retargeting companies have really emerged as leaders. While we haven't used them all personally here at Moz, I thought it would be valuable to compare the companies in case any of our readers are considering retargeting. I really wanted to focus on what services each offer, what separates them from the pack and what they have planned for 2012. Luckily for us quite a few worked with us so we could really jump in with some great screenshots and specifics. For those that didn't reply to my tweet (ahem) or my email (double ahem) … I tried to fill in best as I could based on my "research via the Web" skillz.

Okay let's get on with it. Below I compared the following companies;

• AdRoll
• Retargeter
• Fetchback
• Chango

If there is anyone you'd like to give feedback on that isn't on the list (or is for that matter) feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!

Who are they?
Adroll has been around since 2007 rocking the display advertising world and pushing the limits on targeting capabilities. They have a hot shot team with decades of experience in optimization and creative strategy. They are based out of San Francisco, and have been making some serious waves in the retargeting space.

What do they offer?
On their basic plan they offer site retargeting with both contextual and behavioral targeting built in. They have a complete self-service interface, transparent conversion tracking, and excellent customer service.

How much do they cost?
Their Starter package has no minimum spend, if you are going to go with Plus (which gets you a dedicated account manager) you have to spend around 10k, and if you are going Pro with them (you get creatives, an engineer, and product development help) you need to be spending around 20k.

What's their secret sauce?
They are best known for their dashboard offerings and experienced team. They are truly focused on providing complete transparency into your campaigns (which a lot of other vendors are missing the mark on) and coupling it with lots of controls and options. Last year and the year before when many companies were still trying to make their platforms easy to use, AdRoll raised the bar by launching a platform chock-full of metrics and top-notch reporting options. AdRoll gets a lot of buzz because they are founded by targeting junkies who are striving to bring complex, sequence targeting capabilities to the masses. Impressive to say the least.

What's the downfall?
For those that are looking to do search retargeting this isn't really their bag. They focus mainly on site retargeting and contextual targeting (which is targeting based on category of your site and similar sites rather than search query). I also think it's worth noting unless you are spending at least 5k a month in media spend you don't get a dedicated account manager, much creative guidance, or A/B testing capabilities. All of these are available at the Plus and PRO levels, but those come with higher spends. For those just starting out if you go with AdRoll you'll need to do a lot of those things yourself.

What's up for 2012?
When I asked AdRoll what they were working on they sent over a laundry list of specific action items they have set their sights on. I really appreciate the transparency. These include - focusing on making their UI even more friendly, making the dynamic creative opportunities easier to use, adding more reports to keep up their high bar of transparency, and continuing to grow the team so each advertiser has the attention they deserve.

Some screenshots for the curious cats out there…

Excellent visibility into each ad's performance, and the data you need to succeed.

Tons of options to help you intelligently build out audiences you can sequence.

You can tell from the screenshots that AdRoll has done a great job of making the data the heart of the platform. As they continue to add features it will be interesting to see how they keep the platform uncluttered and streamlined. I think it could prove challenging.

With that said, we currently use AdRoll and are loving the product and team. I think for the moderate to advanced paid marketer, AdRoll is a great option for retargeting. You have a robust product with an innovative team of minds behind it. Exciting to say the least.

Disclaimer: SEOmoz does currently use AdRoll for our site retargeting efforts.

Who are they?
ReTargeter was founded in 2009 by Arjun Dev Arora, and in three short years they have really made a name for themselves. While their roots are in site retargeting they spent the last year really branching out and now offer services around social retargeting and email marketing. They also have chosen to integrate closely with a number of other big-name products out there like KISSmetrics, and SlideShare. Also based in San Francisco, the ReTargeter team has big hopes for 2012.

What do they offer?
They have two main packages — one for site retargeting and one that is mostly display focused for visitors that are targeted via demographics, location, or content verticals. 

How much do they cost?
Both packages start at $500, and scale up from there based on the number of visitors you target and impressions you serve up.

What's their secret sauce?
Time and time again when you hear their name come up you hear they have amazing customer service. Arjun and his team are best known for being available and willing to help you out every step of the way. In fact, every client, regardless of their spend level, will have access to a dedicated Account Manager. They have taken leaps and bounds this past year in product, but their bread and butter is their dedication to account management. You can see this reflected in this awesome Thank You Letter their CEO issued at the end of 2011.

What's the downfall?
I've actually used ReTargeter in the past and enjoyed working with the team, however I did have pain points with the platform. They lacked transparency into the revenue model on their side which left me leery. I know they've worked hard over the past year to build transparency into the platform, but they still have a little ways to go here. I should also mention their pricing is a bit off-putting. While they only start at $500 (which is great) they scale up very aggressively. For a site that has 50k visits a month you are at the $2,500 range. For bigger sites, you better be ready to spend some serious coin to be working with ReTargeter.

What's up for 2012?
I asked ReTargeter what they will be focusing on and was happy to hear they are hoping to streamline their display and retargeting services into one platform, for targeting multiple devices. Companies have told them how exasperated they are working with multiple online partners, dashboards, etc. and they are planning to give that issue some serious time this year. I, for one, and super excited to hear this. I know we see this quite a bit internally and we are always look for ways to be more efficient in our channel management.

Okay here is some dashboard eye candy for you (please note this is there "soon-to-be" released dashboard):

This is a great summary view, I wish there was some more cost data in there though.
 

 It's nice to see the different reporting and view options.

Who are they?
The Fetchback guys have been around since 2007 under the direction of Chad Little. They've been growing the brand steadily with lots of great content and conference appearances ever since. One of my favorite things from their site is this little nugget of gold: "Let's be honest — you don't put dogs all over your Website if you take yourself too seriously." I think that very much embodies their culture, and it's refreshing to see. They also pride themselves in working under seven pretty great core values, we of course can relate with out TAGFEE tenets here at Moz. *Highfive* FetchBack.

What do they offer?
They are all about site retargeting. They even have a patented technology named FIDO, which promises to analyze information on your visitors sent by smart pixels. Ohhh fancy.

How much do they cost?
You have to contact them to get a quote. I contacted them to get a ballpark range but they said they are so customized to the advertiser that would be a challenge. I have my doubts but they did say they have a variety of pricing models available, and they even work on rev-share if it makes sense. Sounds pretty flexible over there.

What's their secret sauce?
They are often praised for their full-funnel approach to campaign management. They take a pretty aggressive stance that retargeting works best when integrated with site behavior and full-picture strategy rather than just serving ads at the end of the sales cycle. They call this "1 to 1 creative," which I can only assume means each creative is tailored for that specific visitor based on their behavior, location, etc. FetchBack is hyper focused on this detailed approach to management, which for more experienced marketers is a really exciting selling point.

What's the downfall?
First off, no pricing on their site. <rant> Man that gets under my skin. If you are going to sell a solution on the Web, you should allow me to research you in my discovery phase, instead of force me to call you guys or fill out a form. </rant> Other than that the only thing worth noting is they really have positioned themselves as an enterprise solution. For those just getting started or for those that never plan to invest too heavily into retargeting, Fetchback probably isn't for you.

What's up for 2012?
I reached out to hear what was on their 2012 horizons. I was a bit surprised to hear they will be focusing on "As display grows from a direct response mechanism to include branding, we are focused on being able to provide solutions for not just conversion based campaigns, but also branding ones as well." Uhmm. Sounds a bit odd to me. In my experience display advertisers are too caught up in branding buys and maximizing impression share, while not focusing on conversions enough. It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out in their services, and platforms. It could be useful for the ever growing social retargeting applications.

I couldn't get you a screenshot but you can click here to watch a live demo.

Who are they?
Chango is a media buying platform that speclializes in Search Retargeting (rather than Site Retargeting like the above vendors). Want to know more about Search Retargeting? Here you go. Basically rather than target those who have come to your site already you are targeting visitors that have performed recent searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They are based out of Toronto (eh?) with offices in NYC and San Francisco.

What do they offer?
Full-service search retargeting options, with limited site retargeting and engagement retargeting capabilities as well.

How much do they cost?
Unfortunately, you have to contact them for a quote as well. I did find out they minimum IO (including media costs) is 10k, and they have some clients spending up to 500k a month. Wowzers.

What's their secret sauce?
Well they really are the only end to end solution for search retargeting available right now. So there is that. At least I had a hard time finding one out there, let me know in the comments if I missed someone. They collect data, optimize, and bid on media at the keyword level which could make a strong argument for some really awesome targeting options. They also claim to have a 90% renewal rate on clients, with over 30 of the top 500 retailers out there. I'm gonna go ahead and give them a high five for that…speaks volumes about their product and service. When you ask the Chango what makes them special they all say "the people working there." They've staffed the team with agency types with a passion for innovation.

What's the downfall?
Honestly for those considering search retargeting it sounds like Chango is one of the first places you should look. With that said, I often tell advertisers they should play in site retargeting before they jump into search retargeting. With site retargeting you get self-service platforms, data visibility, and the controls to test creatives and messages so much easier. Chango is a full-service option. There is no platform you log into, and you are putting a lot of trust in them. Before you commit your budget there I'd get more familiar with what works for audiences through site retargeting and walk into search retargeting with a better understanding of the landscape.

What's up for 2012?
While they do offer some site retargeting, Chango is committed to pushing the innovative limits on search retargeting options. They believe "Search Retargeting 3.0" is already here and their 2012 plans revolve around pushing targeting options, data reporting, and more. Also something cool they will be expanding is called "Instant Search" for Search Retargeting, which allows you to target individuals immediately after arriving from Google, Yahoo or Bing based on the search they just performed. Cool stuff huh? Me thinks so too.

Since I couldn't get you a screenshot I thought I would get you something just as fancy–Chango's infographic on the Seven Types of Retargeting. They have advertising options for all of them, but focus mainly on (1) Search.

How many of these are you trying? #getafterit

So Let's Wrap It Up

When it comes to picking the right retargeting solution for you there are a lot of great options out there. There are a number of questions you should be asking yourself. In fact there are so many, I have compiled a list of "Interview Questions You Should Ask When Picking a Retargeting Agency/Vendor." This list can be your nudge to really investigate who is best for you. I cover topics like reputation, services, set-up, pricing, innovation, and resources. Hope you find it useful!

Whatever your needs are around retargeting, there is an option out there for you. The industry has matured and its time to expect more from both the tools and the services. The four companies above are just a few of the companies out there, but they are great starts. If you have other questions about these companies feel free to leave them below. Also if I left out your favorite company, please add those too! I'm excited to hear what you are using and what is working for you.

* It's worth mentioning I didn't run through Google Remarketing because we just launched this internally for a test and we are going to be posting some juicy good stuff soon enough. So sit tight! 
 

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How To Get The Equivalent Of $100K in PPC Ads For Free »

Posted by scanlin

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.

We launched our site in July 2010. By the end of 2011 we ranked on page one organic results for 108 relevant phrases. During 2011 we went from four phrases in the top three results to 44 phrases in the top three. Here are the SEO tactics we used to get the equivalent of $100K in PPC ads in 2011 for free.

Starting in early 2009, we took 18 months to build a subscription-based information service for investors. Half way through that process we started thinking about marketing and joined SEOmoz to learn about SEO. (First and foremost, thanks to the SEOMoz team and community for educating us on how to do SEO, as we were total novices!) Based on what we learned we made changes to our site architecture, URL naming conventions, image naming conventions, and content strategy before we launched.

Because we are a self-funded startup we knew we wouldn't have a big (or any, really) PPC budget. In our sector (financial services) many of the phrases we wanted are $10/click because we are bidding against well funded competitors (online brokers mostly). Given our conversion rates and lifetime customer value we can't make money by buying visitors at $10/click. We had to rely on organic traffic and SEO.

SEO Results

We made solid progress with our SEO in 2011. We are analytical types and like to graph the number of phrases we have in Top 3 and Page 1 organic results each week.

For Page 1 results we went from 14 phrases at the beginning of 2011 to 108 phrases at the end of 2011:

For Top 3 organic rankings in 2011 we went from four at the start of the year to 44 at the end of the year:

The impact of these ranking improvements was significant. We quadrupled our Google referred organic traffic during the year. At the start of the year we were getting 2000 visitors per month from Google organic visits. By the end of 2011 we were getting 8000 visitors per month from Google organic visits:

For us, this increase in organic search traffic helped us grow our business nicely during 2011.

Over $100,000 Of PPC Ads Equivalent

We wanted to know how much that organic traffic was worth to us in terms of equivalent PPC ad spend. So we went to the Google Keyword Tool and looked up the Exact Match estimated CPC for each phrase where we ranked. Then we multiplied that number by the actual visits we received for that Exact Match phrase.

For example, we rank for "call option" which has an estimated CPC (for Exact Match) of $13.66. We got 286 clicks from that phrase in 2011, which would have cost us 286 x $13.66 or $3907 if we had purchased those clicks via PPC. Do that same exercise for all of the phrases that sent us organic traffic during 2011 and you get a number in excess of $100,000. Those are visits we got for free because of our SEO. (Did I mention how much we appreciate our training from SEOmoz yet?)

Cool. So How Did You Get Those Rankings?

Ah, yes. The secret sauce. Because we are grateful to the community here, we are going to share our tactics. None of this is rocket science or breaking new ground. But rather than vague assurances, we can say for certain these tactics worked for us.

On-page optimization. We created an Excel file and mapped our site so we knew which phrase was mapped to which URL. We limited ourselves to one phrase per URL (okay, maybe two phrases if one was the plural of the other). Then we used the Report Card feature of the On Page tools here until we got an 'A' grade for every phrase/URL pair. We did this for about 200 phrases we care about. Yes, it took a while (a little bit of time each day spread over six months).

Internal linking. If a blog article on one concept mentions a concept we have another blog article for then we make sure the first points to the second with appropriate anchor text. We also interlink our Tutorial with our Blog. We actually repeat this process about once every 90 days, so to make sure that older content is referring to newer content (and vice versa) as we add more content pages.

New content. We add at least one page of unique content per week to the site (300-500 words written by us and relevant to our audience). We have a list of phrases we'd like to rank for that we don't currently rank for and tend to create content around one of those phrases each week.

Link building. We build deep links to every page. For some pages, optimized for long tail phrases, it only takes 1 or 2 links with appropriate anchor text to get a decent ranking. But for most of our phrases it requires many more links than that. We wrote a ton of guest blog articles and article marketing articles (non-spun, non-spammy) and posted them on themed (investment related) blogs and sites. An example is this guest post on a PR5 site.

BLU. Blogger Link Up is a free email list where people post requests for articles every day (there are a few of these kinds of sites). If you write something they will give you a link back. Before spending time creating new content for someone else we always check their traffic stats and look at their site. If their site is spammy looking then forget it. But many of them are quality, well-curated sites that will provide a decent link in exchange for quality content.

HARO. If you aren't using HARO you should be. It stands for Help A Reporter Out. You sign up (free) and then get a daily email from journalists looking for sources on articles. If you are relevant to the article they are working on and offer them some expert answers or content they may cite you in their article (and give you a link back). Major publications use HARO and we have successfully gotten links on sites like American Express's OpenForum (PR6 site) through this process. It's not the same as having an expensive PR firm, but it will give you at least some access to the same kind of publications a PR firm would.

Press releases. Never underestimate the links you will get if you issue a press release. We use PRWeb but there are others. Make sure the release is SEO optimized (put in a few links to deep pages on your site). Seems like no matter what you issue at PRWeb there are dozens of sites that will republish your release, creating dozens of new links. Yes, you have to pay for the releases. Do it a couple times a year, minimum.

Forum participation. This does not mean posting spam in forums. This means find where your audience hangs out and provide meaningful participation. After you've established yourself as credible (posted a certain number of non-spam postings) then most forums will let you have a do-follow link in your signature line for each post. Yes, it takes time to read and participate in the forums. You will not only get some link love (for the bots) but eventually but you will also get human visitors who just like what you're saying in the forums and come check you out.

YouTube videos. We weren't sure about this one until we did it, but it's totally worth it. Create a channel on YouTube (which will get you one do-follow link from a PR9 site) and post some videos. We saw a noticeable increase in rankings once we did this. We think that PR9 link really helped.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+: Set up profiles and every time you write a blog entry post it to these outlets.

You Had Better Like To Write

The bottom line is we spend a ton of time writing. Writing for our own site, writing guest blogs and articles for other sites, writing to answer HARO requests, answering questions in forums, etc. We probably spend half our time on new content creation and writing in general. Yes, you can outsource the writing but (1) it costs money, and (2) much of what you get back won't be of high enough quality to use (at least, within our financial niche that has been our experience). Better to write it yourself.

We've definitely come to realize that SEO is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Even though we made good progress in 2011 we have another hundred phrases we want to rank for in 2012. That's over eight per month. Time to get back to writing!

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What to Do When You Need Boring Content to Rank Well in Competitive SERPs - Whiteboard Friday »

Posted by randfish

What happens when you have a page that ranks very well, but it isn't the page that pulls in the sales that you need? Often times the page that does convert very well is "boring" and subsequently ranks poorly.

In this weeks Whiteboard Friday, we are going to go over some strategies you can use to get those classically "boring" pages to rank well. Don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a particularly vexing problem that plagues many folks in the inbound marketing industry, and that is the challenge of having a different sort of content that you want to rank to help you earn sales, to help you sell your product or your service, your idea, versus the content you create that performs well in the link and social sharing graph of the web, the one that everyone's tweeting about, the one that everyone's putting on Facebook and Google+, the one that everyone's linking to. This is a big frustration because the problem becomes that you don't really want to see this, especially those of you who are very conversion focused don't want to see this, where you Google some particular keyword and then maybe some other guy's ranking number one and you're ranking number two, but you're ranking number two with some link-worthy content, maybe something from your blog, a cool infographic you did, a nifty tool you built, something that you thought would perform well on the web of ideas and the content web, but is not pulling in the sales that you want.

If you've got a page like this that the issue can be, yeah, it's awesome charts and it's graphs and cool images and information and maybe some great opinions, some video, whatever it is, but it's not getting people to take the next step that you want them to which is buy. "I want to collect your e- mail address. I want to get some information from you. I want you to fill out this form. I want to get in touch with you so my salespeople can get in touch. I want to have you click 'buy' right here and go through a shopping cart process," whatever that is, it tends to be on a very different page, a boring, classically boring, not necessarily boring, but a classically boring product or sales-focused page, and oftentimes, that's ranking way down here, number 27.

So, there's a number of strategies that you can use to work around this. I think that this challenge is actually one of the things that draws people away from inbound marketing and makes them focus on sometimes black hat activities or purely paid search activities. Remember with paid search I can go, "Well, you know what? I can just put this in an ad up here and, yeah, the click-through rate isn't going to be nearly as good. I'm not going to capture as many of those leads, but it's fine. I'll get some of them, and that will be a way that I can earn those visits." But what you really want to do is have the ability to rank number one, number two with your boring product or sales page. There's a bunch of ways to do this.

Number one, one of my favorites, it is the simplest one - combine and conquer. This doesn't always work, but there are many times when I've seen folks who, for one reason or another, they have this great page with all this information that people link to and people like and people have checked out and shared, and they have this other page that's boring, but they never think to combine these into one and it's very possible. So, what you can do is take the, whatever it is, the technical specifications of the product, the idea you're trying to present, the sales stuff of it and mix it together with stuff that you know has performed well, the opinion part, the content piece. This doesn't always work, but it can work very well, and one of the things that you can do is if you find content that works tremendously well to attract links and shares and those kinds of things and then you have this boring page, you can put them together and then redirect, 301 redirect one of these to the other one, whichever the new canonical version is or rel=canonical it over, assuming the content's going to be the same, and you can earn that same position, essentially killing this one that's ranking 27th, x'ing this guy out and putting him up here. Then this page, which has the e-mail capture, the lead capture form, the "buy this product" whatever it is, can start to get that traffic, earn that traffic. Granted, this doesn't always work and that's why there's a bunch of other strategies.

One of the ones that we use all the time here at SEOmoz is to leverage the authority that you earn by producing great content to get links to the sales page. What do I mean here? What I'm saying is, what happens if you put out one of these is that this page gets links and interesting stuff and that's great. But if you write a blog that every week has great content that people in your industry care about, eventually, you will find that other great things happen. People will start asking, "Can I translate your content?" When they ask for translation privileges, you say, "Sure. We ask that you provide these links, including the links that we've got on this page, which by the way, link over to this one." So that gives you some nice links right there. People will ask you to guest blog for them. They'll ask you to contribute to questions, to surveys, to industry conferences and events, all sorts of things. Your bio, your profile will fly around the web.

When that stuff happens, you have the opportunity to embed that link that points back to the content that you want to rank, and very often you'll get a chance to capture the indented double listing. Many of you have probably seen this in the Google search results, but when there's a second listing from the same domain, it goes in here if it's on the same page. So, for example, you could be ranking number 10, and you will automatically be popped into a sub-spot number 3, which can be great for traffic, particularly because this can help to get the right intents to the right places, right? If this guy over here says, "Hmm? I'm not sure which one I want to go to." He's even got some little thought bubbles there. He's not sure which of these he's trying to get to. Well, he can take a look at both of them and go, "Oh, yeah, you know what? I've read this piece from them. That's not what I'm interested in. I'm actually interested in the product." Now that's going to be a very high value click, high likelihood of transaction person.

Number three, a lot of the time, if you can't truly combine these, or you feel like it's disingenuous or it doesn't work well or it would be not really the same content to put these two together, you can still have a sales message in here. All sorts of great content on the web has advertising embedded in it. When you advertise for your own stuff, this works even better. You can see this on the SEOmoz blog, where we'll sort of ask, "Hey, have you taken a free trial yet? Do you want to sign up for a comment?" Then you'll put in your e-mail address and you'll say is it okay if we e-mail you, and we'll shoot you an e-mail in your first week of free membership and say, "Hey, do you want to give Pro a try?" So we're sort of capturing you, and that sales message that can pop over on this type of content, that could be something that comes up after the page has loaded. It could be embedded right in there. You can test all sorts of different formats. It could be on the sidebar. It could be at the bottom of the page. It could be only when they try and take action on the page. Whatever it is that you think works best, that's a great way to send the relevant portions of this traffic over to these sales pages and potentially capture those leads as well.

Then the last one I'll mention here, number four, is using content marketing, in general, all forms of content marketing, which would include things like SEO and social media and however your content is being distributed, to earn the permission to do marketing and get that follow-up. And what I mean in here is, if people start subscribing to your blog, if people are following you on Twitter, if people are connecting with your Facebook fan page, they're liking your stuff, they're encircling you on Google+, this essentially says, "Hey, I am open to being part of your community and part of your world. I'm interested in what you're doing," and now you have a relationship and that relationship allows for this kind of permission marketing, which means you can say, "Hey, would you like to subscribe to this e-mail newsletter? Could we contact you about our products? Would you like to watch this webinar about some of the things that we're doing? Does this particular individual product, which is timed with a season or an event match up for you?" Those are things that all sorts of folks do. You can see great examples of this all over the search world where industry blogs that are connected with events like an SMX or a SES or a Pubcon will essentially say to people who are in those communities, "Hey, now it's time for this event. Would you like to follow up?"

You can see this inside the SEOmoz community where we essentially gather a lot of people who subscribe to things like the Moz Top 10, and then there will be one marketing or sales-focused message and link somewhere in the Top 10, usually in paragraphs below, those kinds of things.

These tactics, these strategies, these ways of mixing the two of these are incredibly powerful because what it lets you do is to say, "Hey, inbound marketing and content marketing can be forms of sales," and that's an incredible power to have because the ability of these to attract a huge audience versus these, which tend to have a much tinier and more focused audience, is really impressive, and, over time, this audience actually grows as a part of this. So if you're attracting all these people, yeah, it could only be that a tiny dot starts out as a relevant part of who's going to buy, but over time, it grows and grows and grows. It's a great thing.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you'll try some of these strategies, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Never Worry About an Algorithm Update Again, a History »

Posted by wilreynolds

A few months ago at a keynote I asked people to embrace the HARD work of building a business [video]. We all fall in love with the concept of the four hour work week, don’t we…how can I make money and work less, right?  Who wouldn't. It’s natural.

The hard part is that almost every SEO I know who has a natural focus on scale has burned a more than their fair share of sites or clients in their career. There is just a mentality that comes along with the "scalable SEO", and it brings risks and baggage to many projects. I want to start getting people to think differently. If you can check out Bob Rains’ presentation from Distilled’s Search Love conference - (yes you have to pay, it's worth it) on why he’s turning white hat, you’ll get it. Scalable SEO is becoming HARDER work than you think and he's turning from Blackhat to White-ish. :)

Embracing the hard work, the time consuming, foundational building blocks needed to build almost any sustainable business (notice I am not saying a sustainable SEO strategy, I am talking about a sustainable business) is the key to long-term success. So copy this, print it out and tack this up in your cube…

There is no algorithmic update coming to correct rankings for tactics that are "doing hard work & connecting with customers".

Algorithmic updates are often targeted at those large-scale low quality SEO strategies, so lets just stop doing them. Let’s start with a historical view… 

PHASE I - It starts with cloaking…

Anyone around doing SEO pre-2000 did this, and especially scalable SEOs loved cloaking because they could create some page full of garbage text, and just insert keywords to hit a target keyword density, and boom page 1 of Excite, Lycos, or whatever.

Then came PageRank - Google realized that their search engine would be most successful if people had to "EARN it" by getting links from quality sources that had anchor text in those links. Google realized that too much money was at stake to just "trust" people to not keyword stuff, use white text on white backgrounds, and cloak (and they were right).

PHASE II - Scalable SEOs turned to reciprocal linking

Reciprocal linking sites sprung up quick to provide relief for the scalable SEOs hit by cloaking that was becoming less and less effective.

Reciprocal linking sites were not about finding sites to reciprocate with, who were quality, the strategy was all about scale…there were tools & scripts that were built PURELY to run reciprocal link exchanges. There is no added value or hard work associated with a script that lets anyone post a link to your "links page" and constantly checks to see if they have their link up to you still. Scalable SEO's loved it… run the script, get rankings. No real hard work required. Cash the checks.

Eventually Google updated the algorithm to hit sites who got most of their links in this scalable pattern. Leading to our next scalable exploitation… directory links.

PHASE III - Directory linking on a tragic scale

It wasn't long before scalable SEO's came in again this time with one-way links in the form of directories.

Awesome, now people are getting links in directories for rankings, but many of those directories don't really quality control the links either, pay to play. Remember, there are 230 quality directories for the taking.

As if that wasn't bad enough another cottage industry sprung up, you know the kinds of companies that will submit you to hundreds or thousands of directories for a very low cost.  This allows the 4 hour workweek loving SEOs to just pay some company to do all of their directory linking, sure clients might be at risk the day it stops working, but the scalable SEO doesn't worry about that, they'll just find the next exploit.  I believe that anchor text is going to be on the way out, maybe not in 2012, but soon I hope.

When that does happen, expect several sites to take hits because they have their eggs in too much of one basket, if directories are working for you now, start balancing you link portfolio.

PHASE IV - One-way bought links

Once directory links started working somewhat less (I believe they still work more than they should) next up were link networks. You know the ones that created the golden brick road for SEO's. Pay us, we put your one way, non directory links up on pretty quality sites. Instead of making legitimate relationships with bloggers, authors, site owners and journalists or doing things that are newsworthy, creating awards, badges, etc to get your links, you could just pay. So the scalable SEO once again rubs her hands together in utter joy…because creating relationships with bloggers is hard work, buying links on those blogs through a link broker is so much easier, all I have to do is charge enough, and get back to my 4 hour work week.

PHASE V - Panda smackdown, did you wake up??

I LOVE the fact that none of our existing clients were hit by panda, we (like many of you) picked up new clients, and we learned a ton in the process.

You know what we learned more than anything?

People who made tons of money mashing up databases of info into extremely low quality pages got a major hit. Well let's think, again, that scalable strategy worked for a while, but eventually caused a lot of (much deserved) pain to a bunch of web sites, who saw major drops in traffic. Most SEOs who embraced the hard work of adding value, saw no hits.

Let me give you a peek into what caused a consulting client to get hit by panda. We had a client that we were training, in an emerging international market, the company has hundreds of properties and millions of web pages.  It’s a HUGE task to manage this.  As we interviewed different members of their team, you could just sense in your gut that the goal was drop everything into a database and create pages from the database. This is not always a red flag, obviously large sites run this way.  The issue was that there was no focus on making these pages quality, I mean NONE.  When we would ask why does this page exist, how does it help the user…we were told not to worry about it, we pushed back, but ultimately the client didn't take the advice. 

That was almost 2 years ago, but at that time we knew that without any bloggers, no outreach, no unique content, nothing, just making pages from databases and aggressive interlinking was going to be a recipe for disaster. We knew that deep down Google & Bing don’t want this in their index. One day they got hit, why? Because they fell in love with what was easy and didn't invest in the hard work of adding value.

Scalable SEO's - Zappos is going to eat your lunch 

Are you in the clothing / retail business?  Here's an example:

Zappos is producing 60-100 videos a day according to this video! There is no way to scale that, it’s just hard work. Building studios and making the investment, and their rankings will convert better than your rankings due to that hard work!! They have proof of the conversion increases when videos are on product pages. Eventually video could become a barrier to entry / ranking signal to the search engines, and if they do, you are WAY behind. So are you waiting for that to be the case to start the investment or are you doing it NOW? 

I have been working more and more on evaluating real connections my clients have in social media, and in real life, looking at top forum posters, evaluating their top community members, or heck even looking at their LinkedIn connections as ways to build links.

Final thoughts

Many years have passed since our beloved first search engines have gotten acquired or went out of business, you know Excite, AltaVista, Lycos - even though they never became Google, they all worked towards the same goal Google and Bing do every day…reward the websites who create real businesses, good content, connect with the community and earn links with high rankings. Unlike my buddy Eric Ward, I am not 100% sold that 2012 is the year when all of this comes together, but even if it is 2013 or 2014, he is right in the fact that its coming. It’s been coming since the inception of the first search engine, I've been watching it for 13 of those years…search engines will figure it out. The question is do you want to always stay just one step ahead and have that stress or do you want to start adding value?  

Disclaimer: Every SEO (including us at SEER) has to seek out efficiencies and opportunities that scale to some extent, so I am obviously all for that. But you know when you meet someone if the core of their view of the world is more about scale and less about embracing the hard work. That is when I get worried.

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Everyone in Web Marketing Should Be Against SOPA »

Posted by randfish

If you've visited the Internet today, you know that SOPA and PIPA are being protested by companies like Google, Craigslist, Reddit and thousands of others. To them, we at Moz (and all of us in the web marketing world) say, "Thank You." It's not often that the web's interests align so clearly with the principles of economic and political freedom, and we appreciate those who are recognizing it today, along with those who'll continue the fight in the future.

If you're unfamilar with SOPA, please take a few minutes to watch this video:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

We'd also strongly recommend that everyone concerned about this take heed of Joe Brockmeier's wise words on the topic (via RWW):

I'm glad that all of these organizations are taking a stand. But invoking what some call the "nuclear option" is only going to be so effective. Even if SOPA/PIPA are stopped this year, they'll be back under new names next year. The entertainment industry can afford to keep at it, knowing that the public's attention span is extremely short. The lobbyists who work on things like SOPA are paid to press these things through Congress. They can focus on them year after year, while the voting public has to make a conscious effort to keep tabs on their representatives.

Informing people about SOPA and asking that they call their representatives is all well and good, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.

What the SOPA protesters should say is that even if SOPA goes down in flames, it's not over. It's never over. Further, the public can not rely on mainstream media to warn them of this sort of legislation. This is doubly true when the legislation is supported by the same organizations that own the media.

Sure, call your representative and senators today. Protest SOPA and PIPA. But beyond that, keep paying attention to what your elected officials are doing. Spend a little more time paying attention to your government, even if it means spending a little less time on entertainment activities.  

Today's events are a great step in helping to raise public awareness, but there is real danger in the long term, and advocates must take action more than just today. That said, I've personally signed the petition at American Censorship, and if your beliefs align, I'd encourage you to consider it.

SOPA + PIPA are real threats to Internet freedom, commerce, content and the marketing profession not just in the US, but worldwide (another troubling and terrifying issue that Moz isn't really the place to discuss). We support all those helping to keep the web the amazing place it's become and will put our names, our votes and our dollars to use stopping those who'd legislate against web freedom to help the wallets of self-interested non-innovators.

p.s. SEOmoz had originally planned to make some changes to our site today in support of the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest, but we've been having some release management challenges - for that we apologize. Please don't construe this as a lack of support.

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A Peek Under the Hood: How we Manage the SEOmoz Community »

Posted by jennita

Have you ever been a part of a community and wondered, “How does it all happen?” Well today is your lucky day! In the spirit of TAGFEE, I've decided to lift the Moz hood and show you what it takes to manage a large community. In fact, this is just the first post in a series of posts on Community Management.

Today I'll be explaining the who, what, when, where and how of how we manage the SEOmoz community. It's important to know who are the people behind the scenes, keeping the community in order and running smoothly, just as much as it is to know what exactly we consider the community to be and how we do it.

In the next posts, I'll dig deeper into subjects such as how we deal with negativity, how we gained over 100k Twitter followers and what we're planning to do for our Google+ strategy. For now, let's jump into the SEOmoz community and see how it's done.

Who Are We?

Over the last couple years, the community has grown immensely. It quickly became imperative to build a team to help take care of different aspects of the community. I simply couldn’t handle all aspects on my own anymore. So, before I jump too far into the what, why and how we manage the community, I’d like to introduce you to the “who.”

Peter Meyers (aka Dr. Pete)

Essentially Dr. Pete has been around the Moz community for about as long as Rand himself. :) No, really. He’s been an essential part of the community long before we even called it a community. Rand made the smart move long ago to bring Pete on board as an Associate.

Pete spends much of his time answering questions in Q&A (you’d be amazed at how much stuff this guy knows!) and writing on the blog. In fact he’s written some of top content on the blog for the past three years. He pretty much makes the rest of us (ok except maybe Rand) look bad at our unworthy content.

While he’s not helping manage the chaos of Q&A, writing on the blog, or being one of the funniest guys on Twitter, he runs User Effect, a successful usability and CRO company. Oh and if you’ve ever wondered if he’s a real doctor, read more here.

Casey Henry

Many of you may remember Casey from his excellent YouMoz posts that he wrote as a member of the community. The fact is, his community activity caught our eye and in 2010 we made him an Associate. At that time, he helped kill spam, answer questions in Q&A and did some dev work for us as well. It didn’t take long to realize that he was a great fit for Moz, so we hired him & moved him and his wife to Seattle.

As the resident Marketing Ninja, he manages many marketing projects as well as a number of dev responsibilities. His part within the Community Team is to help keep track of, and kill spam, spammers and scammers. Whether that’s through comments, PMs or otherwise, he’s the man on the case. He’s also quite active in Q&A and can “woot,” “whee,” and “beep” with the rest of us on the SEOmoz Twitter account.

You’ll often find him replying to Tweets to the SEOmoz account from his personal account, fixing link issues, answer questions and being an awesomely helpful guy. Aww.

Keri Morgret

Keri is well known in the industry as one of those amazing conference live-bloggers, and speaks about using negative keywords effectively for PPC. Having managed many forums and community sites in the past, including being a moderator at Sphinn, she is perfectly positioned to be a part of the Moz community team.

Currently Keri works out of her home near San Francisco as a (mostly) full-time Associate and runs her business Strike Models (go check out the site, it’s super cool) with her husband. She has quickly become an integral part of the team as well as the community in general. As the main Mozzer leading YouMoz management as well as Q&A she interacts all day long with community members. Talk about stealth, you may not realize it, but Keri pretty much knows everything that’s going on all the time. You think I’m kidding… I’m not.

Not only does she spend her time managing some of the on-site areas but she often helps out with the SEOmoz Twitter account as well. It can be a daunting task knowing that over 100k people will see your tweets (ok, in reality the number to actually see the tweets is quite less, but you get the point), but Keri jumps right in there. :) She’s also a huge help by cleaning out the Twitter “inbox” (more on that below) for me each morning.

If you’re ever curious about what’s going on at any particular time within the Moz Community, Keri is your woman. Don't forget to follow her on Twitter.

Erica McGillivray

When we found out Erica was a founder as well as the President and Marketing Director of GeekGirlCon, we just knew she’d fit right into our community. :) With a background in SEO, Social, Email Marketing and event planning (pretty much marketing awesomeness) she easily jumped into the role of Community Attaché.

Erica can essentially do anything and everything that has to do with managing the community. A ninja in her own right. On any given day, you’ll find her managing our email marketing, answering questions in Q&A, reading through YouMoz posts, Tweeting from the Moz account, setting up webinars and organizing the upcoming MozCon.

Oh, and did I mention she’s a badass SEO? I’ve always felt strongly that you can’t manage a community unless you’re a part of the community yourself. Well Erica can talk the talk and walk the walk. Just be sure not to make her mad, she might pull these out. If you want to keep up with all of Erica's geekery, check her out on Twitter.

Jen Lopez

Oh hi! That’s me. :) Just a quick background, I have a degree in Journalism, emphasis in Public Relations, but spent 10 years as a web developer before I turned into an SEO. Got hired as an SEO Consultant with SEOmoz in early 2009, then in January 2010 we gave up consulting. Doh! Hello Community Management. It was at that point that I created the position and over the last few years it has grown into a real job.

So what will you find me doing on an average day? I find myself Managing Twitter, Facebook & Google+, combating spam, answering questions in Q&A (usually that Keri or Erica assign me ;)), managing the blog schedule and content, responding to help tickets as needed, commenting on community posts outside of SEOmoz, tweeting from my personal account and any other random thing that comes up during the day.

The truth is, my job rocks. Sure I deal with trolls sometimes, but that’s what makes the job interesting.

Mozzers

That’s you, you and YOU. Whether it’s Gianluca responding to a Tweet about SEOmoz while us West Coasters are sleeping or Ryan answering a question in Q&A about a technical PRO issue, you guys help us every day to manage the community. This is a very important aspect of the community and one that makes people want to be a part of it. It’s not just one person managing everyone else with an iron fist (OK I admit sometimes I have dreams this will happen ;), it’s all the Moz staff and community helping each other out. Holy. geeky. happiness.

What Do We Do?

Obviously there’s no way to really describe everything that we do in one blog post. When you work with a community, your day can change in an instant. Sometimes an issue comes up and you’re helping to manage an issue since you’re the public “face” of the community on the social sites. Other times you wake up to a hashtag being created and hundreds of posts being written about you. *huge grin*

Let me take a few moments to walk you through the major aspects of managing the SEOmoz community. This really is only a high-level look at we do each day. The plan is to expand on many of these areas as separate blog posts. For now, here are the what, when how and who of what it means to manage the community.

Blog

When Rand started the SEOmoz blog years ago, I’m sure he never quite imagined that it would be the base of such an expansive and amazing community. It really has become the center of everything Moz. Think about this; an average blog post gets around 40 thumbs up, 50 comments and 800+ Tweets. That’s a lot to keep up with each day!

What
Since you’re already here you probably know that we post content not only about SEO, but about Inbound Marketing in general. We focus on creating actionable takeaways and look for authors who can bring something new to the community. We like to cover hot topics in the industry but we don’t necessarily cover them as “news.” We’ll also post new updates/improvements/issues about the PRO product on the blog as well.

When
We have at least one new post each day, and sometimes publish a second one during the day (Pacific U.S. time).

How
We have a custom blog editor that we use to create the posts. When it comes to managing comments, we have a system that helps us to moderate them if they meet a certain criteria. This way we don't allow a comment to get published if we suspect that it's spam, and one of us has to approve it.

When it comes to comments and how we handle them, we take the community very seriously and will ban users if they don't "play by the rules." This is an area that I'll dig into a bit deeper on another post, but essentially, you're in our home and we request that you handle yourself as a professional.

Who
I manage the blog schedule and make sure we have a post going up each night. The idea is to set the schedule at least a couple weeks out, with openings here and there for hot topics or new authors we want to introduce. All of us watch for spam comments throughout the day and Casey set up a way to moderate and kill spam before you guys ever even see it. :)

The entire team helps manage the comments, detect spam and make sure things aren't getting out of hand anywhere.

YouMoz

Writing a post for YouMoz is a great way to get your name out in the community (remember above I mentioned Casey started out as a YouMoz author!), plus you get a nice link. ;)

What
Similar to the main blog, the community loves to read actionable posts. However, in YouMoz we do have a little more leeway than we do on the main blog. We’ll publish posts on topics that we don’t normally cover on the blog. The best part about that though is that if the post does really well in YouMoz and gets promoted to the main blog, then we see more diversity in the subjects.

When
We try to post at least one YouMoz post per day and some days we even have two. It used to take 6-8 weeks to get through the queue and now it’s only two weeks, tops! (A HUGE thanks to Keri for cleaning this up.)

How
Any member can create a blog post using our blog editor and submit it to be read by our editors. If it’s approved, it gets published to the YouMoz blog. We recently added a “Read Me First” page that has helped us to get higher quality posts submitted.

Who
Keri is the main point of contact when it comes to YouMoz. She’s done an excellent job cleaning up the queue and making it easier and quicker for authors to get their posts published. Whenever necessary, Erica and I also jump in and help by editing and approving content, declining posts, etc.

When it comes to promoting YouMoz posts to the main blog, I’m usually the one that makes that decision. There is no “golden rule” on how to get promoted and it sometimes depends on whether there’s a spot open on the main blog. When it’s good, and the community likes it, it will get promoted. :)

Q&A

When we launched the new Q&A system last year, we honestly weren’t quite sure exactly how it would be received. We were pleasantly surprised to see how much people loved to both ask and answer questions! It took us a few months to get the hang of managing it properly, but with the help of the team, we’re quite happy with this PRO feature.

What
You’ll find pretty much any and every kind of content related (sometimes barely) to internet marketing. Since it is for PRO members only, it’s fairly easy to keep spam in check since they usually don’t like to pay money. What we mainly look for here is to make sure that people are keeping in line with our Community Guidelines.

When
Twenty-four hours a day the community is asking and answering questions. Plus since many of our Associates who answer questions live in London and other “across the pond” cities, we’re able to have coverage all day long. Whee!

How
This all happens through our own proprietary Q&A system. We get asked quite often if we built this ourselves or used an out-of-box solution. This is 100% a homegrown system, which does have its own set of bugs. :) This system is only about a year old and is about 500% better than the old Q&A.

Who
While Keri manages both private and public Q&A, Dr. Pete and Erica also play a heavy role here. Keri makes sure your private questions are answered by our team of staff and expert Associates. Dr. Pete and Erica are usually in there answering questions for a few hours each day as well. Many of our Associates play a role in Q&A and you’ll see a number of them answering questions and endorsing answers every day. Even Rand goes in quite often and replies to questions personally, even ones asking how to contact him. :)

Social Community

Over the past couple years our community has grown by leaps and bounds through the help of social media sites. You may have noticed that we engage quite heavily on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. It’s not that we’ve ignored other sites; we just tend to focus our energies on these four.

Since many of our members follow us on these sites in addition to the blog, we had to figure out a way to be somewhat unique in all areas. Nothing worse than content overkill (ok, yea yea there really are lots of things that are worse, but you get my point.) Here’s a quick walk through of how we manage these four social media sites here at SEOmoz.

Twitter

Twitter is a bit of our “catch-all” and has the biggest following. With well over 100k followers, as expected this channel is used for customer service, SEO advice, content promotion and other forms of marketing.

What
We tweet about SEOmoz content, PRO membership updates, site outages, tool issues, tool upgrades/improvements, YouMoz posts, and anything related to the SEOmoz community. Additionally you’ll see a ton of replies to customer service type inquiries, issues, problems, questions, kudos, high-fives, etc.

We keep the tone of the tweets as Mozzy as possible, and speak as if we are Roger. It makes may day when someone tweets to us saying “Hey Roger, thanks for great app” or something along those lines. It’s all about Roger!

When
Our community is very international, so we can’t just tweet from 9am-5pm Pacific time. We need to be available as often as possible to respond to questions, requests and such. While we do need to sleep at some point, you’ll notice that we have people covering Twitter from about 7am until around 11pm Pacific.

Keri helps in the morning since she works from home and can jump right in. Then when I get into the office I take over for the day. She again takes over from about 5-8pm, when I jump back on.

We also schedule tweets of our content to go out during “on” hours for many in our community. While we don’t schedule tweets that ask questions and specifically ask for engagement, we do need to schedule them to promote our content. On a side-note our most retweeted tweets usually happen between 2-4am Pacific. Whee!

How
We use CoTweet to manage Twitter, which allows multiple users to manage multiple accounts. It makes it easy to assign tweets to others plus you can tag tweets and set up extensive searches. I wrote a bit more about it here on Marketing Pilgrim.

Who
While I’m the main person managing the account, at any time throughout the day you may find Keri, Erica or Casey tweeting as well. I also encourage staff to reply to tweets if the see them and simply cc: @SEOmoz so we know it’s been handled. For example, Rand will often do this. He’ll see a tweet before we do and will respond plus let us know it’s been handled. It’s a great way to give people direct interaction with Mozzers as well!

Facebook

As I mentioned before, we wanted to figure out a different approach to Facebook so it wasn’t just the same ol’ content as Twitter. So we decided to make Facebook, the “face” of SEOmoz.

What
Yes, we do post all of our content on Facebook, the same as we do on Twitter but in addition to that we’ll post fun things about the company or publish photos of events. One thing I love to do is get photos from a Meetup or conference and post them to Facebook. We find that by tagging people in photos and having them tag themselves and others, we get a boost in “likes” each time.

Additionally, I love to ask questions of the community here. People love to add their opinion and Facebook is a simple and easy way to do it. With so many people logged in all day either on their computers or through their phones or tablets, it’s very easy to get people’s attention on Facebook.

We also love to change Roger’s outfit and add some “life” to him.

When it comes to comments and wall posts, we manage them just as we would manage comments on our site. If it’s spam we remove it, if it’s obscene or someone cusses, we remove it. Essentially, as long as you’re on-topic and not a jerk, we keep your posts. :)

When
The timing of Facebook is somewhat similar to Twitter however we don’t schedule Facebook posts. We haven’t quite nailed down a science as to what time is best to post for us yet, but it’s something we’ll probably focus on this year.

How
Although I could use an outside app to manage Facebook, I choose not to. Facebook seems to not show posts created from outside apps as much in people’s feeds as they do posts directly from Facebook. I want us to show up in those feeds as often as possible. Plus I just like to know I’m seeing what users are seeing on our wall.

Who
Again, I’m the main person to manage the Facebook page, however Erica, Casey and quite a few others not a part of the official “Community team” others also have admin rights.

Google+

As soon as Google+ brand pages came out, we jumped right on it. It has taken us a couple months to shake the bones out and figure out a strategy, but I think we’re going on a nice track now.

What
In order to not seem like drones showing the exact same content over and over, on our Google+ page we not only promote our own content, but we like to promote other’s as well. This is a great place for us to introduce our readers to hot topics or content on our sites that we think they’d be interested in.

However the hottest content we’ve found, is our “Whiteboard+” video series. Essentially, it’s a Whiteboard Friday type of video, but is only posted to Google+. We’ll keep testing this and see what works best, so you might find some new content on there soon as well. J

When
Right now, since it’s so new we don’t have a specific schedule for posting to Google+. Over this past weekend we posted a special Whiteboard+ video on Friday night at 8pm Pacific and it went crazy! It currently has 353 pluses, 382 shares and 101 comments. And most of this happened over the weekend! I think we may be on to something here…

How
As far as I know there aren’t any third-party apps out there that let you set up Google+ posts, so I’m logged into Google+ all day long. I’m very happy that they started showing alerts when we get a new follower, comment, plus, etc. It makes it easier to manage than hitting refresh and scanning the page (like I did at first).

Who
Well since the account right now is connected to my personal account, I’m the only one to manage it. I sincerely hope that they allow the ability to add more users soon. A gal needs a break sometime!

LinkedIn

Ahh LinkedIn, the stepchild of our social efforts for far too long! Luckily we’re in the middle of building out our strategy, since so many people from the community are there.

What
As with the other social sites, we’ve set up our RSS feeds from both the Blog and YouMoz to show up on our group page. Additionally we’ll post updates about our tools, webinars coming up and other information the group may be interested in.

We also manage people joining the group and as with the other sites, we manage comments and posts the way we manage our own blog. There is daily management on clearing out spam and keeping it clear of sales pitches.

We’re also trying new things, like creating a book club and keeping the community connected in other ways.

When
We usually update LinkedIn during “regular business hours” on the West coast.

How
LinkedIn actually has some pretty good management features for letting you decline users and keeping out spam. Erica manages all this through LinkedIn directly.

Who
Erica manages the LinkedIn company page and group. Others on the team have admin access and can jump in at any time. But honestly Erica does such a great job, we haven’t really had to!

Whew.

Whether you're a member of the Moz community or you manage a community of your own, I hope you've found this insightful and gives you a better understanding of the community management process. Honestly, this just barely touches the surface of what happens behind the scenes. I look forward to getting more in-depth on many of these topics. If you have specific topics you'd like to see covered as it pertains to managing a community, running Social Media sites or even dealing with unruly members, please let me know in the comments. I'd love to cover topics you are interested in.

Oh and around here, our motto is "If all else fails, eat ice cream."

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58 billion URLs in the Latest, Largest Linkscape Index Update Yet »

Posted by randfish

I've got good news. Today marks a new Linkscape index (only 14 days after our previous index rollout) which means new data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, the Web App and the Moz API. It's also more than 60% larger than our previous update in early January and shows better correlations with rankings in Google.com; I'm pretty excited.

For the past couple years, SEOmoz has focused on surfacing quality links and high quality, well-correlated-with-rankings metrics to help provide a link graph that shows off a large sample of the web's link graph. However, we've heard feedback that this isn't enough and may not be exactly what many who research links are seeking (or at least, it's not fulfilling all the functions you need). We're responding by moving, starting with today's launch, to a new, consistently larger link index.

Today's data is different from how we've done Linkscape index updates in the past. Rather than take only those pages we've crawled in the past 3-4 weeks, we're using all of the pages we've found since October 2011, replacing anything that's been more recently updated/crawled with a newer version and producing an index more like what you'd see from Google or Bing (where "fresh" content gets recrawled more frequently and static content is crawled/updated less often). This new index format is something that will let us expose a much larger section of the web ongoing, and reduces the redundancies of crawling web pages that haven't been updated in months or years.

Below are two graphs showing the last year of Linkscape updates and their respective sizes in terms of individual URLs (at top) and root domains (at bottom):

As you can see, this latest index is considerably larger than anything we've produced recently. We had some success growing URL counts over the summer, but this actually lowered our domain diversity (and hurt some correlation numbers of metrics) so we rolled back to a previous index format until now.

This means you'll see more links pointing to your sites (on average, at least) and to those of your competitors. Our metrics' correlations are slightly increased (I hope to show off more detailed data on that in a future post with help from our data scientist, Matt), which was something we worried about with a much larger index, but we believe we've managed to retain mostly quality stuff (though I would expect there'll be more "junk" in this index than usual). The oldest crawled URLs included here were seen 82 days ago, and the newest stuff is as fresh as the New Year.

Despite this mix of old + new, the percent of "fresh" material is actually quite high. You can see a histogram below (ignore the green line) showing the distribution of URLs from various timeframes going into this new index. The most recent portion, crawled in the last 2/3rds of December, represents a solid majority.

Let's take a look at the raw stats for index 49:

• 58,316,673,893 (58 billion) URLs
• 639,806,598 (639 million) Subdomains
• 135,392,083 (135 million) Root Domains
• 617,554,278,005 (617 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.10% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.50% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.50% are external
• Rel Canonical - 11.79% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 87.36 links on it
  • 73.06 internal links on average
  • 14.29 external links on average  

In addition to this good news, I have some potentially more hilarious and/or tragic stuff to share. I've made a deal with our Linkscape engineering group that if they release an index with 100+ billion URLs by March 30th (just 72 days away), I will shave/grow my facial hair to whatever style they collectively approve*. Thus, you may be seeing a Whiteboard Friday with a beardless or otherwise peculiar-looking presenter in the early Spring. :-)

As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated on this new index. If some of the pages or links are looking funny, please let us know.

* 20th century European dictator mustaches excluded

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