Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performance.

General Error Checking

General errors can crop up continually with any website and left unchecked, their volume could spiral out of control. Working on improving and resolving large numbers of 404 and timeout errors on your site can help search engines minimise the bandwidth used to completely crawl your site. It’s arguable that minimising crawl errors and general accessibility issues can help get new and updated content into search engine indexes more quickly and often, a good thing for SEO!

If you want to get smart with error handling and other crawl issues, start by getting a Google Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at “Crawl errors” found via the “diagnostics” panel after you’ve verified your site:

Paying particular attention to the “Not found” and “Timed out” reports, it’s wise to test each error with a http header checker online or using a Firefox plug-in such as Live Http Headers or Http Fox. I find that drilling down into the first 100 or so errors, you tend to find a common pattern with many that lead to only a few fixes being required. I like to focus on 404 error pages that have external links first to get maximum SEO value from legacy links.

It’s important to note that sometimes, there’s more to an error report than just the URL listed in the console. I’ve found issues such as multiple redirects ending in a 404 error which is important information to brief your developers, potentially saving them a lot of diagnostics time.

As a side note, be careful how you interpret the “Restricted by robots.txt” reports. Sometimes, those URL’s aren’t directly blocked by robots.txt at all! If you’ve been scratching your head about the URLs in the report, run the http header check. Often, a URL listed in this report is part of a chain of redirects that ends or contains a URL that is blocked by robots.txt.

For extra insight, you should try the IIS SEO Toolkit or running the classic Xenu’s Link Sleuth Crawl both of which can reveal a number of additional problems. Tom wrote a nice article on Xenu and amongst his tips, setting the options to “Treat redirections as errors” is one of my favourites. As well as internal crawl error checking, a site of any size should try to avoid redirects via internal links. From time to time, using Fetch as Googlebot inside Webmaster tools or browsing your site with JavaScript and CSS disabled using Web Developer Toolbar with your user agent set to Googlebot can also reveal hidden problems.

Linking Out to 404 Errors?

Linking out to expired external URLs isn’t great for user experience, and implies perhaps that as a resource, your site is getting out of date. Consider checking your outbound external links for errors by using the “Check external links” setting in Xenu.

Canonicalisation

You spent time and effort specifying rules for canonicalized URLs across your site, but when was the last time you checked the rules you painstakingly devised are still in place? Thanks to the ever evolving nature of our websites, things change. Redirect rules can be left out of updated site releases and your canonicalization is back to square one. You should always be working towards reducing internal duplicate content as a best practice gesture, and without solely relying on the rel=”canonical” attribute.

Checking the following can quickly reveal if you could have a problem:

• www or non www redirects (choose either, but always use a 301)
• trailing slash (choose to leave out like SEOmoz, or in, like SEOgadget but don’t allow both)
• Case redirects – a 301 redirect to all lower case URLs can solve a lot of headaches or title case redirects if you want to capitalise place names like some travel sites do

“Spot checks” of Front End Code, Missing Page Titles and Duplicate Meta

Just every now and again, it’s nice to take another look at your own code. Even if you don’t find a problem that needs fixing, you might find inspiration to make an enhancement, test a new approach or bring your site up to date with SEO best practice.

One quick check I find useful is under “Diagnostics” > “HTML suggestions” in Webmaster tools:

Duplicated title tags or meta descriptions or both can reveal problems with your dynamic page templates, missed opportunities or canonicalization issues.

Site Indexation

Site indexation, or the number of pages that receive one visit or more from a search engine in a given period of time, is a powerful metric to quickly assess how many pages on your site are generating traffic.

Aside from the obvious merit in tracking site indexation over time as an SEO KPI, the metric can also reveal unintended indexing issues like leaked tracking or exit URLs on affiliate sites or huge amounts of indexed duplicate content. If the number of pages Google claims to have indexed on your site is vastly different to the site indexation numbers you’re seeing through analytics, you may have found a new problem to solve.

Indexed Development / Staging Servers

Is your staging or development server accessible from outside your office IP range? It might be worth checking that none of your development pages are cached by the major search engines. There’s nothing worse than discovering a ranking development server URL (it does happen!) with dummy products and prices in the database. You just know that customer is going to have a bad time on a development server! If you discover an issue, talk to your development team about restricting access via IP to the staging site or consider redirecting search engine bots to the correct version of your site.

Significant / Recent Changes to Server Performance

Google have put a lot of effort into helping webmasters identify site speed issues and it could make a lot of sense to keep a regular check on your performance if you’re not doing so already. There are a few useful tools out there to help you speed up your site, starting with Google’s “Site performance” reported located under “Labs” in Webmaster tools:

It’s good to check out the “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)” report found under “Diagnostics > Crawl stats” in Webmaster tools, too:

Tackling search engine accessibility issues like errors and canonicalization problems is a really important part of your SEO routine. It’s also a favourite subject of mine! What checks do you carry out regularly to manage the performance of your website? Do you have your own routine? If you manage a large site, or many large sites, what "industrial strength" tools or automated processes do you gain the most insight from?

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

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Note: This post will make you smile, possibly even laugh. It won’t however teach you much about SEO. You’ve been warned.

Last week I attended SMX West in Santa Clara, California and took a couple flip video cameras along. I thought it would be fun to do "man on the street" interviews, somewhat along the lines of Jay Leno’s "Jaywalking" episodes on The Tonight Show. Another great idea I had was to employ the help of Dana Lookadoo from Yo! Yo! SEO to help with the interviews. Little did I know she’d be so great at it (ok, I lie. I knew she’d do much better than I would!). She did so well in fact that our video editor, none other than my (awesome) husband Rudy Lopez, mainly only used Dana’s interviews. A rockstar in the making!

Rather than keeping you from this awesome video any further… I present to you: SEOmoz "Man on Street" - A Who’s Who in Search Marketing.

Thanks to all our great participants!

I also had great intentions of getting several Whiteboard Friday’s with some of the speakers. Unfortunately I ended up just toting a mini whiteboard around with me all week instead. I’m sure I looked like quite the winner with my whiteboard in hand. I wonder if people think all mozzers are required to carry a whiteboard around just in case they get the urge to record a Whiteboard Friday. heh.

Thanks for watching along! I hope you had as much fun watching, as we had putting it together. Again a HUGE thanks to Dana Lookadoo and Rudy Lopez for all their help.

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WARNING: Get ready to read with this one. There aren’t a ton of fun graphics or quick bullet points, but I do promise that if you read through, you’ll feel much more knowledgeable about the topic, and likely get more value from organizing, speaking or attending an event.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve attended nearly 100 conferences on search, online marketing, startups and technology. I’ve given presentations or sat on panels at nearly all of them. I’ve organized our own SEOmoz seminars here in Seattle and in London, built panels for a variety of other conference series and sat in the audience for many hundreds of sessions. Oddly, in the past 3 months, I’ve had more discussions about the conference format and the optimization of the experience than I can ever recall in previous years.

I don’t know whether it’s me thinking about the problem more or just stumbling into conversations that center around conference strategy and business models, but like Twitter and conversion rate optimization, it’s been finding its way into the nooks and crannies of every lunch, dinner, casual coffee or post-session beer.

Wow… Even Google Trends says this is a hot topic.

I consider the organizers of conferences like SMX, SES, Pubcon & many overseas events (RIMC, SMX Sydney, the SMX/SES shows in the UK & Europe, etc.) to be both good friends and good people. This blog post is in no way meant to denigrate or cast aspersions at their intents or achievements (which have been remarkable - SEO itself has gained tremendous legitimacy because of their efforts). Quite the opposite - it’s meant to highlight some of the reasons why things we, as conference goers and speakers, complain about continue and why it’s hard to change the status quo. I’m also going to try putting forward some ideas at the end of the post that I have seen work well and would love to see more of (or more experimentation with) in the future.

(Added late) It’s important to note while reading this post that I’m sharing my perspective, opinions and experiences, so please read with SEOmoz’s usual "this is an opinion piece" lens.

Competing Incentives

On one side, we have conference & event organizers. They have businesses to maintain, revenue and profits to grow and pressures from owners/investors/boards to meet certain goals. They have to please advertisers, sponsors & exhibitors, but can’t do any of that without first delighting customers (those who buy tickets to the events).

On the other, we have attendees (and, to a lesser extent, speakers) who want to learn, have an enjoyable experience and get personal and professional value from the event(s). Most attendees are not paying themselves - this is a business expense they need to justify and hence, managers and C-level types hold the pursestrings.

In the subsections below, I’ll try to walk through the competing incentives and goals of these two parties and why they make the conference experience so tough to perfect.

Venues, Locations & Timing

This is one of the easiest dichotomies to describe. In one corner, we have the organizers, who are optimizing on cost. In the other, we’ve got attendees, who want the best experience (particularly if they’re traveling). Not surprisingly, every organizer wants to hold their event at the best possible time in the most optimal location. That means, at least here in the US, winter events in warm weather climates like southern California, Las Vegas, Florida and Hawaii, summer events in mild climates like the Pacific Northwest or the Bay Area and events in extreme climates like the Northeast and Midwest in Fall/Spring.

Economics dictates that supply for these optimal locations at optimal times will be low because demand is high. This also means that prices will rise accordingly. Organizers know it’s hard to pass those costs on to attendees. Once a conference’s price has been set for a few years, fluctuating dramatically is challenging.

What many may not realize is some of the additional, behind-the-scenes inputs. For example, conference venues like to book 12-18 months in advance (sometimes more for very large/expensive/high demand events/locations). They require down payments and guarantees, since re-booking a space if an event cancels 3 or even 6 months ahead often proves impossible. In addition, advertisers, speakers, exhibitors and conference goers themselves get accustomed to certain events at certain times in specific places. Changing an established event always carries risk.

Next time you wonder why SES has a show in Chicago in December and New York in March or why RIMC hits Reykjavik in winter, remember that costs, momentum and contracts make those very hard things to change. If we were all willing to fly to Anchorage in January, you can bet the costs would be rock bottom.

Attendance Level

This one isn’t quite as clear cut. For some attendees, an intimate, small show experience is ideal. You get one-on-one time with the speakers, more opportunity for Q+A, a less stressful environment and, typically, easier times with everything from getting good food to booking hotels to scheduling meetings with other conference-goers/speakers. However…

The incentives are frequently the reverse for both speakers (who want large crowds so they can justify the travel expense and preparation time) and for organizers (who have a tough time charging enough to a small group to make up for what a larger base could bring). Organizers also want to signal that their event is "a big deal" and high attendance numbers is one of the best ways to do this.

So why not go for huge venues and trim the costs down to minimal levels I hear you ask? Good question.

The obvious answer is profit margins (and sometimes, just covering costs), but it’s not the whole reason. Advertisers, sponsors, exhibitors and even speakers want to be in front of "qualified" audiences. An audience of web marketers paying $100 to go to a show is hard to pitch as a compelling and potentially lucrative base to these groups. However, if tickets are $1,800 and 5,000 people show up, every speaker and sponsor in the world wants to make their voice heard and presence known to that group. Even the big industry players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. will be willing to lose their top notch talent for a week to get in front of the audience, mingle with the crowd and network with the best and brightest.

Some attendees are also more excited by large events. They provide greater opportunities to meet a high quantity of peers and help lend credibility to the value and importance of the event. They also tend to draw big name speakers and presenters, which means a perception of greater value from the learning aspects of the conference.

Of course, this is all balanced by the availability and affordability of venues. SMX Advanced happens in Seattle and for each of the past 2 years, it’s been completely sold out. The organizers could go to a larger facility, but Seattle doesn’t have many that support in excess of 2,000 people without dramatically raising the costs (and likely lowering quality) and the SMX organizers may like the feel/vibe of the current audience size. It can also be a positive signal to consistently sell out a show - every SEOmoz seminar we’ve thrown has sold out weeks before the event and this means more early bookings, greater consistency in attendance and revenue and an easier time planning (to be fair, SEOmoz’s seminars are a small fraction of the size - 150-250 attendees - of true, large conferences like Pubcon, SES, SMX or even OMS - and hence aren’t particularly comparable).

Speakers

Things get more contentious and thorny around the issue of speakers. Attendees and organizers alike can agree that in a perfect world, only speakers who consistently earn top ratings and attract large followings would present. Sadly, in virtually every industry, these individuals comprise only a handful of players. Google’s Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik are likely among them as is Danny Sullivan of Third Door and Seth Godin. However, I’m hard pressed to name many more that would attract paying audiences simply with their presence.

There’s also a large group of phenomenal speakers like Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Vanessa Fox, Jessica Bowman, Marshall Simmonds and the like who are excellent presenters, incredibly valuable to the audience, and, together with other positive signals, are likely to draw in paying attendees. This is where the trouble starts, though. These individuals didn’t necessarily start out as remarkable presenters. In fact, I’ve personally seen speakers I’d consider "rock stars" today many years back and the same couldn’t always be said of them. It takes a trial-and-error, weeding-out process to determine who’s going to be great, and that means you need to try out new names and faces as an organizer.

Finally, you’ve got groups of new or nearly-new speakers, some of whom may be diamonds in the rough and others who may be complete duds. Organizers have little information to base this on other than their CV, a pitch form and possibly recommendations from previous events. Tragically, even great online writers/bloggers/personalities sometimes turn out to be less-than-amazing when placed in front of hot lights, a restless audience and 15 minutes of Powerpoint.

Organizers & panel leaders (those who organize individual sessions or tracks) complain to me all the time about the necessity of finding the new stars, getting those diamonds-in-the-rough enough experience to shine and providing a diversity of speakers. Many technology conferences face the constant problem of gender imbalance and I’m certainly not immune to it. Last year, between Seattle and London events SEOmoz & Distilled had less than 15% women give talks - a shameful number.

Everyone can agree that we need more truly great speakers and fewer mediocre/poor ones. But when you’re trying to discover new talent, mature up-and-coming stars AND bring as many speakers into the event as possible (see the next section), it clashes with the goals of consistently excellent quality speakers and presentations.

Session Formats

This might be the toughest problem of all. More speakers = more attendees. And yes, that often holds true for even new speakers and those of low-middling quality. The reason is that speakers frequently invite clients, partners and colleagues as well as promote the event on their sites, blogs and social media accounts. If you want your event to have thousands of attendees, get 100+ speakers and they’ll (hopefully) help spread the word for you.

The problem is the session formats this creates. In order to maximize numbers of speakers while fixing the event length, you move from solo presentations to panels with increasingly larger number of participants.

Some organizers argue that panels are a good thing and I’d agree in moderation. For something like an "Ask the Search Engines" panel, having a representative from both Bing & Google makes sense. For Q+A sessions in general, 3-4 panelists can help to spark discussion and even get into vigorous and valuable debates (at SMX West last week, my friend Roger Monti and I got into a nice tiff that I think helped keep the audience on its toes - and yes, it was all in good fun and good humor).

However, when it comes to learning about an individual topic in a robust, in-depth fashion, I think it’s very tough to argue that having a highly talented panel of 4 or 5 speakers give 10-14 minute slide decks can compare to a single 45-50 minute session with a single great speaker who can go both broad and deep (and then take questions). The highest rated panels (from my understanding and from direct experience with the ones I’ve seen) are always those where a remarkable presenter has the full time to dig into their subject matter. Three weeks ago I was at OMS San Diego where Dharmesh Shah spoke on Twitter and Tim Ash presented on Conversion Rate Optimization. The difference between that and a panel approach is night and day - there’s just no comparison.

But, as an organizer, if you optimize towards these highly rated sessions and kill the panels, you lose speakers which costs you reach and buzz and, likely, attendees. Happy attendees might rave about the value of the session in their reviews, but no one has the incentive to fill the seats like a speaker (even a bad one). Solving this issue might be a pipe dream.

Session Topics

What about the topic choices themselves? I hear attendees constantly complain about certain topics going missing while others get too much coverage. Organizers, meanwhile, struggle with how to fit in esoteric, but likely fascinating topics against tried-and-true (and in-demand) popular sessions.

The best thing an organizer can do is to survey their audience ahead of time and plan/prepare from that feedback. But, this is much easier said than done. Organizers don’t necessarily know who’s going to be at a show with enough lead time to arrange speaker schedules and build a topic plan. It’s also very hard to get commitments from a large number of speakers with a shorter deadline and nearly impossible to nail down keynotes and big names without months of advance notice.

When Will Critchlow and I do the planning for the SEOmoz/Distilled seminars, we get to cheat in a lot of ways. First off, we have the email addresses of all the PRO and registered (free) members on SEOmoz, so we can survey to our heart’s content ahead of time (and do). Second, we actually optimize to speakers - since we largely don’t use the panel approach, we pool together a list of the speakers we’ve seen in the last 12 months that have wowed us and then ask them to give performances that speak to their strengths and experiences. Since we only need 10-15 speakers per event, we can personally invite a handful of top-notch folks each time. We know we’re only covering a fractional amount of material (more cheating), but can get away with it since this is a niche event that doesn’t need to appeal to a broad audience.

Can a larger conference use these tactics? Almost certainly not. Their audiences aren’t nearly as nicely packaged ahead of time, and panels are critical to growing the number of speakers, providing the diversity, giving experience to the "diamonds-in-the-rough," addressing all the important topics of the day, etc. Conferences like Pubcon, SMX, SES and OMS would also almost certainly take a huge amount of heat if they stopped accepting pitches and simply relied on a smaller contingent of consistently excellent speakers. Advertisers, exhibitors and sponsorships would likely drop too (even though they’re technically not at all tied to the editorial programming side of the equation), and these are a massive source of revenue.

Amenities

As an attendee, we probably think that things like reliable wifi, better food and comfortable seating with tables and power outlets in session rooms makes a big difference. The problem is, these don’t tend to correlate with how we actually choose conferences to attend and/or return to.  I know organizers who’ve invested hugely in the attendee experience, only to see retention rates drop (despite the fewer numbers of tweeted/blogged complaints). When those dollars are re-invested in marketing the conference, drawing in bigger keynotes, or optimizing other aspects, the numbers get better (even when cardboard sandwiches and grade-school chairs are employed).

We, as conference goers, vote with our wallets, and we apparently don’t care as much about the amenities as we make out to (personal note - please, conference organizers, don’t use this knowledge against us too much; I love comfy chairs, good food and great wifi).

Press Passes & Guest Passes

Speaking of thorny issues - little in the conference world raises as much public ire as this one. For nearly every event it makes good sense to give bloggers and journalists press passes. However, when a big, expensive, popular event is thrown, these can quickly gobble into profit margins with questionable returns.

The problems are myriad - bloggers don’t often deliver the extent or quality of coverage they promise and traditional journalists frequently make no promise of coverage at all (and then write nothing). Feeding and seating them alone can run into the hundreds of dollars per day (trust me, you don’t want to know what a trade venue will charge for a cup of coffee or a bag of Cheetos). And, as savvy organizers know, some (possibly even many or most) bloggers would pay to attend the event if their press pass request was rejected. You don’t want to anger this vocal minority, but you also can’t afford to be taken advantage of.

For sold out events, it gets even harder. Longtime "friends" and traditional receivers of press passes may need to be sacrificed to make room for paying attendees, especially if the event relies on those last 1-200 seats for the majority of the profit margin.

Organizers know they need to be careful to be generous, but discerning, or risk becoming known for "giving free access to anyone who can set up Wordpress." They also want to try to give newcomers to the blogging/coverage scene a chance to make an impact, while being mindful of abuse and sensitive to the dangers of angering influencers. It’s a tough tightrope to walk and one that press pass requesters should be more sensitive to (I’m speaking from personal experience on this one, and know that we certainly owe some apologies for past requests and perceived slights).

Optimizing the Conference Experience

Now that we’re through some of the reasons events are so hard to get right, I’ll try to provide some recommendations for every participant in the process. This is personal opinion, and unlike SEO, it’s not based on thousands of hours of experience, but probably just a few hundred and my own observations. Still, I hope it’s valuable, or, at the least, worth considering.

Advice & Experiments for Organizers

• If possible, try to shave panels down to more reasonable sizes. Both speakers and attendees will appreciate it, and those nasty timing issues that can wreck schedules and hurt moderators will get better, too.
• Great networking events should be built into more conferences. Many attendees say that the most value they get is from the networking outside the sessions (which, to my mind means the sessions need help, but that’s another matter).
• This also speaks to the value of providing great areas to network during the event. Quiet areas with couches, tables, drinks and wifi can make for very happy conference goers (note: for some reason, putting these in/around the trade booths never seems to work very while, though perhaps I just haven’t seen an optimal configuration).
• Select speakers more carefully. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s worthwhile. And consider optimizing topics to speakers rather than the other way around - if you know that a particular individual can give an amazing experience to attendees, block off 45 minutes, email and offer to pick up a flight and/or hotel. I’ve been consistently shocked by who will say yes (and then feel so guilty/thankful about having their expenses covered that they’ll put in twice the effort preparing and promoting) .
• Be harsh on returning speakers if their last presentation wasn’t up to standards. I understand having some new blood every time, but if someone under-delivered, you need to axe them, or make it clear that the next one needs to make the audience stand up and cheer.
• Likewise, bring back great speakers more often, but make them craft new content. In my experience, great speakers seem to do well no matter the topic (so long as they have some experience/relevance to it) far more so than experienced/talented professionals correlate with great presentations on those topic.
• Try playing with venues. OMS this year moved to a new location that was 10X better than their previous spot, and my understanding is that the cost was lower, too (SEMpdx’s Searchfest also had a new location in downtown Portland this year that was fantastic, though I don’t know the cost differential). When you find venues that will be accommodating, magic happens because your cost structure suddenly becomes less of a burden and more of an opportunity to do creative, interesting things attendees will remember.
• Big one - don’t let the room sizes dwarf the audience sizes. I was just at an event where the room could hold 1,500 people but only 200 were in the session. It feels to everyone - speakers, organizers, attendees -  like there’s no energy or excitement. In comparison, I was at an event a few weeks back where the room could only hold 150 and 170 squeezed in. The air felt electric and every presentation, question and tip felt alive. Optimize this one carefully because it makes a huge difference.
• Make new speakers jump through a few hoops to sell you on being installed on a panel. An impressive CV, a good blog and a high ranking title do not correlate with great presentations, but the ability to make a compelling web video (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) on the topic does.

Advice & Experiments for Attendees

• If you love an event, a speaker or a session, sing it from the rooftops. Tweet, blog, write reviews, tell friends and invite colleagues next time. So many of the incentive problems described above happen because as attendees, we don’t do the marketing or give the feedback we could and should.
• Don’t tolerate low quality speakers/presentations, but also don’t make it public. Tweeting nasty remarks about a speaker while they’re on a panel shouldn’t be any more acceptable than booing or throwing fruit. Make your voice heard to the organizers afterward - it will have a real impact (and if it doesn’t, don’t come back).
• You get out what you put in. Come with an open mind, a stack of business cards, openness to new ideas and a slough of great questions. Introduce yourself, don’t be shy and make the most of networking opportunities; they often end up producing the most memorable value.
• Be the change you want to see - make sure to let organizers and speakers know what you liked and didn’t via email and feedback forms. This includes venue/amenities/location/timing. None of us are clairvoyant (though Google’s working on something, I hear).

Advice & Experiments for Budget Authorizers

• Give your employees freedom to choose their own events. Great people will choose wisely, and that’s who you want to keep anyway.
• Let them stretch their budgets and time - at SEOmoz, we fix number of dollars and let our people do the rest. If they want to spend it all on one big trip to a conference in Fiji, go for it. If they’d prefer to optimize for multiple events closer to home, that’s great, too. You’ll often find employees are much more accountable if they know their budget really belongs to them.
• Ask attendees to record and share their experiences. Internal docs or wikis or a 20 minute PPT during a brown bag lunch from employees who attend events goes a long way. It will force them to take some notes and provide some actionable value back to the rest of the company and it lets the employee be the star - the one who’s been somewhere and learned something no one else knows.

Advice & Experiments for Speakers

• Be empathetic - imagine yourself in the audience or better yet, remember yourself in the audience in the last session or at the last conference. What impressed you? Do that. What sucked? Avoid that.
• Go advanced - I have almost never been asked to go more basic at a search marketing event, no matter how adavanced my presentation or content gets. My takeaway is either that everything I do is way too beginner level or that audiences just love more "down-the-rabbit-hole" material. If you’re on the fence, lean advanced.
• Don’t pitch or present if you can’t kick butt. You owe it to the audience, to the organizers and, for goodness sake, to yourself, to do an amazing job every time you’re up speaking. If you’re not funny or charismatic, don’t sweat it - let the material do the talking.
• Fewer bullet points, less text, less time talking about each slide and less.
• More images, more screenshots, more callouts (text boxes with arrows to important stuff on a slide/screenshot), more stories and more real life examples.
• Don’t ask for a business card to send someone a copy of your slide deck. Make it available online at a URL everyone can access. If your material is good enough, you’ll get plenty of warm leads.
• Prepare. I’m a busy guy - no, seriously, I mean really busy - and I still take hours putting together high quality decks for even small conferences and 12 minutes presentations in half-full rooms. If you don’t have the time to set aside and do great work on a presentation, you better either be incredibly naturally gifted on stage or have a team that makes great decks for you. If you can’t do any of these, don’t present.
• Remember you are why the event happens, you’re why everyone is there, and you have a massive responsibility to deliver something that will add value for the audience. Just one or two actionable tips can tilt the balance, but don’t settle for that. Do better than anyone would think possible and I promise the rewards will be tremendous. This industry is still craving excellence from its presenters and you have that chance - don’t waste it.
• Experiment with taking questions in the middle of your talk, particularly if you’re going longer than 20 minutes (which, sadly, is quite rare). It brings a liveliness and level of engagement that’s tough to match with a purely "I’m going to talk at you" presentation.

Your Thoughts

I don’t mean to be forward, but I suspect a lot of organizers, speakers and attendees in the search marketing conference space will check out this post. Please, please share your thoughts and feedback below, with one caveat - we like to keep this blog TAGFEE, so no harsh insults or personal attacks. That’s what YouTube comments are for :-)

p.s. I’m just back from Searchfest in Portland (which was a terrific event that continues to get better every year). I was originally asked to give a 20 minute presentation on SEOmoz’s toolset, but decided I couldn’t be quite that self promotional and created a deck that covers a wider range. I saw folks giving my co-presenter, Enquisite’s Richard Zwicky, a hard time over Twitter for talking all about Enquisite’s software, but in fact, that’s what we were asked to do and I was the one who went off-focus (so if anything, you should blame me). You can check out my slide deck here -  SEO Problems and the Tool to Solve Them. Hope you enjoy and sorry about the weird formatting; Scribd didn’t import PPTx very well this time.

p.p.s. Please excuse my lack of links to appropriate sites/pages/people and probably spelling errors (drove back from Portland tonight and still not over my sinus infection). Jen, if you have time early tomorrow, maybe you can help add those in? :-)

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Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue - the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).

NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL’s data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.

For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you’re deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I’ve taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:

NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer’s Backlink Analysis

If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It’s also likely that you’ll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don’t have that singular, pinpoint focus.

I wrote another post on a similar topic highlighting how to format titles, meta descriptions and keyword usage on pages that aim for multi-keyword targeting that may also be of help.

Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.

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Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics - all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing.

The post includes real screen shots from Google Analytics (click any of them to enlarge) but the sites and data have been anonymized.

Target Your Target Terms

Remember that post about building a page with perfect keyword targeting? SEOmoz wasn’t kidding around.

A website that sells homewares had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains such as

• http://kitchenequipment.sitename.com

or

• http://livingrooms.sitename.com

whilst each sub-category was back on the main subdomain at:

• www.sitename.com/find_product2.asp?url1=living+room&url2=rugs+and+carpets

Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting.

Getting appropriate H1 tags onto each page was a quick job, improving title tag structure took a bit longer, clean & friendly URLs and internal links with appropriate anchor text were also added.

The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms. Can you guess when the changes were made? ;-)

Getting sorted in Google Local

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ranking factors for Local Search, dead simple tactics, etc, it’s important to get the basics right. A large chain of restaurants created a ‘bulk upload’ file with the correct data for each one of their locations. After uploading the file, they applied for it to be reviewed and ‘whitelisted’. Local data that’s been uploaded by the business owner and whitelisted is treated as authoritatively as locations that have been manually verified by postcard.

Despite various issues (Google’s best practice guidelines still aren’t quite the best solution in some cases) the traffic generated by visibility in Local Search has been significant and valuable. (The uploads were verified in late November when the traffic begins its steady rise.)

Architecture of Change

A current affairs magazine wanted to get more from their website. Because of falling advertising revenue, the publication was at risk of being closed down. They’d seen some growth from SEO already, but wanted to prove that the website had greater value.

Although the site had a good brand and some great content, it suffered from similar problems to many news-type websites, including badly archived content, duplicate issues and a CMS that hampered keyword targeting or promoting individual articles. Recommendations were made to improve the site’s architecture and migrate to the new structure.

The effect of the changes was immediate growth which took the organic traffic to 257% in three months. A month later, the magazine’s owner explained that the falling revenue from print advertising meant that they couldn’t continue to lose money publishing the mag, and closed it down.

Hook, Line, Sinker

An office cleaning company wanted to improve the profile of their site through SEO. Amongst other tactics, a member of staff spent a day writing a ‘linkbait’ post to publish on their blog. This generated huge amounts of traffic from social media sites (dwarfing their regular daily visitors) and was subsequently linked to from dozens of sites. This post, along with other content published on the site to attract links, helped the site grow in strength and authority, and it now ranks position 3 for ‘office cleaning’ in their country.

Paid In Full

This is SEOmoz, but I’d like to share a graph from a PPC colleague working on a site that sells scooters. They were initially bidding on very broad terms (scooter, scooters, buy a scooter, etc) but the campaign was adjusted to target more long tail terms, including descriptions, specifications, etc.

Over a period of around six weeks, the cost per click was reduced by 30% and the more targeted traffic converted increasingly well - this allowed the site owners to increase their ad budget and generated more sales than their paid search campaign ever had before.

If you’re new to SEOmoz and this post has inspired you to get involved in search marketing for your site, do browse the site for the PRO & free SEO guides and the SEO blog. If you’re a regular, do share any stories you’re particularly proud of in the comments.

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This week, despite still being seriously under the weather (see this week’s sad WB Friday), I flew down to SMX West to speak on the Link Building Strategies panel. Although I’d wanted to put more work in and deliver a better presentation, I received some very kind words afterward and requests from folks to share the deck via the blog. Before I embed the actual deck, though, I need to provide some context (as this isn’t a wholly self-explanatory presentation).

Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically. In the deck below, I walk through a number of examples of sites, primarily startups, that have done this. These include:

• Twitter - every user of Twitter has an incentive to link to their profile so more people will follow them. This is also true of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantArt, Etsy & others
• Vimeo - nearly everyone who uses Vimeo appreciates the beautiful aesthetic they’ve created. The embeddable versions of Vimeo videos look and feel more professional and high quality than nearly any other player, hence they get embedded (a lot). This embed action automatically drives links back to the video on Vimeo’s site, Vimeo’s homepage and the user’s profile, all with targeted anchor text.
• Urbanspoon - not only do they give badges to restaurants like Yelp and have started an online reservations system like OpenTable, Urbanspoon also features reviews from bloggers and foodies, who are then incentivized to promote their inclusion on the site.
• Last.fm - the widgets users embed on their site to share their favorite music automatically creates links back to the service.
• SurveyMonkey - a truly viral product (anyone who’s surveyed is automatically exposed to the site), SurveyMonkey is inherently link acquisitive through the product. In order to use the service, you need to link to SurveyMonkey’s site, where your form is hosted.
• Scribd - just look at the embed and the link below; ’nuff said.
• Miibeian.gov.cn - possibly the greatest link building strategy ever devised. The Chinese government requires that all websites in the country link to this site in order to operate legally; not too shabby, eh?

Here’s the deck:

Strategic Link Building

As you can see, I’ve put in a shameless plug for Open Site Explorer at the end. If you haven’t seen the new features launched yesterday, you’re missing out. Tons of the data is completely free, and top pages is just about the easiest way to find traffic and link opportunities ever built (not that I’m biased or anything). :-)

Look forward to your comments about the presentation and the concept of productizing link acquisition into a site.

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Sure, you use Twitter as a social media tool, but have you ever considered it as an SEO research tool? No? Well watch and learn this week to find out how you can harness it in a whole new way.

Now that social signals (particularly Twitter) are becoming more important in the engines, they can help you pinpoint when a keyword is going to trip the ‘Query Deserves Freshness’ switch. If you can figure that out, you can gain a big competitive advantage by publishing fresh content in a targeted, timely manner.

Rand mentions a couple of tools for using Twitter to target and time your content. One is Trendistic, which helps you see trends in Twitter; another is our very own Blogscape Social Media Monitoring prototype (inside PRO Labs), which monitors and analyzes a few million key content providers across the fresh web, including over 250,000 influential Twitter accounts.

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 Today I am proud to announce the launch of the second version of Open Site Explorer. Since SEOmoz has officially moved out of consulting, we are now able to put our full resources into building fantastic SEO software. We want to thank all of you who provided feedback on the first version of the tool for your guidance and we look forward to hearing more from you in the future.

Now enough with the chit chat, on to the new features!

New Features:

• Top Pages on a Domain
• Target URL
• Comprehensive CSV Export
• Usability Enhancements (The end of page reloads when applying filters!)
• Improved Filtering

Top Pages on a Domain

With the new version of Open Site Explorer you can get a sorted listed of the top 10,000 pages on a domain. This is essential for viewing your own site and for doing competitive analysis.

With this new feature, we can see that Microsoft is unwisely 302 redirecting their homepage! Doh!

You can also see which content is drawing the most links on your competitors websites. In this example we see that that these are the most linked to comics on XKCD.

Target URL

The new version of Open Site Explorer shows you which URL a given link is targeting when you sort by sub or root domains so you can see exactly where the given link is helping you. (This is also available for all links when the data is exported as a CSV)

With this new feature you can see which link is most important to Harvard.edu’s domain and which page it is linking to.

Comprehensive CSV Export

After lots of input, we are now offering more robust CSV exports.

The new CSV exports offer:

• The Target URL of the given link
• Numbers of links to the given source page
• Indication of whether or not the linked is followed
• Indication of whether the link is internal or external

Usability Enhancements

Remember how you used to have to reload the page every time you applied a filter in Yahoo! Site Explorer?

With the addition of the Filter Results button, these needless page reloads are a thing of the past.

Common Tasks are Easier to Perform

New buttons make performing common tasks easier and faster to do.

The new Explore and Compare buttons make it easier to get more information about any links you find interesting.

Improved Filtering

With the new version of this tool you can do even more filtering to drill down into what you think is important.

In this example, we filtered the data to show only followed (dofollow) and 301 redirecting external links to the specific page.

Open Site Explorer vs. Linkscape vs. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Throughout this process, we also heard a lot of questions about the differences between Yahoo! Site Explorer, Open Site Explorer and Linkscape. The chart below lays out the similarities and differences.

Help us Improve!

Are there other features you want to see? Are we moving in the right direction? We want know! Please feel free to share your suggestions and opinions via SEOmoz on Twitter, SEOmoz on Facebook or in the comments below :-)

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SMX West 2010 kicked off with quite a bang (or was that a yell?). Since Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer was the keynote, people arrived early to ensure good seats. The music playing before it started was amazing, it helped to create an excitement in the room that I really had never felt before a keynote before. I had attempted to save a seat for someone up front, but there was just too much demand and had to give it up. That’s the sort of thing that happens at a great concert, not a conference keynote.

There were quite a few live blogs of the event, but I had a few favorites from the interview that I wanted to call out.

1. He made it very clear that Microsoft is focused on the big picture and not just immediate goals. He spoke about continuing to move forward with a positive momentum and a differentiated point of view.
2. When the question came up of "Can you be #1 in the U.S.?" he essentially said "YES!" [and yes he said it with that exclamation] However he made it clear that it was a tricky question. If you say yes, you sound arrogant but if you say no you sound unsure of yourself. You don’t do things to come in second!
3. Danny asked "Is Yahoo! going to survive as a search player? You want to beat them aren’t you just going to kill them?" Ballmer could really only answer one way "No." He stated that they wanted Yahoo! to do a good job, that there was lots of flexibility written into their contract and there was advantage to having the power of 2 as opposed to the power of 1.
4. When asked whether he was going to get on Twitter he said "I’m more of a webpage than a bunch of short tweets." But then acknowledged that he did have a stealth Twitter account however only the people in his neighborhood followed him.
5. His favorite thing on Bing are the Bing maps. [completely agree here... the maps are amazing!]
6. What he thinks is the biggest opportunity in search: to "Help people get done what they’re trying to get done."
7. Oh! And he gave us all his personal email account. You’ll have to watch the video to get that though. :)

All in all it was quite enjoyable to watch, although I was a bit unprepared (although perhaps I shouldn’t have been) for the yelling. Ok, I don’t think in his mind he was yelling, he was just talking VERY LOUDLY. But sitting right up front, I think we all sat back in our chairs a bit when he got excited and started to get louder. :) You can see the full video of the keynote below.

Google’s Personalized Search Revolution

Now that personalization has become an opt-out rather than an opt-in, I was really interested in what this session had to offer. The only speaker, Brian Horling who works in Personalized Search at Google, first gave a very informative presentation, then fielded quite a few questions from the audience. I really enjoyed having just one speaker who was focused on the topic at hand. The top takeaways that I got were some of the differences between a logged out user who gets personalized search versus a logged in user. Let me break it down a bit.

First of all, both types of users are thought of as two different identities to Google. Let’s say you’re logged in, and then log out, they don’t view you as the same logged in person. At that point they do look at the cookies set on your computer which tell gives them information on what you’ve searched for previously, which results you’ve clicked on, etc. For signed in accounts, your web history is saved indefinitely, but your non-logged in identity is only saved for 180 days.

Every user using search has the potential of seeing personalized search in some way whether it’s geo-location, web history, social search, etc. Personalization occurs about 1 in 5 queries for a user and the changes tend to be restricted to only a few results.

How can you control the personalization of your searches?

• Use search details
• Disable it by appending &pws=0 on searchs (you can find the bookmarklet to do that here)
• Edit or disable your web history

If you haven’t looked at the "view customizations" link I highlight above before, you should definitely check it out. Pretty interesting what’s going on there.

One thing that came up in this session was how do you explain to a client that the results they’re seeing aren’t the same as what everyone else sees. Although in some cases that would probably be a good thing since they’re seeing better rankings since they search and click on their sites more often than the average user. :)

How do you feel about personalized search? After this presentation I found that I was much more open to the idea than I was previously. I think because I felt like I finally understood a bit better where the data was coming from and how to turn it off. But what about you?

And so on…

The other session I really loved was "Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks" but as I was putting this post together I realized that should really a be a post in and of itself. It was great to hear from a Google rep about how certain sitelinks show up and ways you can enhance your site to ensure proper sitelinks. I have tons of screenshots and examples, so I’ll put them into a full post. Plus I’d really like to get Jerry Dischler (the Google guy) to answer a few of my questions. :) So watch for that one!

The best swag of the conference goes to Yahoo! for not only giving away these awesome coffee mugs, but for setting up a full-on coffee shop with baristas to make us our much needed lattes!

I really wanted to show the videos from the SMX Ignite as that was one of my favorite parts of the day. But unfortunately the videos aren’t live yet. Here’s a link to where they should be. :) Maile Ohye’s "DateRank: PageRank for singles" was my personal favorite, although all the speakers were exceptional.

Dana Lookadoo and I interviewed a number of people in sort of a Jay Leno "man on the street" sort of way. We hope to have the interviews up tomorrow.

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This post is short and easy to follow, just like the tactic it recommends. Most everyone who optimizes for Google Local (aka Google Maps) is familar with David Mihm’s excellent and oft-referenced Local Search Ranking Factors. In that document, and in many places where local results are analyzed, it’s clear that getting your business/website into more listings, in a consistent fashion is a very good thing.

Yet, somehow, this obvious tactic has gone missing from many GG Local optimization recommendations. Either that or it’s so obvious that no one feels the need to mention it. Whatever the case, it’s available now :-)

Step 1: Do Lots of Searches Related to Your Business & Region

Let’s say you’re working on local SEO for a Thai restaurant in Seattle, WA. Searches you might perform include:

• Thai Seattle, WA
• Thai Restaurants Seattle, WA
• Seattle Thai Restaurants
• Thai Food Seattle

You’re seeking results that show competing or closely related businesses, so get creative.

Step 2: Identify a Handful (or a Few Dozen) Businesses that Consistently Get Top Rankings

You could build a formal spreadsheet and perform tracking to identify these or start with gut feel and expand later on in the process. For less competitive listings, an informal approach may work just fine.

Step 3: Go to the Local Business Profile for Each of These

Don’t click the name of the listing itself. Instead, follow the links to the "reviews" about each of your competitors’ businesses. You’ll get a page with information about the business, reviews and lists of data that Google has found about them.

Step 4: Click on the Links to "More About this Place"

The "more about this place" section of the business listing shows brief snippets, titles and URLs where Google has found relevant information pertaining to the business. This is your potential goldmine for discovering listing sources.

Step 5: Go to those Sites & Get Your Business Added/Updated

 The domains that are listed are places where Google is pulling information about your business. This is where the Maps algorithm comes into play - it relies on not only the number of listings, but the quality of the sources and the consistency between them. You want every listing to perfectly match one another, right down the the suffix on the reservations phone number and the formatting of your suite number (e.g. 1221 E Pike Street vs. 1221 East Pike Street vs. 1221 E Pike Street Suite 200 vs. 1221 East Pike Street #200 are all DIFFERENT - don’t make that mistake).

As an example, I visited a link from Thaiku’s listing in the example above to Intuit’s Local Business Directory (I didn’t even know they had one until now) and could then add/edit SEOmoz’s listing:

In addition to the potential local ranking boost, a majority of these sources offer the potential to earn links! Even if you don’t care much about the local results themselves, this is a pretty terrific way to get some good quality, trusted sites linking to you.

Step 6: Repeat Step 4 & 5 for the "Reviews" and "User Content" Sections

If you’re hungry for even more sources, you can look at where listings come from on other competitors and/or go back to the business listing’s page in Google Maps/Local and choose from the "reviews" and "user content" sections for even more potential spots. Much like manual link building back in the late ’90’s, perseverance and careful attention to detail will take you far.

There are automated services out there to help with this process, but I haven’t yet seen one I feel completely comfortable about. The biggest issue is the dramatic value of and need for consistency in the listings. When automated systems submit, they can mix in a suite number in the wrong place, cut off a phone number because the form doesn’t accept hyphens or confirm a URL that doesn’t match what you’ve submitted elsewhere. For now, I recommend playing it safe and spending the hours (even if that’s a dozen or two) to get those 50-250 listings correct. Google will reward you with local rankings and high quality traffic.

p.s. Next week I’m down in Portland for SEMpdx’s Searchfest and hope to spend time with some true local search experts and perhaps share some more cutting edge tactics :-)

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We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

• Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few "clicks" as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
• Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

When is Pagination Necessary?

When a site grows beyond a few dozen pages of content in a specific category or subcategory, listing all of the links on a single page of results can make for unwieldly, hard-to-use pages that seem to scroll indefinitely (and can cause long load times as well).

Clearly, I need to log into Facebook more often…

But, usability isn’t the only reason pagination exists. For many years, Google’s recommended that pages contain no more than 100 links (internal or external) in order to make it easy for spiders to reach down deep into a site’s architecture. Many SEOs have found that this "limit" isn’t hard and fast, but staying within that general range remains a best practice. Hence, pages that contain many hundreds or thousands of links may inadvertently be hurting the access of search engines to the content-rich pages in the list making pagination essential.

Numbers of Links & Pages

We know that sometimes pagination is essential - one page of results just doesn’t cut it in every situation. But just how many links to content should the average category/results page show? And how many pages of results should display in the pagination?

There are a lot of options here, but there’s serious danger in using the wrong structures. Let’s take a look at the right (and wrong) ways to determine link numbers.

In some cases, there’s simply too many pages of results to list them all. When this happens, the very best thing you can do is to work around the problem by… creating more subcategories! It may seem challenging or even counter-intuitive, but adding either an extra layer of classification or a greater number of subcategories can have a dramatically positive impact on both SEO and usability.

There are times, however, when even the creation of many deep subcategories isn’t enough. If your site is big enough, you may need to have extensive pagination such that not every page of results can be reached in once click. In these cases, there are a few clear dos and don’ts.

Do:

• Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
• Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
• Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don’t:

• Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs - you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
• Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
• Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
• Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets - engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they’re not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
• Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

When in doubt, consider the directives you’re optimizing toward - the need for fewer extra pages of pagination, the desire to make the browsing experience usable (many webmasters mistakenly think users will simply give up and search, forgetting that some of us can’t recall the name of the piece we’re looking for!) and the importance of maintaining a reasonable count of links per page. Also note that although I’ve illustrated using 5-10 listings (for graphical space requirements), a normal listings set could be 30-90 links per page, depending on the situation.

Titles & Meta Descriptions for Paginated Results

In most cases, the title and meta description of paginated results are copied from the top page. This isn’t ideal, as it can potentially cause duplicate content issues. Instead, you can employ a number of tactics to help solve the problem.

Example of results page titles & descriptions:

Top Page Title: Theatres & Playhouses in Princeton, New Jersey
Top Page Meta Description: Listings of 368 theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (including surrounding cities).

Page 4 Title: Page 4 of 7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Page 4 Meta Description: Listings 201-250 (out of 368) theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (inclusing surrounding cities).

Alternate Page 4 Title: Results Page 4/7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Alternate Page 4: Description: -

Yes, you can use no meta description at all, and in fact, if I were setting up a CMS today, this is how I’d do it. A missing meta description reduces complexity and potential mis-casting of URLs as duplicates. Also notce that I’ve made the titles on results pages sub-optimal to help dissuade the engines from sending traffic to these URLs, rather than the top page (which is made to be the better "landing" experience for users).

Nofollows. Rel=Canonicals and Conditional Redirects

Some SEOs and website owners have, unfortunately, received or interpreted advice incorrectly about employing directives like the nofollow tag, canonical URL tag or even conditional redirects to help control bot activity in relation to pagination. These are almost always a bad idea.

Whatever you do, DO NOT:

• Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You’ll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren’t worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).
• Add nofollow to the paginated links on the results pages. This tells the engines not to flow link juice/votes/authority down into the results pages that desperately need those votes to help them get indexed and pass value to the deeper pages.
• Create a conditional redirect so that when search engines request paginated results, they 301 redirect or meta refresh back to the top page of results.

The only time I recommend using any of these is when pagination exists in multiple formats. For example, if you let users re-sort by a number of different metrics (in a restaurant list, for example, it might be by star rating, distance, name, price, etc.), you may want to either perform this re-sort using javascript (and employ the hash tag in the URL) or make those separately segmented paginated results rel=canonical back to a single sorting format.

Letting Users Display More/Less Results

From a usability perspective, this can make good sense, allowing users with faster connections or a greater desire to browse large numbers of results at once to achieve these goals. However, it can cause big duplicate problems for search engines, and add complexity and useless pages to the engines’ indices. If/when you create these systems, employ javascript/AJAX (either with or without the hash tag) to make the pages reload without creating a separate URL.

(the Google Analytics interface allows users to choose the number of rows shown, though they don’t have to worry much about crawlability or search-friendliness)

Also remember that the "default" number of results shown is what the search engines will see; so make that count match your goals for usability and SEO.

Additional Resources

• A Gallery of Pagination Examples and Recommendations from Smashing Magazine
• A Farewell to Pagination from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series
• The SEO Pager Plugin for Wordpress is a highly customizable set of options that allows you to create search-engine friendly pagination in Wordpress’s CMS from SEO Egghead

If you have any thoughts or recommendations to share in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

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

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

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

Competitors and Benchmarking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry Assessment

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

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

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

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

Actions

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

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

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

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

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

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

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

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

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

Here are the charts Danny referenced in the video:

     
                                                                                       Courtesy of WebsiteOptimization.com

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

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

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

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

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

Development Team

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

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

Marketing Team

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

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

Product Team

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

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

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

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

Operations Team

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

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

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

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

moz Associates

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

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

Boss Team

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

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

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

Thanks for taking the time to get to know us!

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

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

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

External Page Data shows domain metrics link links and rank

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

 Social Media pulls shares and bookmarks from a number of places

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

 Page Terms displays relevant page elements to SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some future plans are:

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

Get the SEO Site Tools Extention Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO for Startups: YCombinator February 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO Project Kickoff Checklist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1 - Prioritization of Marketing Tactics Drives Small Businesses Crazy

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

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

#2 - The Myth of Great Content Pervades

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

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

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

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

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

#4 - Multiple Sites are a Weak Link Building Strategy

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

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

#5 - Last Click Attribution is Killing Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

The view from Stirling castle South to the Wallace Monument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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