No, we’re not moving out there, although it would be a nice change of scenery! We have an even more thrilling mission!

The purpose of our visit there is to attend this year’s SMX Advanced SEO conference, held on the 5th and 6th of June.

What is SMX Advanced?

The Search Marketing Expo – SMX – is the global search engine marketing conference series from Third Door Media, the company behind the Search Engine Land and Marketing Land news sites. The SMX Advanced two-day conference is the only search marketing conference designed exclusively for experienced internet marketers.

With top search marketers around the world sharing their pioneer ideas and tips, attending to SMX Advanced gives you the knowledge you can’t find anywhere else.

We’re speaking at SMX!

We’re excited to announce our presence at the SMX Advanced conference this year with an awesome presentation uncovering our in-house experiment on links, authority and their impact on rankings. Philip Petrescu, the CEO of Caphyon is going to speak on the first day of the conference in a session dedicated to link building.

He will be joining Eric Enge, Casie Gillette and Thomas Schmitz for an in-depth discussion on the topic “Authority Building Versus Link Building In A Search Meets Social World”, moderated by Elisabeth Osmeloski, managing editor of Search Engine Land.

Look for the Advanced Web Ranking big blue panel my colleague Red designed especially for the event!

We’ll also be present throughout the conference in booth no. 32 and we would LOVE if you could stop by. It would be a great chance for us to meet.

We’ll be waiting for you with all the usual conference goodies. But beware! These things usually fly in a matter of hours so you will have to hurry up!

We’re looking forward to meet you there!

You’ve worked hard to build up good and useful content and your readers seemed to enjoy it.

But still, nothing extraordinary happened, right?

You didn’t have thousands of tweets and shares for your post, did you?

Nor avalanches of backlinks from people wanting to spread the word…

It just didn’t have that little detail that makes a piece of content VIRAL!

And now comes the question: What exactly is that little something? And how can it be achieved?

Questioning myself for ages about this, I’ve examined the matter and chosen these examples below that proved to have discovered the road to success and pulled out some of the required ingredients for “virality“. Here they are:

1. Interactive infographics

If infographics are already known for guaranteeing your article’s social success, a brilliant campaign of Forex Trading proved that there is something even better that that: interactive infographics.

The team of designers and marketers that handled this campaign, found a way to present the benefits of financial trading through a personalized, interactive and funny interface. Take a look at this masterpiece: http://mahifx.com/

It had all the premises for going viral:

• personalized content. At each step, through interaction with the reader, the creator was able to adjust the content for each individual and engage the audience from beginning to the end of the post.
• the content was sequentially revealed which made the infographic surprising and incentive.
• was funny and interesting.

 The reactions to this infographic exceeded any expectation.  In only a few days it got:

•  > 25,000 Visits from 130 countries.
• Links from more than 250 referring sources (including coverage from really exciting/high quality websites)
• 697 Tweets
• >1,000 Facebook likes
• >450 requests for an invitation to the platform

2. The experts’ opinion

“What’s the biggest mistake small businesses make when it comes to SEO or online marketing, and what can SMBs do to avoid making that mistake?” – this question generated more that 10,000 words of top notch content.

The editorial team from DIYSEO contacted no more, no less than 46 active experts in the SEO industry to share their experience and answer this very simple question.

With all these guru’s answers put together, DIYSEO generated by now more than 28k tweets for this single blog post.

Their advantages? Lots:

• Published high quality content written from the knowledge and experience of reputable people in the industry
• Got their article shared by 46 of the most influential figures
• Got massively re-shared among the enormous social circles it entered, wearing the vote of confidence of all these influencers
• Created a timeless resource people would always come back to and still find valuable

3. Charity

Sorrow always brings people together. And so, two weeks after the New Zealand earthquake in February 2011, SEOmoz announced its intention to donate money for the New Zealand Red Cross and support reconstruction after the horrible devastation caused by the earthquake.

Their charity act would have certainly been admired by many, but it wouldn’t have become as popular as it did after the post Jennita wrote on the SEOmoz blog.

And all she did, regarding her article, was to ask everybody to give a thumb up. That’s it: a thumb up!

But for each thumb up generated by this post, SEOmoz would donate 1$ to charity. So the least anyone could do was to give thumb ups on the post, tweet the article, ask friends to do so, post comments that would generate even more thumb ups and feed their ego for having participated to a good deed.

Meanwhile, SEOmoz rewarded itself with lots of exposure and popularity for a donation they could have made quietly.

Brilliant!

4. Controversial manifesto

This next post I will share with you is more than controversial. You might even say it’s “aggressive”.

Last year, in May, Peter Shankman published on his personal blog an article entitled: “I WILL NEVER HIRE A “SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERT,” AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU”. Just like that, in CAPS.

As if the chosen title wouldn’t have been already enough intriguing, the author even confessed in the article’s intro that his first choice for the title would have been “All “Social Media Experts” need to go die in a fire”. But that sounded too harsh and he gave it up. Ah, well…he still said it…

Let me ask you now: who wouldn’t read this article after such an introduction?

Yes, you guessed! Everybody read it. This post generated over 400 comments and thousands of Tweets and Likes from both sides of the bridge: supporters and opponents.

On top of that, a few days later Rand Fishkin wrote a response to this post on the SEOmoz blog. Although he disputed Peter Shankman’s idea and argued his own opinion, by writing about it to his audience, Rand contributed himself to promoting Peter’s post, giving it even more exposure.

This shows how important it is for an article to be more than just informative. An incentive statement to further conversation and reactions, greatly contributes to the post’s exposure.

Become viral!

Hoping that you’ve found here some inspiring ideas, I’m looking forward to your beautiful, viral posts as to your own secret “virality” ingredients. Please, share with us!

Photo credit: hersheydesai

It’s right there, in our face! Yet nothing sets it apart from all the other little red guys in the picture.

Let’s imagine now that this is a search engine results list and each golf tee represents an entry. Even if it’s not on the first position, I bet all eyes are on the white tee.

That’s the magic of Google Universal Search, where traditional organic results are blended with specialized search entries like Videos or Images, making the SERPs look cheerful like a sunny day.

This system gives you the chance to gain more visibility in the search engine by exploring different types of content. To stand out from the crowd, like our white golf tee here, you need to focus on three main steps:

1. Choose the result types you will target
2. Optimize the fresh content you create
3. Monitor your Universal Search rankings

Choose the result types you will target

A Searchmetrics study performed in 2011 shows that most of the results returned as Universal entries come from the Videos and Images specialized searches.

These are also the result types proven to have the strongest visual impact on the searchers. Since people are more likely to click on a video or image thumbnail than on an URL, you can definitely boost your clickthrough rate by creating video presentations and tutorials for your products and services, and use ingenious images on your web pages.

But other types of results should not be neglected, especially if they match your business profile. For example, if you are selling golf tees, it’s a good idea to also target the Shopping search results.

Just think about the different content and media aspects that you can approach. Here is a list with all the Universal result types (that I know of) Google includes in the SERPs:

• Video
• Image
• Local
• News
• Shopping
• Books 

Note: the link on each result type above takes you to a Universal Search example in Google.com.

Optimize the fresh content you create

Creating the new, diverse content gets only half the job done. The next step is to prepare it for the search engines.

Universal Search optimization factors are similar to those used when optimizing content for web search.

Your techniques should include:

• on-page keyword optimization
• authority backlinks
• social shares

Here is one of Matt Cutts’ videos explaining how traditional optimization factors affect Universal video results:

Once you have the new optimized content ready, it’s time to publish and promote it on various channels like blogs, social media and video sharing platforms. This should help you make the new content accessible to a larger audience.

Monitor your Universal Search rankings

Now that you’ve seen where to focus your optimization efforts, it’s time to take a look at the results.

Below, I will show you how you can track Google Universal Search ranking results with Advanced Web Ranking. Let’s take as an example the keyword “golf tee” and the Google Canada search engine.

A quick search in browser reveals an Image result on the third position.

Here are the steps you should follow in order to track this Image result:

1. Select your Google Universal search engine

You can do this from Project -> Search Engines. Just click on the [Add] button and choose the first option available – [Add Search Engines]. Here, type Google Universal in the filter box and the search engine will pop up in the list.

To target a particular country, you need to click on [See more countries], and then select the related search engine (in this case Google Canada).

Now just click [OK] and the search engine will be automatically added to your AWR project.

2. Choose the results type you want to display

To track only specific universal results, you need to right-click on the search engine you just added in the project, and select [Properties]. All the Universal results available for tracking in the application are listed in the [Result Types] grid, as below:

To monitor only part of them, un-check the options that you don’t need. When you’re done, just click [OK] and your preferences will be stored in the application.

3. Start the rank tracking process

To do this, click on the green [Update] button, from the left-bottom corner of the application window.

If you want the rankings update to run automatically, you have the option to create a scheduled task in AWR. This should gather the ranking data at a frequency of your own choice.

4. See results in rankings report

When the update is completed, you can see the Google Universal ranking results in one of the AWR reports. For example, let’s choose Rankings -> Website Rankings and select the [Date Comparison] view.

To display the Result Type column, click on the [Select Columns] button, next to the [Website] column, and check the related check box.

Here is our Image result, on the 3rd position in Google Canada:

This way, you can easily keep an eye on the new videos, images or other type of content you promote.

Conclusion

Changing the way SERPs look today, and subsequently the behavior of the searchers, Google transformed content diversity from “nice to have” into a “must have”.

So dare to explore new challenges in your search engine optimization strategy and make your fresh content accessible on as many marketing channels as you can.

I’m sure there is a lot more to tell about Google Universal Search and how to make the most of each specialized search type. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Photo credit: Steven Depolo

I am not a bad photographer myself, but my family, friends and fishing themes never seem to find their place with the content I write. So, it’s only common sense for me to use images that are the work of professionals.

You’re probably suspecting I had fun looking for this picture. Well, this time I actually did!

Let me tell you about a smart tool I recently discovered, that helped me save precious time when searching for images. It all started with…

The Problem

Every time I prepared a new article, finding the perfect image proved to be an exhausting task. I had to go through several resources and set up tons of search filters, hoping that the images I liked would meet my three republishing criteria:

1. Be meaningful for the content

2. Have a decent quality and size for the blog; and

3. Be free for share and reuse

As you can imagine, a lot of the pictures I found to be relevant for my articles had some restricted republishing rights, or, to my frustration, they were too small for reuse.

The Solution

… came up unexpectedly. I learned about the search tool that Creative Commons provides while reading through the comments section of an interesting article on the Portent Blog.

This tool reunites several search services for different types of content, like Images, Videos and even Music, returning items that are labeled for reuse.

It’s a gold mine for content writers, if you ask me

How it works

After you enter your term in the search box, just click on the resource that is relevant for the type of content you need and hit Enter. Then Creative Commons runs the search directly with the relevant privacy filters applied.

Switching to a different resource is very simple if you are not happy with the results returned.

For example, to find the image for this blog article, I typed colorful and selected first the Google Images service.

But the images I found were not exactly what I needed, so I returned to the search window and clicked on Flickr.

The query on images licensed for commercial use was performed instantly, without me having to go directly to the search service page and set up the filter manually.

Once I decided which image to choose from the search on Flickr, I saved it along with the author’s credits to be mentioned in the article.

Easy as pie!

Image Search Services available

Now that you’ve seen how to quickly find free images you can share, let’s take a look at the three most important search services that you have access to with Creative Commons:

1. Flickr

This is a photo management service owned by Yahoo!, that currently has over 5 million items shared. Besides high quality pictures of real life items, you can also find here graphic works that are very useful to render abstract concepts.

2. Fotopedia

This is a photo encyclopedia designed for photographers all over the world to promote their content. At this point, it gives access to 700,000+ images which approach a wide variety of themes.

3. Google Images

This search service is provided by Google. If the previous two services also host the images they provide, Google Images is not a resource in itself, but an engine that returns Image results from millions of sources it indexes.

Of course, there are several other search services that you can prospect with Creative Commons, but these three are the most relevant for finding images.

Regardless of the source you choose, running the searches through this tool will provide results that have the “labeled for commercial reuse with modifications” filter applied.

Conclusion

With so many free image resources available just one click away, finding visual elements that boost the value of your written content becomes a child’s play.

An alternative to using free images from search services is to make your own photos for the products, services or concepts you write about. I’m planning to use one of mine someday… when I find a way to blend SEO and fishing

In the meantime, to show appreciation for a professional’ s work, it is a good practice to give credit to the author of the content shared.

Photo credit: Vectorportal

Before you start writing content, you need to have your mind set on two things:
1. what are the most relevant keywords that describe your website page; and
2. how valuable these keywords are from the commercial point of view

Keyword research tools are a great way to find new keyword ideas.

But there’s a catch…

Choosing one primary keyword and 2 or 3 secondary keywords for a web page, from a list of 100+ results, may prove to be a task more difficult than expected.

How can you find the perfect balance between relevance and commercial value, without actually going through hundreds of items manually.

Mission impossible?

Not for the Advanced Web Ranking Keyword Research tool.

With the new keyword research filters in AWR 8.9, you have the ability to refine your Google AdWords suggestions and find the most profitable keywords in no time.

To illustrate this refining process, let’s choose flower toy as an example – there are only a few days left till Easter, and this is what I’m planning to get for my baby girl

Here are the filtering steps you need to take:

1. Select the match type, country and language

The first thing you should do before retrieving keyword suggestions in AWR is to decide on the “Broad”, “Exact” or “Phrase” match type and narrow the search session to the specific market you are targeting. For this example, let’s go for Broad match and the UK online market.

Just click on [Research] -> [Keyword Research] -> [Google AdWords Keyword Tool] and make the selections. Then, press on the green [Update button] to start extracting the data.

The first time you use the Google AdWords tool in AWR, you will need to authenticate with your AdWords credentials.

Future keyword research sessions will be performed with the same AdWords account that you have chosen at this point.

2. Proceed with in-depth filtering

Once the keyword suggestions are retrieved in AWR, you can start playing with the criteria available on the left Filtering panel. Let’s picture this as a makeover game.

So, you take the keyword list with 84 items, as below:

And start refining it one step at a time:

- by Relevance

This criterion helps you filter the phrases that include or exclude a certain term.

Because everything started with the flower toy, let’s make sure the refined list will contain only keywords that include the term flower :)

- by Phrase length

Here, you get to select the minimum and maximum number of terms your keywords will contain.

If you are interested in long tails, you should consider keywords that include at least 3 terms. However, for this example let’s stick with a number of 2 – 4 terms.

- by Volume

To avoid chasing the wild goose, it’s recommended to always remove suggestions that don’t have a competitive global or local monthly search value from your keyword lists.

In this example, since a specific country is targeted, both average search values are important. So let’s go for a minimum value of 1,500 global searches and 100 local searches per month.

- by Competition

As I am sure you know, the Competition does not refer to the number of pages Google has indexed for a certain keyword. This criterion actually defines the number of advertisers that bid for the keyword in question. This is calculated by Google, in accordance to bids for all keywords across the search engine.

Thus, the more advertisers bid for your keyword, the higher the competition is. For this example, let’s take it slowly and stick only with Medium and Low competition.

- by Value

This criterion approaches two commercial aspects:

a) Cost per Click (CPC), which is calculated by Google; and
b) Commercial value, which is calculated by Advanced Web Ranking as [Global monthly search]X[CPC]

For this example, let’s filter the keyword list starting from a minimum CPC of 0.5 and a minimum commercial value of 100.

And Voila! Only 4 keywords out of 80 meet the criteria you’ve set.

As you can see in the image above, keywords are sorted by the Commercial value. This helps you easily see which are the strongest keywords you can pursue.

3. Add keywords automatically to your ranking project in AWR

Now that you’ve refined your keyword list, it’s time to decide on the keywords you will use on the web page and further track rankings for.

The good news is that you can add all of these nice keywords automatically to your AWR project. Just select the ones you are interested in and click on [Add keywords to project].

In just a few minutes, you will be able to start running your first search engine ranking update for the new keywords.

Conclusion

Getting found on the search engines’ first page is what makes keyword research the most important task when it comes to creating new content.

Hundreds of keyword suggestions that keyword research tools return need to be carefully refined in order to identify the phrases that will define your pages. Here is where AWR gives you a helping hand, by turning a time consuming activity into a makeover play:)

To see it in action, take advantage of the 30 days free trial.

So do keyword research the smart way and start tailoring beautiful webpages!

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. I am looking forward to reading your comments in the section below:

Photo Credit: Freefoto.com

Therefore, to be able to get the most out of my few social activities, I had to do some research to discover what should I be focusing on to be more efficient.

Should I be working on expanding my circles or focusing on engagement? Would I find more active users on Facebook or Twitter? What is it that my audience is more interested in?

Adding more people

The power of social grows with the size of the built community. So logically, the bigger your social circle is on one platform, the more promising it gets for delivering good results.

Comparing your main accounts (Facebook, Twitter and Google+) you can easily see which is the one you left behind and work to increase the number of adherents.

But taking your other accounts as reference is not enough. What if your competitors are driving lots of fans on Facebook while you are doing a horrible work with your Fan Page? Doesn’t this mean that you are somehow missing a relevant audience on Facebook?

Beware! A high number of followers or fans on a social platform does not guarantee you efficiency for the content you share there.

This number only defines how wide your message will spread socially. It does not say anything about its impact or the response it got from its audience. Was it good, bad or was it just that your audience couldn’t care less about your content?

Generating engagement

10k followers on Twitter are useless for your business if no one is actually following your tweets. So, beside looking at the number of users in your social reach, you must also check the level of engagement you drive.

There are two types of social reactions: the reactions to your posts on social platforms and social reactions to your website or blog content.

Let’s take Facebook for example. What would it mean to have a poor engagement on your Fan Page but to generate lots of likes through the Like button installed on your website pages?

In this case, based on the poor reactions you got on your Fan Page, you might have been tempted to conclude that your audience is not being engaged on Facebook. You would have made a false assumption.

So, in order to make a truly valuable evaluation of a platform’s potential, you should analyze both types of reactions:

1. On Platform Engagement

A constant monitoring of all your social accounts is needed, whether you do it manually or through a  tool, to be able to measure social engagement.

For Facebook, the analysis is much easier as a dedicated metric is available, that defines the overall volume of a Fan Page’s generated engagement: the Talking About number.

This metric displays the rate of active users among total fans. The higher this number, the more active your audience is on your Fan Page and therefore the more effective your on-platform performance for Facebook is.

Although Twitter does not provide you with such aggregating number, there are other metrics that are relevant for indicating the level of followers’ engagement: number of mentions and retweets.

Mentions highlight the level of interaction you have with your followers while the number of retweets shows the appreciation your followers have for the content you share.

Although different by substance, both metrics are indicating how active and interested your Twitter community is, allowing you to decide whether you should focus more on Twitter or not.

Google+ is still reluctant to granting access to its data or generating such revealing metrics, leaving us with the unique option of eye scanning the Google+ Profile page in search of engagement signs.

2. On Site Engagement

Social sharing buttons you install on your website are tided to the page where you set them. If a webpage or blog post you wrote has collected lots of shares, others might not have.

Therefore to get a conclusive overview of these shares for your entire website, you should make a list of your most important pages or those you find most socially enticing, and monitor their shares altogether to be able to get an overview for your entire website:

This report not only lets you see which platform is preferred for on-site sharing, but it is also representative for the type of content your audience is interested in.

At this point it is also extremely useful to run a similar competitive analysis. Setting your competitors alongside allows you to see the platforms they are best performing on and discover their  top shared content:

Conclusion

When time is not on your side, you might not afford a social promotion by the book and you do what I do: hop from one platform to another, constantly targeting “social low-hanging fruits”.

Hoping my story gave you new ideas for managing your social tasks and the urge to share your own tricks, I’m looking forward to your tweets and comments.

Photo credit: Matthew Burpee

Is it : How good is he?  Or: Is he successful?  Does he drive massive traffic to his website? What about his monthly revenue? Is he going to get awesomely popular and put me out of business?

Probably countless questions are flooding your mind, speeding up your heart rate and inducing panic.

With a little patience and a few updates on your AWR projects, you will know everything there is to know about this new competitor, you’ll discover the best ways to defeat him and you’ll never allow yourself to be surprised by such arrival again.

Who is this new competitor?

Domain wide metrics are perfect for understanding the overall strength of your new competitor. These should give you a sense of how likely it is for this website to rank for any terms it might be targeting and of how tough the competition between you two will  be.

In Advanced Web Ranking, through the Links -> Overview -> Date Comparison interactive report, you can set side by side the metrics for both your website and that of your new competitor and getting’ an overview.

The information displayed, except for the anchor text related metrics,  is independent from any keyword or search engine selection you have made, so it is accurate even at this early stage of the competitive research.

Which keywords is your competitor targeting?

Powerful or not, you are still concerned if the new competitor is targeting the same keywords as you do.

If so, you might need to improve your optimization for some commonly targeted keywords or discover that there are other new and relevant terms that you have successfully missed.

Either way, there are only two simple things to do in this case:

• Scan your competitor’s website and discover his most important and authoritative pages.

The Website Auditor tool crawls the website and gives you an overview of its pages that enables you to understand which of your competitor’s webpages bring him the most benefits.

• Disclose the keywords targeted on your competitor’s most performing landing pages.

With Advanced Web Ranking’s Keyword Analysis tool you are able to analyze text usage on a webpage. By using it on your competitor’s most important pages, you will be able to also discover his most valued keywords.

Usually the targeted keywords are quickly found in a website’s page Titles, meta Descriptions and meta Keywords tag.  If passing through these lists you spot terms you don’t have in your project, just add them and run another update.

Is your competitor ranking better than you?

Once you have determined the keywords you and your rival are competing for, you should start monitoring and comparing your evolution for all these terms.

A great option for this is The Website Ranking – Evolution in Time report that allows you to draw a chart that displays simultaneously the evolution of multiple websites for the same keyword.

Although at first you will only see a point on the chart for the newly added competitor, it will be the beginning of the evaluation and you will be able to understand the danger you are in, due to this new competitor.

Why do you rank the way you do?

Once you have identified the problem, you should quickly come up with a solution.  So, since you have no time to waste, run for each of the keywords, you are underperforming for, a check with the Keyword Difficulty tool.

This will help you find out why your competitors rank the way they do.  What do they do better than you? What is it that convinces Google they are a better choice?

The colored grid highlights your website’s strengths and weaknesses, indicating weather you need to adjust your on-page or off-page optimization.

Be wary!

It’s quite annoying to worry that for any of your hundreds of targeted keywords, a new  competitor might jump into the picture unexpected. But you can release yourself from this stress using AWR’s simple “Suggest competitors” tool.

What it does is to take all your project’s keywords and give you the list of websites that have visibility in your niche.

You will thus be able to stay in control over your competitive environment at all times.

With all this being said, I have just one more question for you: what else would you do to research your newly found competitors? Feel free to express yourselves and abuse the comments section!

Photo credit: Kenski1970

So, if you work on your anchor text distribution, you should see some effects on your rankings as well. Or at least you should know what to expect after adding some anchor text links.

Therefore, for matching and tracking together your website rankings and your anchor text distribution, I suggest this three step routine:

Step 1

First of all, match the terms!

Let’s say that you have 100 keywords targeted on your website. You would really want your website to have high rankings for all of these terms, otherwise you wouldn’t be targeting them.

This means that you should also have some links using matching anchor texts.

But do you? Do you have all these terms in your anchor text list as well?

In Advanced Web Ranking you have two options for checking this:

• You can either get both lists of anchors and project keywords, sort them and compare them;
• Or you can glide through the list of project keywords in Links -> Overview -> Date Comparison report and check the number of Keywords in anchors of each.

One more thing! Now that you know you don’t have all keywords covered, don’t panic! Be patient and pass forward to step 2.

Step 2

The next step, after identifying the keywords you should build matching anchor texts for, is to establish how much effort is needed for results to start seeing.

That primary depends on the competition you must surpass for each keyword. If your competitors, those websites that are ranking better than you for a certain search term, have lots of links with exact or partial match anchor text, you will probably need to perform just as good as they do.

All that is available in the Website rankings -> Date comparison interactive report:

• First of all, make sure you have in your project all the websites you are competing with for your targeted terms;
• Add the two anchor text related data columns: Keywords in anchors & Keywords in anchors (partial match);
• Sort the table by position to be able to get a more comprehensive view over your competitors;
• Compare your website’s number of links with matching anchor text with that of your competitors’;
• Run down the list of keywords to make the evaluation for all keywords.

Step 3

And finally, you clearly would want to see if your plan worked. Or, otherwise put, you want to see if the new added anchor texts had any effect over your website rankings.

To track and compare the changes in both your keyword rankings and your anchor text distribution, just switch to the Overview -> Evolution in time -> Rankings interactive report.

Here you are able to display on the same chart all the information that would be relevant for you at this point: your Rankings, the Total Number of Links, Keywords in anchors and Keywords in anchors(partial match).

What simpler way could there be to compare results than using charts? If one chart line goes up, the others should follow.

…and a pirouette!

Back to you, I’d love to hear about your thoughts and your techniques of steering anchor texts into higher rankings in the comments section below or via Twitter.

Photo credit: John William

Sadly, this imaginary conversation summarizes one of today’s realities. Simple ranking results no longer reflect the actual growth of an online business.

This happens because of three major Google factors that change the way the SERPs look:

1. Localization
2. Universal search
3. Personalization

Subsequently, this affects the way searchers behave when choosing a webpage from the result lists they see in browser.

Advanced Web Ranking already helps you handle the Location and Universal search factors, with the integration of the Google Location and Google Universal search engines.

With the release of the new AWR 8.8 version, you can now approach the third factor – Personalization – by keeping a close eye on your social media activity.

Looking from the social media perspective, personalized search is effective only when the searchers you target are logged in their Google accounts. In this case, the search engine returns a personalized list of results for each individual, which includes pages recommended by his friends.

To reach this audience, you need to build a strong social media presence, constantly monitoring reactions to your content and activities.

There are three steps you need to consider for a reliable social media monitoring: listen, analyze and relate information to past events. Here is how AWR helps you manage all of them together in an unified framework:

1. Listen to your audience

There is a good reason why people have two ears and only one mouth … Listening to your audience is the key ingredient of a good social media communication strategy. The scope is to gather relevant information, based on which you can further take informed decisions for your online business.

AWR helps you easily monitor to what extent your content reaches the targeted audience, as well as the feedback you receive. With the new Social Media feature, from the left vertical menu bar, you have access to three social media interactive reports, each managing a different set of data.

The Social Shares report is one of the most powerful weapons in your new social media arsenal. Besides gathering valuable insights about your content, it allows you to peek at your competitors’ social media shares and compare their evolution to yours.

This is possible since the information is retrieved directly for the website pages monitored in your AWR project, without the need to access a specific social media profile.

Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 shares are displayed both in a comprehensive chart and in a comparison table, with the ability to select the specific date range you are interested in.

2. Analyze the feedback you receive

The art of building strong relationships with others is always based on the ability to analyze conversations.

Twitter, for example, is an environment where you can engage discussions with tens of people. Seeing the actual content of their mentions or retweets, organized in a comprehensive table, helps you analyze reactions to your social activity.

By connecting AWR to your Twitter account, you can retrieve this valuable information and see the exact Retweets, Mentions, Lists and Followers your profile has, in the Twitter report.

For example, mentions of your profile are retrieved along with information about the related users. Matching a mention’s content with the user that generated it helps you identify and further manage your most important relationships.

You can switch between different Twitter metrics by selecting the one you are interested in from the top filter box.

3. Relate to previous information

New information becomes much more valuable once you can relate it to past events. This is a key factor in understanding your audience trend.

With the new Facebook interactive report in AWR, you can see historic information on the number of Likes, New Likes and Talking about that your Facebook page gain.

This helps you identify possible problems in your social media communication strategy.

For example, by comparing the number of Likes with the number of New Likes over a period of time, you can see if the content you promote on this channel keeps the interest of your fans alive. If the values for the first metric is constant and those for the second metric show an increasing trend, this indicates that, in time, existing fans tend to leave your side.

All this information helps you make an overall evaluation of your social media activity, and periodically monitor the effects of your communication decisions.

Conclusion

Personalization is the factor that brings the most dramatic change to the way SERPs look. Social signals being integrated in Google’s mechanisms to interpret the relevance of results makes it more and more difficult to measure the actual effect of high non-personalized rankings.

The way to approach this is by reaching a wider audience each day, with good quality content. After all, this is not so different from Google’s scope which is to provide searchers with the most relevant and trustworthy results.

Integrating the Social Media feature, Advanced Web Ranking helps you monitor your activity on the social media channels and evaluate your efforts, so you can further act upon them.

Take advanced of the 30 days free trial to see it in action.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article. I am looking forward to reading some of your user experience tips in the comments section below.

This is a nice theory, I’m sure you agree But it’s often hard to see it in action. Link data is difficult to manage, making link profiles assessment a real pain. That’s because most link building tools focus on gathering the information, and overlook the user experience. The data retrieved is presented in bulk sheets, with thousands of URLs and terms that don’t always make sense.

What if the link building management process was entirely in your hands? You could choose exactly what links you want to see, how you want to see them and how much you want to spend to retrieve this information. How about that?

With Advanced Web Ranking, we introduced a link building feature that helps you manage your profile with data retrieved directly from the SEOmoz Linkscape database.

Just think about it!

Powerful link information about you and your competitors is now at your fingertips, through a fully customizable process.

Let me explain how this works:

Link building data management in Advanced Web Ranking involves three main activities that require your attention:

1. Managing the information types retrieval
2. Managing the costs
3. Managing the updates frequency

And the best part is that everything is done in the same place – a centralized application dialog named Retrieving links options, that you can access from Project -> Websites -> SEOmoz Links button.

Managing the information types retrieval

I’m sure you know that link building data is not just about the actual URLs that point back to your website. There’s much more to a link that brings value for your profile.

With AWR, you can retrieve three types of link data:

• External links

This link information type contains the actual URL, its anchor text, the Page Rank and Page Authority, as well as the no follow and image type information. The data gathered according your preferences in the “Links” column refers to the metrics and anchor text of the URLs themselves, not to the domain or subdomain to which they belong.

• Anchor text distribution

With this type of information, you can see which are the terms that other websites use to link to the pages in your website, and how many links you have for each of these terms. The accuracy of this data is given by the fact that the number of anchor texts you choose to gather in the “Anchor text” column is related to your entire link building profile, not only to the external links that you have retrieved in the application.

• Link metrics

For each website that you have in your AWR project, for which you are gathering link information, you also get a full overview of the link metrics, the total number of external links and the external followed links. These details are also related to the total number of external links of the domains or subdomains in your project, for which you have gathered the link information.

For example, let’s say you have a website with a total number of 10,000 external links, but you want to see only the best 1,000 links back your website, and 250 anchor texts.

This means that in the Retrieving links options left panel you need to check your domain check box and select to gather 1,000 links and 250 anchor texts.

Your selection will tell the application to get from the SEOmoz database only the top 1,000 links pointing back to your website, the strongest 250 anchor texts out of the terms used in all your 10,000 backlinks and the link metrics for the domain you selected.

This way, you get full control on the quantity and quality of the link data you choose to retrieve.

Managing the costs

Gathering link information from the Linkscape database is done through a link credits mechanism. For each type of information retrieved, AWR consumes from the link credits that are available for your application license.

You can control the credits consumption in detail from the right side panel of the Retrieving links options“.

For the domain selected in this example, the application would gather 1,000 external links (for which it uses 1,000 link credits), 250 anchor texts (for these AWR uses another 250 link credits) and link metrics for the domain selected (for this information AWR will consumes 1 link credit). All together, the application would consume 1,251 link credits for the details gathered.

The good news is that each new AWR license comes with 2,000 free link credits, that you can use to start building your link profile. When the free credits are consumed, you can easily get new ones directly from our website, here. The newly purchased credits are then added to your AWR license key.

All the link credits transactions are kept in the SEOmoz History section, that you can access from the same dialog.

Managing the updates frequency

The Linkscape database is refreshed approximately once a month. SEOmoz’s Roger has a lot of work to do, parsing the internet for new link information . This means that, the first time you gather your links data in AWR, the information will be at the level of the last update in the Linkscape database. Future updates would have a monthly frequency.

There are two ways you can update your link information with AWR:

• Automatic updates

They are performed through scheduled tasks, that you can create with the help of the Scheduler wizard (just click on Scheduled tasks -> New). This type of update retrieves automatically the link information together with the other types of SEO data for the project in question.

The application will take into account your links preferences configured previously in the Retrieving links options. Thus, on each project update, it will search for fresh link data. If it finds new information, it will retrieve it and display it in the interactive and printable reports.

• Manual updates

Using the manual updates, you can update the link information separately from the other types of SEO details that you can retrieve with AWR. To gather links, just click on the small downwards arrow next to the Update button and select the Update Links option.

New link information will be gathered only after the SEOmoz database is refreshed, and only for the domains or subdomains that you have selected in the Retrieving links options.

What happens when the same domain is in two or more AWR projects?

Link credits are consumed for the link information retrieved per domain or subdomain. This means that, if you have the same website in different projects, you can see the links retrieved in all these projects, not only in the project from where the update was performed.

What happens if the website has less links than the number selected to be retrieved?

AWR will retrieve all links available in the SEOmoz links database and consume only the afferent number of credits. Thus, the credits consumed will be less than estimated.

For example, if you make a request for 1,000 links, but your domain has only 800 external links, the application will retrieve all the available links and consume only 800 credits.

What happens when more links are needed?

Simply run a new links update specifying the total number of links you actually need.

To continue with this example, if you gathered 1,000 links for your domain, and then decided that you actually need 1,500 links, just set the value in the “Links” column to 1,500 and run a new update.  The application will retrieve the next best 500 backlinks pointing to your website and will use only 500 new link credits. This way, you will have the information you need for 1,500 links. The same process applies to retrieving anchor text distribution details.

Displaying links information in Advanced Web Ranking

Now that you’ve seen how to manage the link data gathering process, let’s take a look at the reports where you can see it. There are two types of reports in the application where you can see the links details:

• Link building reports

These reports are in the Links menu. Here, you can see an overview of your SEOmoz link metrics compared to your competition, the best domains that link back to your website and also your anchor text distribution. You also get some good insights to the hub sites that link to your competitors. The data can be further sorted according to the Domain Authority or by the number of links.

• Hybrid reports

These are the SEO reports  where you can combine the link building data with analytics and ranking details. You can access the hybrid reports from the Rankings menu.

The data can be displayed both as a tabular report, in the Website Rankings – Date Comparison view, and as a chart, in the Overview – Evolution in Time view.

All these reports help you get an accurate view over your link profile and your competition. With every new update, the previous information is kept in the application database, so you can compare the data and see your evolution in time.

Link data management in Advanced Web Ranking & Advanced Link Manager

With the integration of the SEOmoz links in AWR, customers asked us if the link information managed here is the same as the information that you can retrieve with a SEOmoz key using the Advanced Link Manager link building tool.

The information is different, because each application uses a different SEOmoz API.

In ALM, the SEOmoz links information is taken with the free API, connecting through the user’s SEOmoz Pro account.  The number of links and metrics retrieved from this source is limited here, as mentioned on the SEOmoz website.

In AWR we have implemented the Site Intelligence API, which provides a more detailed analysis of link building details, with anchor text distribution data, and more link metrics.

It’d be interesting to learn your user experience in managing links information. How do you manage your link building strategy? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Photo credit: Kristian Vinkenes