esmoretti.com

Klout Score is Blind Luck At Best

2011-07-27T17:06:54Z

I’ve always thought that judging a person’s ability to be successful in Social media by their Klout score was misleading at best. There are a lot of different perspectives to evaluate this. The crux of the issue is what is that Klout score tied to. You could potentially have one candidate who has developed social media strategies for Fortune 500 companies, and generated millions of dollars in revenue that has the same Klout score as the candidate who has spent the last few months tweeting from their parents’ basement.

“Well the resume would make it obvious that Candidate A is the better choice.”

So why even look at a Klout score? Would you say, sure maybe Candidate A is awesome but they’re too pricey, so I’m going to go with basement candidate to save some coin. Absolutely not. The very idea is insane.

What Does Klout Score Even Measure?

Network Influence: This measures how much you interact with your “audience” – this apparently takes into account, Twitter mentions, Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, Facebook comments and LinkedIn recommendations. So, I get more or the same points for carrying on pointless conversations and sharing viral content than the people that create it? Again, how does this demonstrate my ability to achieve business goals by keeping up my conversations with random people?

Amplification Probability: Could there be something easier to game? I have several Twitter accounts for legitimate reasons, my personal account, blogs etc. I can easily reach out and get every Tweet, retweeted at least 5 times… every single time.

Quite simply, if I see a resume that brags about a Klout score all that tells me is that person knows how to abuse a system.

Only one case for having a high Klout score was put in front of me – gaining potential customers. If you’re a social media consultant, potential clients who don’t understand social media, but know they need it will be looking for any clue to evaluate hiring someone to do something they don’t know.

My advice to those people – is look for consultants who drive a real number, beyond Klout score and even beyond driving follower count. Look for consultants who drive business goals, like they increased social media traffic and sales to clients’ estores, or increases leads, etc. The downside to that is that you have to take their word for it – but at least it proves they understand business strategy which seperates them from the barista-turned-social-media-guru types.

While you can equate Klout score as a “Social Media Grade” it’s a moot point if you don’t understand the curriculum. I can claim to get an A – but it doesn’t tell you whether I got an A in 3rd grade PE or in Advanced Physics at MIT.

Google Testing New Search Engine Results Page?

2011-07-01T01:37:11Z

Google is testing a look for their search engine results page that includes not only a new layout but also how it displays snippet and url information.

Click to view fullsize

Here are some of the changes that I’ve noticed:

Black “User” Bar
Grayed “Search Area”
Different Style “Search” button
Low Color Search Options
URL Above Snippet

What are you noticing?

*Update* I emailed this to Barry Schwartz over at Rusty Brick, and it turns out that Google announced this on their blog yesterday afternoon. We’re still seeing variations so this appears to be rolling out to some users, and based on feedback Google will decide which things stay and go. I for one, don’t care for the URL over the description – but thats just me.

North Texas Polar Bears – or SEO for WordPress

2011-07-01T01:31:44Z

I gave a talk about SEO for WordPress at WordCamp Columbus earlier today. I had a blast and learned a great deal about other topics in WordPress as well.

The goal of this talk was to help the great content creators that use the WordPress platform to understand the basics of SEO. I covered where to put your keywords, how to find the right keywords to talk about and some of the great plug-ins to use for SEO.

In the Q&A, we covered a few advanced topics, like Socials impact on PageRank and what to do when content theives steal your content. Well, if your a small site like me, the best option you have to start with is trying to contact the content thieves. I promosed the audience a few links – one, file a DMCA complaint with Google. Let’s be honest though, it might be hard to get Google to respond to your small blog. So there are some things you can do to prevent it, like blocking known site scrapper bots. But you can also try to beat them at their own game – try optimizing a page on your site for their name or brand so that when people search for them, they see they’re sleazy. Don’t take down that page until they remove your content from their site.

If you want to know what other SEO’s are talking about, there’s also the Webmaster World Google Forums.

Here’s a slide show of my presentation. Thanks for all those who attended.

WordPress & SEO

View more presentations from emor8t.

How To Track Email in Google Analytics

2011-07-04T05:39:12Z

Actually, this is a way to really track anything but for applications sake I’d like to chose something you can’t get without some customization.

Step 1: Read SEOmoz’s Steps to Setting up Social Media Segmentation in Google Analytics. Yep, that SEOmoz the one that I still own you guys a part 2 and 3 of SEOmoz SEO Tools.

Step 2: Google’s URL Builder allows you to pass refferer data. So set the refferer in the tool like show below:

Step 3: MEASURE!

Ok, so you can’t track open rates directly. But now you can segment your visitors to find out how well your email campaigns are after they get to the site.

A Review of SEOmoz SEO Pro Tools Part 1

2011-07-04T05:35:55Z

SEOmoz is an industry leader in tools for SEO tools. They provide an extensive lists of tools that allow you diagnose, track and dig into your site’s SEO efforts. This is the first part of a three part series of posts. Here’s a list of tools SEOmoz provides:

Open Site Explorer
SEO Tool Bar
Trifecta
Competitive Link Research Tool*
Juicy Link Finder*
Historical PageRank Checker
Linkscape Visualization and Comparison*
Link Acquisition Assistant
SEOmoz API’s
Top 500
Keyword Difficulty*
Rank Tracker*
Term Extractor*
On-Page Optimizer*
Term Target
Crawl Test
Custom Crawl*
Spam Detection
Social Media Monitoring*
Blogscape*

* Pro Tools

Quite a list, huh? Well, some of these tools are free but to get access to the tools that provide the most information, or to run more than one report a day you need to be a premium member.

Let’s look at the free stuff first.

SEOmoz Open Site Explorer

The Open Site Explorer (OSE) provides a ton of data about the authority of a page and the links coming in to your site. This data includes, incoming URL’s, the anchor text, the page and domain authority of incoming links. Additionally, the OSE allows you to sort all of this data and export it to Excel. This is a great tool for moinotiring anchor text distribution, and I’ve talked before about why anchor text is important. This tool also highlights if the links are followed or no-followed – crucial data for SEO’s.

Why this tool is important:
The OSE really helps you understand one of the most vital parts of your SEO campaign(s) – your link structure. Analyzing your anchor text distribution against your competitors can help identify one reason why you’re not outranking your competitors.

SEOmoz SEO Toolbar

The SEO Toolbar is available for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox and displays link and domain metrics, highlights no-follows and will analyze the various elements of the page. However some features of this toolbar are only available to pro members, this includes the actually list of domain links.

Trifecta

The Trifecta, similarly to the OSE will measure the number of links to your page but it also mentions the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web and how much traffic the page receives. Traffic data is from Compete, Quantcast and Alexa. Trifecta scans various search engines and networks like Google, Yahoo!, Technorati and others to find mentions of blogs and brand names. The nice part about this tool is that it allows you to compare your site to competitors and spits out one metric that sums up the results as a graded score. Free members are allowed to run one report, but paid members can run multiple to unlimited reports depending on your level of membership.

Why this tool is important:
Trifecta helps you understand the total “web presence” of your site and brand. From a perspective as a consultant, this tool helps me show progress to clients in a simple metric. I personally hate touchy-feely metrics like this but when you’re trying to explain to clients who might not totally understand everything your saying but expect you to push the needle, this metric will allow you to show progress without getting into the nitty gritty.

Competitive Link Research Tool

Ah, we’ve reached our first “Pro Members Only” tool. The Competitive Link Research Tool. Part of the reason this tool is “pro” only is because it’s part of SEOmoz Labs – that is, tools that are in beta. This tool finds links that competitors have and checks to see if you have links from that domain as well.

Juicy Linkfinder

The Juicy Linkfinder tool is another “Pro” tool that enables you to find links with high PageRank for key terms you might be going after. This is a great tool for identify high PR web sites with relevant links but it’s not a link farming tool. So if you can manage to obtain links with this tool through legit means you’re good to go without worrying about being black listed by Google.

Why these tool are important:
Do I really need to explain the Competitive Research Tool and the Juicy Linkfinder tools are important to you? Link-juice baby. Who loves it?

Historical PageRank Checker

The name says it all – this simple tool can help you identify when problems occurred in a domain, or help you figure out the history of a new clients domain.

Click Here To Sign up for SEOmoz Pro Tools

How Good Are Interactive Agencies Own Sites?

2011-07-04T05:37:37Z

I’ve ranted a bit on how agencies can kill your SEO if you’re not careful. But how are they about everything else? An agencies website should be a shining example of its services. Why? Ask most people who have worked for an agency or work in an agency-like role in an organization – you don’t always get to do what you want for a client. On an agency website – they get to do what they want. So it better be good. What I’ve found by perusing “top agency lists” is that websites of these agencies are often pretty, but fail hard on everything else. Look, I like a pretty website just as much as the next person, but I need to be able to do two key things before I sign a big check to them, I need to find them, and I need to figure out how to use their website once I’m there.

Let’s look at once of the biggest names in the biz:

Crispin, Porter + Bogusky

http://www.cpbgroup.com/

Can I just say it? This website is disappointing from a “top notch company.”

Let’s start with the obvious – where’s the branding? I see all the companies they’ve done work for, but I don’t see there name. I don’t see what they do either. Do they just do video? Do they do branding? I’ve heard that this is a good company for “marketing” but do they do what I need? I see from their job postings they are looking for interactive, UX, lead, a mobile people but I don’t see what those people actually are contributing. Man, 5 minutes on this website and I’m already confused about what they do or how to contact them. Oh, wait, there it is, allll the way at the bottom is a link to contact them. Isn’t this one of the primary things I want to do when I visit an agency website – contact them?

But wait, I skipped the big question. How did I find them in the first place. Sure, you’ve probably heard of Crispin Porter and Bogusky before. I bet their website is crispinporter.com – nope. How about crispinporterbo..gusky.com? Bogusky… is that how you spell it? Doesn’t matter, its not them either. Let’s just Google it. Ok, hmm their title in SERP’s reads: CP+B | Advertising & Design Factory and they haven’t declared a meta description so Google is pulling tweets for their meta description and this just isn’t making any sense. I guess this is them so I’ll click it. Then I land on the home page again, that has no branding and no menu and I’m back to square one.

Ok, so maybe they aren’t an “interactive agency.” But I now know that they don’t know anything about usability, they don’t know how to do basic SEO stuff and I can’t use their website for anything. Is this a metaphor for working with them? NEXT!

Crispin, Porter & Bogusky: D

Let’s shoot for an actual interactive agency. Let’s pick what AdAge calls the #1 Interactive Agency:

Razorfish

http://www.razorfish.com/

Ok, a little odd. I feel like I should be going into seizures about now, but at least there is an identifiable menu with clear calls-to-action. I know what they offer, who they’ve done work for and I can figure out if they are what I need.

But how did I find them? Well, if I knew the brand the URL is obvious, and it works. If I wasn’t sure and Googled the brand name the result in the SERP makes sense, so that’s good. What if I didn’t know them though? Maybe I was just looking for an interactive agency. “Interactive Agency” isn’t in the title of their page, and according to Google it’s not even on the body of their home page. In fact, when looking at it with seo-browser.com, there’s really isn’t ANY content on the home page.

So close, but yet so far. Still, once I get there it’s a better experience than CP+B.

Razorfish: B

Ok, so AdAge did ok on that one, how about another from the list?

Digitas

http://www.digitas.com/

Oh dear. Mystery Meat navigation. This is awful. What do I do? Where am I? I’m not even going to touch the usability of this with a 10 foot pole. If you can’t see why websites like this are awful, I can’t help you.

But wait, there’s more. Looking at the source code in SEO Browser, we see that Digitas is providing content to search engines that it isn’t providing to viewers and that’s a really terrible way to trick Google. Just ask BMW Germany and Ricoh who did the exact same thing and got blacklisted by Google. It’s odd they would go through the trouble to “SEO” that portion of the site because they don’t bother to add keywords into the title tag or meta description. One could argue that they are providing content to meet Section 508 standards, which if that’s the case it might be easier to use their website with JAWS.

Digitas: F

The annoying part is that I could go on and on for many other agency sites. I can find at least another handful of sites that duplicate these exact same problems.

Link Farming Is Not Link Building

2010-10-21T00:49:43Z

I, and I think most people define link farming as the Black Hat cousin to link building. Link farming typically revolves around the purchasing or exchanging of links. Buying links, in no uncertain terms is not allowed by Google. But I’ll be damned if companies still don’t participate in it anyways.

First off, I’m not making things up, Google doesn’t really like link farming. What I’ve seen happen (to others, but not to me) is companies rank well for their target terms but eventually Google catches companies who use link farming services, and it costs them millions of dollars. Matt Cutts, chief of web spam for Google has even called out LinkExperts attempts to legitimize link buying. Even after LinkExperts changed to Conductor, it’s practices where still identified Black Hat.

Simply put, I don’t recommend buying links. Building a site to compete in a competitive arena takes a bit of time, and good content, relevant incoming links and other White Hat techniques are the way to go.

How do you build links naturally? With good content is one answer, but how to not build is to spam relevant blogs with comments trying to gain links. From my own personal example, I receive a ton of spam – most of which is caught by a filter. It’s mostly comments about insurance or free Viagra, but there are few known companies in these results, Aetna for one. I’ll never blog about insurance or free viagra. Which is important, because the only way to get a followed link from me, is for me to blog about it. My comments are all automatically no-followed. What those companies have accomplished is irritating me. I will never give a followed link to those companies. You might think I’m a small fry, but what if you engage in link farming for your company and spam relevant blogs with spam comments, how do you think those bloggers will react?

There Is No Metric "To Rule Them All"

2011-05-02T22:54:22Z

I’ve frequently found when discussing both SEO and PPC with clients or just general “non search marketers” that people tend to focus on one metric. People pick the weirdest things to chose as their “live and die” by metric. I’ve read forum posts by webmasters, who threw out entire sites if the bounce rate is higher than 30%. Some people who are happy because the conversion rate is 50% without looking at the rest of the data.

Unfortunately, this leads to conversation that is a string of “buts” that often start sounding like excuses or nit-picking. “Well, yes, your conversion rate is 50% but this page only had two visitors.” or “The site had 30,000 visitors this month, but the conversion rate was .02% and the average time on site was 30 seconds.” usually lead to statements like “But the conversion rate was 50%, I thought you said that was good?” or “But we had 30,000 visitors! That’s twice as much was we’ve ever had!”

As much as I’d like to let people believe something is great, we all know it will come back to bite us. Yes, a 50% conversion rate is off-the-charts awesome, but if I only sell to 1 person chances are my business will go bankrupt quickly. I’d much rather have a 10% conversion rate for 100 people than a 50% conversion rate for 2. Obsessing on improving conversion rate doesn’t mean success if you’re not taking other factors into consideration.

Conversely, if I have 30,000 visitors and only .01% convert then I know the people coming into the site aren’t getting what they need. This is somewhat tougher to diagnose. It could be a problem with the UI of a site. If people are only spending 30 seconds on a site, maybe they aren’t finding what they need easily enough, or maybe the keywords that are bringing people into your site aren’t quite on target.

Metrics are a balancing act. Paying attention to only one metric will not insure success. Great traffic numbers are important, but only if it’s the right traffic. Conversion rate is important, but only if the traffic is substantial. These are just two examples of being blinded by metric. Don’t get wrapped up in increasing one metric, get wrapped up in increasing success.

Bing Now Provides Organic Results for Yahoo!

2010-10-14T01:03:35Z

To understand why this is so monumental we need to go back, to just five short years ago. In 2005, Googles share of internet searches was a 36.9% but by 2007 it had sky rocketed to over 65%. Fast forward to today, when Googles share of internet searches is almost 66%. So what did the search landscape look like in 2005? Pretty segmented, Yahoo, Live, Ask.com and more took share from Google, sliding forward to 2007, Yahoo, Live, and Ask.com where slicing up a smaller share of search.

However, Bing (Live) now provides search results for Yahoo, effectively making them one search engine. Bing and Yahoo control 11% and 17.1% respectively, which means two search engines now control over 94% of search traffic. So the next time you’re on Yahoo! you should notice a very small “Powered by Bing” text at the bottom of the search results.

What does that mean for search marketers? Well, it means optimizing for Bing becomes a bit more worthwhile but it also means that for the first time in a few years Google has some healthy competition – so beware the algo change and new “features” coming out.

United Airlines Misses The Point of Social Media and Customer Service

2010-10-14T01:03:59Z

I don’t travel often so if my experiences are typical of air travel then I have a hard time imagining spending more time on air planes. My first “really?” moment came when one of the people traveling with me asked for a blanket and was informed “blankets are for first class passengers only.”

Seriously? Have the airlines gotten to the point where only first class passengers can have the gross, wash-cloth sized pieces of fabric they call blankets? But I digress because this really a small complaint in the big picture.

On the return trip we arrived to the airport to find our flight had been cancelled – color me a newb, we should have checked before we left the hotel. The kiosk informed us we could wait standby and because we had no hotel to return to we decided to wait and see. The United Airlines attendants, without saying a word checked our bags and took them. At this point we had no idea why our flight was even canceled and now we have to get a ride out of here today or we’d have no clothes – travel newb tip #2, change of clothes in the carry-on.

We waited 3 hours for the next stand by flight and missed that, then the next one because even then we were still 20 deep on the waitlist. Ok, my patience is gone. There are no United Airlines agents to be found, once the flight departs they scurry away and when the next flight is loading they are way to busy to talk to you. So I breakout the smartphone and find the customer service phone number for United Airlines. 100% automated – but hey if you have a complaint you can fill out a form on their website and get a response in… 5 days. Look, all I wanted to know was what my options are and if there any way possible to get home. I don’t want frequent flyer miles, I don’t want comps and benny’s – I just want to go home.

So I find United Airlines on twitter. “Awesome” I think, I’m going to make this social media thing work for me.

Here’s how my twitter conversation with United Airlines went:

The answer I got was a canned response from the website. I’ve been to the website, I can’t find an agent and to get back to the ticket counter I’d have to go through security again. After seeing how unhelpful those agents were, I was reluctant to do that for fear of the time it would take myself and others to get back to the terminal.

I called a relative who was previously a flight attendant for several years who informed me of the dirty secrets of what to do when you flight gets canceled. One – they have to tell you why your flight was canceled and if it’s their fault, they pay. In our case it was a mechanical issue, so it’s United Airlines fault. My options in this case are at a minimum, United Airlines covers my hotel costs for the night I have to stay over, they put me on another airline, or get my close to my destination and rent a car.

Finally I get a United Airlines person and start hashing out a deal. In this case I opt’d to be transfered to another airline, US Airways. US Airways was able to get all three people booked on a flight and even two of us had window seats. Plus, the same plane on US Airways had better padded seats and what felt like more room. The only downside to this was US Airways doesn’t show inflight movies and you still have to rent headphones if they do. Find by me, I have my own movies and headphones and now I’m on my way home on a shorter flight to boot. After 8 hours in an airport I will take it.

United Airlines incompetency did manage to bite us one more time. When we landed at 1:30am their baggage department had checked out, which was a major inconvenience for one person who needed their luggage for the next day. US Airways saved the day, again, by still having a baggage department open (well, most major airlines still did… United Airlines was once again the exception) and the US Airways baggage personal took out information and baggage tickets to grab the luggage from United Airlines and sent someone out with our luggage 8 hours later.

Here’s what United Airlines needs to understand:

Social Media needs to do more than just regurgitate information on your website. Twitter is on the internet – when people need help they’ll visit the web page, they come to Twitter to address concerns immediately and “talk to a person” – after all, it’s about the conversation or so they say.
Finish what you start – you can’t respond to everyone on Twitter but when you start to help someone make sure they actually get what they started talking to you about. Don’t stop answering someone just because you don’t have a canned response
Can I get a live person – either a hotline or someone at the kiosk, just like every other major corporation
Blankets are first class only? Really? There where 3 rows of first class seats on this flight. I can understand carrying less blankets and running out. But restricting blankets to first class as a policy is just ridiculous.
Staff your baggage departments the same hours as everyone else

You can claim these measures are cost cutting and providing a “better value” for your customer – but I know the next time I fly, it won’t be with United Airlines.

esmoretti.com

Klout Score is Blind Luck At Best

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Click Here To Sign up for SEOmoz Pro Tools

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How Good Are Interactive Agencies Own Sites?

Crispin, Porter & Bogusky: D

Razorfish: B

Digitas: F

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Link Farming Is Not Link Building

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