Thanks to the Internet and search algorithms, people have learned to express their informational need in the form of keyword queries. Keywords can be easily called the major concept of the global theory of search optimisation because they are the point to start out any web search.

Undoubtedly, one of the main tasks of SEO specialist is to create a competent list of keywords for the promoted web-site. Below you can find the stages that you should pass selecting proper keywords. Fulfilling these points you can decrease expenses for further works in website promotion and to increase the success of advertising campaign. So, what are these stages? See our infographic below.

See the embed code for this infographic at Promodo.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/cZg1UUQkdbk/

Howdy Mozzers,

My name is Anthony and I’m from Fargo, ND. First-time YouMozzer here. After reading this post, I hope you (in?)voluntarily scroll back up to the top to follow me on twitter (@anthonydnelson) and check out my blog Northside SEO.

Today’s post is about broken link building. It’s been a popular topic in the industry, but I also noticed that SEOmoz didn’t have a lot on the subject, so I thought it would be nice to write a kick-ass piece for the large SEOmoz community. Now, on to the post.

Broken [broh-kuhn] adjective: not functioning properly; out of working order

Link [lingk] noun: anything serving to connect one part or thing with another

Building [bil-ding] verb (used with object): to construct (especially something complex) by assembling and joining parts

Definitions taken from dictionary.com.

Broken Link Building [lingk bil-ding gohld] verb: the act of acquiring a link to your website by pointing out a broken link on someone else’s website

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken link building (sometimes called dead link building) is a technique that involves pointing out a link on another website that is no longer working and also asking for a link to your website. Often the broken link leads to a 404 page. The link will be on a page that is relevant to your niche and appears to be a good fit for inclusion of your site. You perform a solid by pointing out the broken link to the webmaster and in return, suggest that your link be added or be used as a replacement.

Why has Broken Link Building been so Popular Lately?

1. SEOs feel like they are making the web a better place. They are helping webmaster’s deal with the problem of link rot. SEOs care about the quality of the web. The fewer broken links, the better.
2. It gives the link builder an easy value add to their email. You are helping them out, before asking them to help you out.
3. It can result in quick links. When broken link building emails are successful, you usually get your link within a day or two of sending the email. Much quicker then allowing a site owner to try and review a product or spending time making a connection and pitching a guest blog post.
4. It’s a relatively new technique that has already yielded good results for numerous link builders.

Broken Link Building Required Tools:

1. A website that doesn’t suck (no one is going to link to your crappy site, even if you point out a broken link)
2. Google Chrome with Check My Links Extension or Domain Hunter+ (Domain Hunter+ was recently featured on YouMoz)
3. Open Site Explorer: Limited use for everyone if you register for a free account at SEOmoz

Additional Tools for Increase Efficiency:

1. Xenu Link Sleuth (unless you’re really cool like me and use a Mac)
2. Screaming Frog
3. W3C’s Link Checker
4. Gmail plugins Rapporative and Boomerang
5. Canned Responses in Gmail or saving stationary templates in Mac mail are major time saving wins

How to Find Broken Links

1. Use the Check My Links Extension on any webpage you happen to visit and cross your fingers.
2. Check Top Pages tab in OSE for any competitor or site in your niche and look for 404 pages with external links pointing at them in the Top Pages tab.
3. Use search operators in Google to find relevant sites (my examples just below). This should result in hundreds of sites with lists of links specific to your industry. Switch your search settings to display the top 100 results and export them to a CSV using the MozBar’s SERP Control Panel. Sort by Page Authority or Domain Authority and you’re good to go. Find more useful link building search operaters or advanced search queries on Himanshu’s site. Visit the sites and run a link checker extension. 
   1. intitle:KEYWORD inurl:links -exchange
   2. intitle:KEYWORD inurl:resources
   3. inurl:links KEYWORD -
4. Add exported lists of links to Xenu/Screaming Frog to find 404 pages and easily run them through OSE. Alternatively, you can run a single page through to easily find the status codes of its outbound links.
5. Run a website through W3C’s Link Checker to find broken links
6. When you find a broken link, run that link through OSE to determine who else is linking to it. You may find 5-10 other good link prospects from a single broken link.
7. Export numerous competitor’s followed back link profiles in OSE. Combine results. Filter for URLs containing Link, Directory, Where to Buy, Resources or whatever words fit your industry. Sort sites by PA/DA, visit, run link checker, email.

Determining Link Target Quality

After you find a page with some broken links on it, you have to decide if it’s worth your time sending an email and asking for a link.

But there are too many broken links!

It’s a bit of a road block to run into a page with decent authority only to realize that it contains a ton of broken links. When you find a page with too many broken links on it (10+), you have a few options.

1. Decide the page is low-quality and choose not to contact them.
2. Send an email pointing out two or three of them and pretend that you don’t know about the rest.
3. Point out all 10+ broken links and risk overwhelming them to the point that they decide not to update the page at all or completely delete it.

It’s totally up to you to decide what is right for you and the site you are building links for. Personally, I’ve gone with all of the techniques above. Often times, it doesn’t matter what you decide on because you may not hear back from them at all.

Finding a Website Owner’s Contact Information

• Look for their email address on the contact page, about page or footer of the website
• Google site:DOMAIN.COM email
• Google site:DOMAIN.COM @DOMAIN.COM gmail.com hotmail.com yahoo.com msn.com live.com
• Look for their Twitter handle. A great casual way to introduce yourself
• Check WhoIs
• Look for a contact form on their website
• Citation Labs The Contact Finder if you are working with a large list

Stalk them to the best of your ability. It’s OK if they feel a little uncomfortable that you found them through their sister’s Twitter account. No contact, no link.

Broken Link Building Email Templates

Now that you know what broken link building is and how to find websites to target, let’s get on to email outreach. I’m going to show you five email templates I use which will hopefully help you start your own successful broken link building campaign. Each template is slightly tailored for a different type of website or client. You may find that one of them works best for you, or you may find that you hopping back and forth between styles will give you the best results depending on your client, the niche or the targeted site for link acquisition.

Broken Link Building Email Template #1 – Quick and Dirty

Subject Line: (DOMAIN.COM) question

Hey (WEBSITE OWNER FIRST NAME),

Are you still updating (DOMAIN.COM)? I found a broken link I’d like to point out.

-(YOUR FIRST NAME)

Who to Send it to: Perfect for use on websites that look like they were made in the 90′s and seem as if they are no longer being updated. Also good for sites that are questionable in quality. Don’t waste too much time with on an email for a site you don’t expect to reply.

Why it Works: This short and sweet email has one of the highest response rates of any of the templates I use. It comes off as genuine and helpful and leads with a strong question that illicits a response from all webmasters who are actually updating their website. When they reply, simply follow-up by sharing the page and the broken link as well as suggesting your website and explaining the fit and value it offers to that page.

Broken Link Building Template #2 – The Pressure is On Them

Subject Line: (DOMAIN.COM) broken link

Who to Send it to: Any website that has a list of links or resources (with a broken link) that you think is a good fit for your site.

Why it Works: You come clean immediately in the email explaining that you want a link. The webmaster might feel the need to include your link in order to find out what links on their site are broken. No webmaster will email you back and say, “No, I won’t link to you. Now please show me the broken links.” You get a link or they are on their own.

Broken Link Building Template #3 – In and Out

Who Should Use This Template: Any link builder that doesn’t have time to follow up. This is a one and done send.

Subject Line: (FIRST NAME), (DOMAIN.COM) broken links

Hey (WEBSITE OWNER FIRST NAME),

Who to Send it to: Any website that has a list of links or resources (with a broken link) that you think is a good fit for your site.

Why it Works: When you nominate two unaffiliated websites for inclusion on the webmasters list of links, they will simply think you are trying to help them. You want to point out some broken links and also give them some additional sites to consider. Make sure the alternate suggested site is not a competitor to your site.

Broken Link Building Template #4 – Brand Power

Who Should Use This Template: Link builders (consultants or in-house) who work for a semi-recognizable brand name in their particular industry.

Subject Line: (SITE OWNER FIRST NAME), (DOMAIN.COM) broken link

Hey (WEBSITE OWNER FIRST NAME),

My name is (YOUR FIRST NAME) and I wanted to let you know I really liked your post about (TOPIC OF A BLOG POST – NOT EXACT TITLE AND NOT THE MOST RECENT ONE). The part I particularly enjoyed was the part about (QUOTE FROM THEIR POST).

I work at (COMPANY NAME) and after being in the INDUSTRY/NICHE field for a few years, I’ve become really passionate about INDUSTRY/NICHE and I’m happy to have found your site.

When I was looking at your (DESCRIPTION OF PAGE WITH BROKEN LINK) page, I noticed that one of the links was broken. The link labeled (BROKEN LINK ANCHOR TEXT) isn’t currently working. (OPTIONAL: DO YOU KNOW WHERE THAT LINK IS SUPPOSED TO GO?)

Also, I hope you would consider adding our website (WWW.YOURSITE.COM) as an additional (RESOURCE/RECOMMENDATION/ALTERNATIVE) to your great (DESCRIPTION OF PAGE WITH BROKEN LINK) page. We’d be honored to be included on your site and I think the link would provide great value to your visitors due to our (BRAND UNIQUE SELLING POINT).

Have a nice (DAY/NIGHT).

I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

-(YOUR FULL NAME)

-(COMPANY NAME)

Who to Send it to: Any website that has a list of links or resources (with a broken link) that you think is a good fit for your site.

Why it Works: The website owner is flattered by having someone from a recognizable brand contact them with complements about their site. On top of that, they are grateful for you pointing out the broken links. How could they not give you a link?

Broken Link Building Template #5 – Zen Master Link Builder

The fifth template is essentially using no template at all. The Zen Master Link Builder builds a relationship before asking for a favor and the placement of a link. I’ll outline the basic process below.

1. Comment on one the website’s blog post. Make sure it’s thoughtful and genuine.
2. Send first email with complement and question about a post of theirs or the niche they are in.
3. After they reply, you email back kindly thanking them. Consider repeating steps two and three if the conversation goes that way.
4. Follow them on twitter. Casually tweet at them or about their content to remain on their radar.
5. Email again to point out the broken link as an FYI. Mention your website as a replacement or addition to the page.

Who to Send it to: Ideally everyone. Realistically, use this technique on high quality websites. Sites where links are hard to come by.

Why it Works: You’ve shown that you care and connected with the website owner on a personal level first. The website owner should be grateful for your support (comments, tweets, emails) and will most likely happily add your link to the page in question.

Note: The Zen Master approach is the best approach to take for all link building outreach. It is definitely not exclusive to broken link building. The ultimate hang-up comes to the overall time and resources required to execute.

Outreach Email Link Building Tips:

• Send emails one at a time. From you, to them. Be real and try to offer as much value as possible.
• Don’t use full URLs or hyperlinks in your actual email. This increases the chance your email lands in the spam folder.
• Find the website owner’s email address and real name. Cyber stalk them to get it. Google them, find their twitter and check WHOIS.
• The email templates above will work even better if you personalize them more. Show some personality. Being unique and odd can be more effective than professional and stale. Be a person, not a canned response, even if you start your post from one.
• Use a woman’s name.
• End emails with a question or a sentence that implies they need to respond to you.
• Always double check and proof your email. Using templates can be dangerous if you’re not careful. Make sure it is personalized to the right website.
• If you do make a mistake in sending a templated email, come clean and do this.
• Hustle. You will never get a link for an email you don’t send.

Pro Broken Link Building Outreach Tip

• If the website has a phone number, call it. A real conversation will monumentally increase your chance at landing a link. Admittedly, I still send emails 99% of the time.

301 Redirect Broken Link Building – Double Dipping

Sometimes the link you point out in your outreach email doesn’t even have to be broken to get the webmaster to take action and change the page. I’ve had success pointing out links that 301 to a different site. Simply put, if you tell a site owner that they are trying to link to domainA.com and the result is a link to domainB.com they are often willing to remove that link. The benefit of this can be great.

Study your competitors’ external backlink profile and find the urls of other websites that are 301ing back to them.

Example: DOMAIN1.com is redirecting to COMPETITOR.com.

Contact the sites who are linking to DOMAIN1.com and explain to them they are not linking to the site they were once intending to. Be sure to offer your website as an additional resource.

The end result: Your competitor loses a link and you gain one. Double win.

This technique will not work for links where the redirect clearly goes to the same company/website at a different URL. This technique works best when combined with an email pointing out a few broken links. “These links are broken and this one doesn’t go to the right spot…”

Link Exchanges and Directories

Pointing out broken links is often enough to get you listed in a paid directory or on a site that is requesting link exchanges for submission. Of course, this only means something if you find a paid directory you actually want to be listed in or a site that exchanges links in a non-spammy way.

Content Recreation

Sometimes in the hunt for broken links, you’ll find a 404 page that has 5-20 external links pointing at it. Some of them are juicy links. Links that you want. Bad. The problem is, your site doesn’t contain a direct replacement for the 404′d content. Here is how you can get them.

Even though your site is in the same niche, your site didn’t originally publish the results from that study in 2005 that was referenced so many times and no longer exists. You need to recreate the content. The first step is to put the broken link into the Wayback Machine to find out what the content originally was. Recreate the content for your site. If possible, feel free to repurpose it a bit to fit your branding and style.

Once you have created the similar content, contact the webmasters with the broken link pointing at the now non-existent content and gently nudge them towards your new piece. The exact piece they were looking for.

This technique takes a lot of time and effort but can definitely pay dividends. It is already established that the content you are creating is link worthy in the eyes of multiple webmasters.

18 Additional Broken Link Building Resources

1. 40 Broken Link Building Resources by Garrett French on Citation Labs
2. Broken Link Building In Action by Nick LeRoy on nickleroy.com
3. A Tactical Guide to Broken Link Building by Cleo Kirkland on ROI Factor Blog
4. The Reciprocity Link Building Method by Melanie Nathan on Search Engine People
5. Easy Link Building with Your Competitors’ 404 Errors by Fabio Ricotta on Ontolo
6. Need Links? Make Up For Your Competitors Shortcomings by Napoleon Suarez on SEER Interactive Blog
7. 5 Creative Broken Link Building Strategies by Jon Cooper on Point Blank SEO
8. Broken Link Building for Content Promotion by Garrett French on Search Engine Watch
9. Check My Links Chrome Extension – A Link Builder’s Dream by Jon Cooper on SEOmoz
10. Broken Link Building – A Case Study by Ben Jackson on SEO ROI
11. Broken Link Building: Feast On Your Competitors This Thanksgiving by Napoleon Suarez on SEER Interactive Blog
12. Fixing the Web’s Lost Content: An 8 Step Guide for Link Builders by Jeremy Bencken on Search Engine Watch
13. 15 Questions with Nick LeRoy on Broken Link Building by Garrett French on Citation Labs
14. Broken Link Building: How Napoleon Suarez Gets 8-12% Conversions by Garrett French on Citation Labs
15. Broken Link Building Tips: an Interview with Melanie Nathan by Garrett French on Citation Labs
16. Busted Links as Reason for Link Request by Wheel on Webmaster World Forum
17. Improving Corrective Value-Adds in Link Request E-mails by Ross Hudgens on rosshudgens.com
18. Broken link building with Raven’s Link Manager and local directories by Eric Scism on Raven Blog

If you know of a great broken link building resource that I am missing, please post it in the comments and maybe one of the mozzers or I (not sure how this YouMoz editing will work) will be able to add it to the list.

Noob to Novice

I gave this post the title from Noob to Novice because reading blog posts is not going to make you an expert or advanced link builder. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty. Send emails. Send a lot of emails. Try different techniques. Test and record. Broken link building is still a technique that is in its infancy and there is a lot of room for us all to improve and refine our techniques.

I still consider myself a novice link builder. There is so much to learn and the game is always changing.

Broken link building or any outreach based link building campaign is never going to compete with someone who creates link worthy content. Content that will continue to build links on it’s own. Content that will build links on the weekends when they’re not working.

Be sure to drop a comment and let everyone know about your broken link building successes or failures. It is still a relatively new technique and we can all learn from sharing. Don’t be shy on giving this post a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Feedback is needed to grow.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/L3k9-B4DaGI/broken-link-building-guide-from-noob-to-novice

If you’re an SEO who’s still fumbling with the latest version of Google Analytics (version 5), fumble no more.  Here is a quick overview of 3 features you should know to help make your job easier.  These tips will also help you keep demonstrating the importance of your laborious SEO efforts and make you look smarter too.

This is part II of a three part series.  In part I of this Google analytics 5 series, I discussed keyword reports and reviewed some differences in where things are now located.  Here, I’ll go over my top 3 features for goal setting.  In part three we’ll get extremely geeky and go over a few custom reports you’ll want to save for your SEO reporting needs.   Bookmark this and come back to it to!  Ready to roll up your sleeves?  Grab a cup of Joe, and let’s go.

1) Customize Your Dashboard with SEO Widgets

One of the sexiest features about Google Analytics 5 is the ability for you to modify the dashboard you are used to seeing once you access your specific profile.  You can drag and drop certain widgets to organize your metrics in a way that is meaningful to you and have the data display as a metric, pie chart, timeline, or table format.  This allows you to see important metrics at a glance.  I’ve used this awesome feature to create separate dashboards for e-commerce, events, and SEO.

How to Add an SEO Widget for Your SEO Dashboard

Let’s start by creating a widget for top branded vs. non-branded keywords.

1. Go to the “home” tab on the orange top navigation bar.  Go to the left navigation and click on “New Dashboard.”
2. You will be presented with the option to create a blank canvas or a starter dashboard and provide a title for your dashboard.  Title your dashboard “SEO Dashboard,” and click on “Blank Canvas.”
3. You will then see the “Add a Widget” box.  You can again, add a metric, a pie chart, timeline, or table.  Now, we’ll add a “table.”
4. The next step is to add a dimension.  Dimensions are visitor characteristics and are the kinds of things you would see in the rows of a Google Analytics report. Dimensions are highlighted in green.  Choose “keywords” as your dimension.
5. Click on the arrow and begin typing “keyword.” Google Analytics will auto-populate with the dimension, and you can either finish typing or click on the dimension “keyword” to fill the box.
6. Your metrics are numbers and are represented by the color light blue.  Here we will add “Visits” and “% New Visits.”
7. We will then keep the “show a table with” 10 rows (the max number of rows for any widget).
8. To filter your keywords by “branded,” enter you main branded keywords by clicking on the “add a filter” hyperlink.  You will see “only show” and “don’t show.” Since we want branded keywords, we will select “only show” our branded keyword of choice by selecting “containing” your branded term.  You can repeat this for any other branded keywords.
9. Name Your Widget “Top Branded Keywords.”
10. When you are done adding your filters, name your widget.
11. Now you can hit save and see your pretty new widget on your snazzy SEO Dashboard.

Analytics FYI: You can also link this report to one of your standard reports.  However, linking to the report will not keep any of your filters you set in your widget; it will just send you to the unfiltered standard report for easy reference.

Once your widget has been created, you can easily go to that specific report by clicking the box at the top right of your widget to access that report.  To link this widget to a report, simply start typing your report name.  In this case, we will link to the “Traffic Sources / Sources / Search / Organic” report.

An Example Customized Google Analytics Widget for Your New SEO Dashboard

You don’t have to link all of your widgets to its report, by the way, but it is a nice option.

You can repeat this process for non-branded keywords by simply selecting “don’t show” your branded search terms.

SEO Tip: You may want to include a filter to exclude keywords under “not set” and “not provided.”

Analytics Quick Tip: An alternate way to create a widget for your SEO dashboard is to go to a your standard keywords report and filter the data accordingly (as I demonstrated in part one of this Google analytics 5 series) then clicking on “Add to Dashboard.”  If you do it this way, your report will automatically be linked to the keyword report.

Yeah, yeah.  Now I hear you saying, “Dali, if that was the easy way why didn’t you say so in the first place? “ Well you must know the manual way to get things done if Google Analytics if you want to be a true SEO/analytics geek.

SEO Dashboard FYI: You can only add keyword report widgets from the Traffic Sources – Sources – Search – Organic keyword report and not the reports with Google Webmaster tools data located at Traffic Sources – Search Engine Optimization – Queries (or Landing Pages).  Dear Google Analytics, that would be a nice additional feature for the next update!

Other Ideas to Add Spice to Your New Sexy SEO Dashboard

• Add line charts to show your organic search visit trends
• Add a metric widget telling you your average page speed
• Add a pie chart featuring your top sources / mediums
• Add any specific goals you have added into your Google Analytics profile related to SEO to tie your dashboard with outcomes and conversions

Imagine the look on your boss or clients face when you are able to show them your SEO Dashboard!

In all, you can create up to 20 dashboards, and each dashboard can contain up to 12 widgets.  What’s sweeter is that you can add any of your specific custom reports to your dashboard as a widget too.   Don’t you love me… um, I mean the new analytics now?

2) Set up Custom Alerts to Inform you When a Specific SEO Goal Has Been Met

Wouldn’t you like to know right when a goal has been hit?

Under your “Home” tab you will find a left navigation menu item named “Intelligence Events.”  This is where Google Analytics monitors any significant variations in your website’s traffic and will automatically generate alerts when they occur.

Custom alerts were a beta feature prior to Google Analytics Version 5.  However, it is now out of beta.  You can set all kinds of cool analytic geek alerts.

For instance, you, upper management, or your client may be obsessed about the performance of one keyword, and may want to know exactly when you hit a goal you’ve set out to achieve.

Below are two examples of custom alerts you can create for your SEO goals.

– How to Create Custom Alerts for SEO Goals

1. You can create custom alerts by clicking on the “home” navigation menu and then selecting “intelligence events.”  You can view any interesting statistical variations in your Google Analytics profile by day, week, or month.  Select whichever you want.
2. In the middle of the screen you will see the specific date or date range and then blue links on the far right to “create a custom alert” or manage an existing custom alert.  Click “create a custom alert”

– One Custom Alert Monitoring an Increase in Visits for a variation of keywords

Once created, you will find that your custom alert will also be found (and could be edited) by clicking on your settings gear icon on the far right and clicking on “assets.”

Google Analytics Geek Tip: If you have added any custom/advanced segments in your profile, those will be available for you to choose from when creating your alert.

Google Analytics Ice Cream with a Cherry on Top: You can request the alert be sent to you by email and even mobile phone when it is triggered.  Yes!

And of course, you can create custom alerts to for AdWords and ecommerce conversions.  Woo!

A list of your custom alerts will be found under your settings (again, click the gear icon on the far top right) and under “assets.”

3) Get Deeper Insights into your SEO Conversion Process with Multi-Channel Funnels

The Multi-Channel Funnels reports show you how your traffic sources work together harmoniously to create sales and conversions.

You will see:

• How many steps assisted in those conversions (conversion paths)
• The number of conversions from each path
• The value of the conversions

Before this feature, you only could only tell that a visitor converted from one specific source (the one right before the conversion took place).

This is pretty exciting because you can see if you have any conversion patterns that may help you focus on a type of marketing you may not have been focused on i.e. (social media).

Additionally, you can create a channel grouping to see if a specific pattern is contributing to your conversions.  If so, you know your marketing strategy is right on the money! Oh my word!

Here is an example of a customized Channel Grouping that involves non-branded keywords via organic search and twitter traffic!

Like all reports, you can filter.  Below I’ve filtered out all of the channel groupings that include social. (click image to expand)

Ooh la la la! This may finally help prove the value of your social media marketing efforts (especially if you report to upper management or clients who are afraid of engaging in social marketing)!

SEO Dashboards, Custom Alerts, and Channel Groupings will keep you on task; make your job easier, and help you look like an SEO web analytics genius.  Stay tuned for more on custom reports in The SEO’s Guide to Google Analytics 5 part III.

What do you think about these features, and how do you plan to use these tips to expand your SEO/analytics skills?

Any other super geeky nuances you’d like to share about Google Analytics version 5?  I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/BqOKigZmlcc/

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

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

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

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

Absolute and relative authority links explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule 2: Fix other people’s broken links

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

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

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

You can easily solve this in 2 ways:

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

Drop link into sub form:

Choose your options:

Click “done” and then wait 644.47 seconds:

You can then work your way through the status report:

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

Rule 3: Create a desirable image library

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

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

Or freepixels.com:

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

Here’s what you have to do, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule 5: Go to where your target audience hangs out

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

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

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

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

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

Rule 6: Fill gaps in content

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

Whatever it is, offer to create it for them.

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

Rule 7: Contact big media at the right time

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

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

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

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

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

8. Approach government or education sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Buy links without penalty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/rMTP9jlYLPw/the-10-golden-rules-to-attracting-authority-links

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

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

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

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

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

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

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

The Impression That I Get

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

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

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

If You Ain’t First Page, You’re Last

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

The More You Know

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

Mo Money Mo Metrics

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

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

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

One Report To Rule Them All

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

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

The master report.

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

Pivotal Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

The final product.

Conclusion

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

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

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/xdY75HrxZJo/how-to-build-an-advanced-keyword-analysis-report-in-excel

Updating as this plays out with deeper analysis and links…

Just a few moments ago, Facebook officially filed an S-1  for an initial public offering seeking to raise $5 billion. Here are a few key findings…

- 845 million monthly active users, year over year growth of 39%

- 483 million daily active users as of December, year over year growth of 48%

- 425 million monthly mobile users

- 100 billion friend connections as of December 31, 2011

- 2.7 billion Likes and comments per day during the last quarter of 2011

- $1 billion in profits in 2011

- $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, soaring 88% between 2010 – 2011

- Profits grew 65% from $606 million in 2010

- Zynga makes up 12% of overall Facebook revenue

- Google posted $961.8 million in revenue and $105.6 million in profit when it initially went public…Facebook’s profits are nearly 10x heading into its IPO

- Facebook 2011 profits were 1.6x that of Amazon, which posted a 45% drop in net income between 2010 and 2011 at $631 million

For press seeking analyst commentary, please contact Altimeter Group at 650-212-2282 or via email.

UPDATE 1: The Hacker Way

Really appreciate the culture of Facebook as mentioned in the S-1 under the heading “The Hacker Way.” Here’s an excerpt:

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

UPDATE 2: Risks

As a matter of disclosure, Facebook must release risks to caution investors against buying blindly. Here is the full list as pulled from the S-1. I share it here with you to learn from Facebook’s diligence in constant innovation or as they say “shipping.” It’s a healthy form of inspiration to always compete for the moment and for relevance over time.

1. users increasingly engage with competing products;

2. we fail to introduce new and improved products or if we introduce new products or services that are not favorably received;

3. we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;

4. we are unable to continue to develop products for mobile devices that users find engaging, that work with a variety of mobile operating systems and networks, and that achieve a high level of market acceptance;

5. there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;

6. we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;

7. there are adverse changes in our products that are mandated by legislation, regulatory authorities, or litigation, including settlements or consent decrees;

8. technical or other problems prevent us from delivering our products in a rapid and reliable manner or otherwise affect the user experience;

9. we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;

10. we fail to provide adequate customer service to users, developers, or advertisers;

11. we, our Platform developers, or other companies in our industry are the subject of adverse media reports or other negative publicity; or

12. our current or future products, such as the Facebook Platform, reduce user activity on Facebook by making it easier for our users to interact and share on third-party websites.

UPDATE 3: Facebook’s Friends or Who Owns Facebook

Ken Yeung over at bub.blicio.us found this interesting graphic complied by Learnvest based on data published by The WSJ and The Guardian. It’s a visual look at the distribution of Facebook stock. Some interesting pre-trading numbers reveal just how big this IPO is worth to the market, employees, investors, and partners.

UPDATE 4: A Letter from Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg urges understanding before investment. This is an approach that conditions investors for a long-term play rather than a quick and profitable turn. As important, is the focus on culture and values. Facebook invests emotion and aspiration in its mission and purpose, something I think more companies should consider to effectively connect with the human network (you and me).

Here are some highlights…

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

Zuckerberg believes that personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society

Facebook’s 5 core principles are 1) Focus on impact, 2) Move Fast, 3) Be Bold, 4) Be Open, and 5) Build Social Value.

The Facebook team is inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information.

Facebook hopes to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even though Facebook’s mission sounds big, the company is focusing on starting small — with the relationship between two people.

Facebook is building tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

Facebook has already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections with a goal of accelerating this “rewiring.”

Facebook seeks to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

The company believes a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

Facebook observes that as people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. As a result, the global social network strives to makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

This quote by Zuckerberg really captures the spirit of Facebook’s mission, “Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

More data available at SEC.gov.

Connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ | Pinterest

Order The End of Business as Usual today…

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/socialmediatoday_allposts/~3/CjWAaSmXTIw/facebook-files-s-1-5-billion-ipo-revealing-stats-revenue

“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”

Johanna’s voice showed a trace of irritation.  “All I’m asking is how much you charge for SEO services!”

I smiled. This was familiar terrain. As an SEO consultant, almost every client asks me a similar question. My answer is always the same.

“It depends. On many things. Because SEO is not a turn-key solution you plug in to play.”

“Wait.  You’re an expert – and you can’t tell me what you’ll charge?!”

That’s when I explain why and when SEO matters, and the dynamic process of fixing my price for SEO consulting.

Broadly speaking, here’s what I share – and 3 analogies I use to make it easier to understand – buying a car, an iceberg or a dam!

Why SEO Matters

Every client likes to save money while getting great results from search engine optimization. But by always looking to save money on SEO, you’ll take your eye off the more important issue of intelligently allocating your marketing budget across various tactics, of which, SEO is often the most cost effective.

SEO isn’t simple or easy. Google itself rates websites based on over 200 ranking criteria – and keeps tweaking the algorithm constantly, up to 600 times in a year.

So if an ‘expert’ takes one look at your site and quotes you a “complete price” for SEO, run for the hills (or at least exercise extreme caution). Sure, they may fix some glaring weaknesses, or help you pick the low hanging fruit – but deep and lasting SEO is about a lot more than that.

Simple ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’ packages don’t work for SEO. SEO isn’t something you install or plug in to your website. It’s not a ‘one-time’ operation. Good SEO is a process. Research and planning are critical components of it.

That’s why no SEO consultant can make an off-hand estimate, or set a ‘price per site’ for their services. Everything depends upon your goals and targets, the nature of your business, your audience, and more.

There’s good reason why, as a client, you shouldn’t focus on the cost alone. It’s better to concentrate on the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your business such as the cost per acquisition, profit per sale, conversion rate and others.

A cheap SEO service may save you a little cash, but you won’t earn a lot from it either. In fact, it’s more likely that you’ll “save yourself into the poor-house!”

So ask yourself these critical questions first:

• Why are you even thinking about hiring an SEO consultant?
• Is SEO merely going to be your alibi instead of your ‘secret weapon’?
• Are you looking for SEO help just because everyone’s doing it, or your marketing department insists upon trying it?
• Or are you developing an SEO strategy to skyrocket your rankings, and along with it your profit?

Then, depending on the type of client, I introduce one (or all) of the 3 analogies.

Analogy #1: SEO Is Like Buying a Car, Your Price Will Match Your Needs

Johanna kept nodding her head, listening attentively to all that I said… but she still wasn’t convinced.

“Well, that’s fine,” she continued. “But I still want to know what it will cost to get my site optimized for search engines. How much does SEO cost?”

I asked her, “How much does it cost to buy a car?”

Johanna was a little confused. “Why, that depends.”

“Exactly” I said.  “The price you’ll pay for a car will depend on the make and model, its size and purpose, where you’ll drive it, and with whom. A sturdy station wagon for your family will be priced differently from a sports car you want to show-off!”

SEO services also range in price depending on what you want from it. The best SEO strategy begins by evaluating needs and problems of your prospective clients. It then deploys SEO as a magnet to attract only the most relevant leads out of the vast ocean of online Web surfers.

Setting up your website to do this effectively and well isn’t easy. Building laser focused landing pages targeted at sub-segments of your audience can draw a flood of relevant traffic that converts nicely into customers. But getting this right takes time and resources.

Cheap SEO is like bargain hunting. You might save some money. But you won’t earn much either. The way I practice SEO is not qualified guesswork that endangers a client’s business. Research and analysis come first, often followed by a face to face meeting with clients to gather all relevant information.

There’s nothing “turnkey” or “standard” about this kind of SEO. You can’t buy it, install it, and sit back. It is dynamic and constantly evolving. The ranking signals are in constant flux, and are impacted by various external factors, not just on-site ones.

SEO is also not about “fixing” things. Viewing SEO as a quick fix for reduced sales or traffic is a big mistake. You’ll only end up leaving money on the table (a lot of it!)

Good SEO must deliver a huge ROI. It is not just about getting high rankings and more traffic, clicks and page views. It’s about converting those visitors into paying customers. What happens before the landing page has a major impact on conversion rates.

SEO consulting of high caliber will help you:

• find your customers’ intent, needs and pressing problems
• identify their expectations from your business or website
• decide how you will deliver value (on the landing page)
• uncover areas of profitability
• pick triggers that convert visitors into customers
• personalize the experience for each visitor

Getting all these elements of SEO right takes a lot of time. Knowing where to begin for the best, fastest results will takes tremendous research. But the investment is worthwhile, because it will earn you a high return.

That’s why SEO should never be viewed as a cost. It’s an investment. One that pays off for a long time.

Analogy #2: SEO Is Like An Iceberg, Mainly Hidden But With Massive Impact

It is said 90% of the mass of an iceberg is under the water, hidden from view. SEO is just the same.

While you might see only the attractive top ranking on Google as the impact of your SEO, there are a hundred unseen elements at play, all working in concert to deliver the collective impact of intelligent optimization.

Like icebergs, SEO has some serious risks to balance the great opportunities it creates. Boats, ships, cruisers and even ocean liners have run aground on hidden rocks under the sea. And countless businesses have paid a steep price for wrongly executed SEO campaigns.

Mainly, such campaigns were put together by amateurs. Business owners wrongly assume that any Internet consultant is capable of “good enough” SEO, and hand it over to a Web designer or developer.

Just because they’re already in there coding or designing your website is not a reason to thrust SEO upon a Web designer or programmer. That’s like saying you’ll just get your plumber to do the wiring because he’s already working on the walls! Web developers are great at developing. SEO experts are best at SEO.

Sometimes, through sheer good luck (or even accident), you may own a great business with top search rankings and a steady flow of traffic coming in. That’s “good enough” – but with SEO, it can become so much more. And only a specialist can deliver great results.

SEO is well known to be one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing. For this reason, SEO should have a larger budget. Yet even after Web analytics data prove beyond doubt that SEO is the absolute winner at driving more traffic, many companies pay little attention to it.

In today’s competitive online arena, SEO cannot be relegated to the status of a secondhand job any longer.

It is not a trivial task to be handed over to a friend or distant cousin who knows how to “fix it”. It shouldn’t be put off until the site is ready to launch. SEO should be the first thing to focus on. And there’s a reason for this.

Not everyone will arrive at your website through the homepage. Search engines will not ask you which of your landing pages you wish to have listed in their directory.  Generic searches on business critical keywords will throw up different entry points into your website. Many visitors will enter through these back doors.

Knowing why they landed at your site, what they expect to find, and what motivates or drives them to seek your solution is critical information if you are to capture their attention, retain their interest and gain their trust.

How will you optimize every page on your large website later on?

It’s far easier to plan for it in advance. This is something I insist upon with SEO clients. After all, if your website (or any section of it) is not important enough for you to do this, why does it even exist in the first place?

Analogy #3:  SEO Is Like a Dam – Open Flood Gates Traffic Just Keeps Flowing

Dams across massive rivers store water. Think about search engines like Google as huge dams that store your targeted visitors, and your listing on SERPs (search engine results pages) as holes in the dam. Punch enough of them, and you’ll be drowned in a flood of traffic!

That’s a great reason to start optimizing your website right now – and not take it in small steps, but go for a massive overhaul.

No matter what niche you are involved in, there are ‘evergreen’ search phrases with the potential to drive a large amount of traffic to your website for years. And this traffic is free! It will continue without any dent in your ongoing or proposed marketing budget.

But optimizing just one page on your website will only deliver one extra traffic stream. What if you opened the flood gates?

Keyword research will reveal that many searches are carried out on business related and highly relevant ‘non-brand’ generic keywords. These are used by people who have never even heard about you, but are focused on their needs and problems, actively seeking out solutions. That’s the ‘water’ behind the ‘dam’ that you can tap into through SEO.

Or if you don’t like the idea of punching holes in a dam, think of your keyword research as finding a pinata, the decorated papier mache container full of candy, that you can break open to get a treat. SEO is the candy king!

Speaking of candy, a website without strategically planned design is little more than eye candy. If all it does is look nice without providing any value, then it’s like playing trick-or-treat with kids – but keeping all the sweets for yourself!

Elements other than SEO are important. You should use SEO as a way to convert and engage your visitors. Knowing the intent behind keywords that lead visitors to an individual page on your site will be valuable for your Web designer.

But don’t let your designer start outlining your site or your programmer begin coding your pages before you’ve finalized an SEO strategy and done your keyword analysis. That’s the platform upon which you can build your future success.

You may get everything else right. Your inbound marketing strategy may cover all the bases – heavy SEO, social search, local SEO, mobile optimization – and may integrate nicely with other parts of your offline and digital marketing. But without diligent keyword research underlying it all, you’re only building a superstructure upon quicksand. That’s just not smart or effective.

In 2012 or 2013, I’m guessing that search and social media will meld. Researching generic long tail keywords and merging them with local terms like cities, place names and more will become important. The growth of mobile search and the rising awareness and experience of search engine users in general will power this trend.

When you know what savvy searchers are looking for, identify the exact keywords and combinations they use, and map them to individual pages on your website, it will make the difference between a 1% and a 20% conversion rate.

Do you think it might be a good idea to raise earnings from an individual page by 20% or more? Definitely, yes!

Do you think it’s quick and easy work to do this for each page?  Absolutely not!

An extensive e-commerce website with thousands of products for sale will have prospective buyers with totally (or at least slightly) different tastes and needs. Optimizing your site for each of them is important.  The text on your site, the visual appearance, the products and services you present to them – all need to fit into the concept of an “ideal solution” that your visitor has in his or her mind.

If you add value to their lives based on uniquely individual needs, you will boost sales.

Who Should Be In Charge of Your SEO?

Definitely not the information technologists.  The project should be owned by your marketing department.

At a local conference on SEM a few years ago, I heard the term “Business Prevention Unit” applied to the IT department! There was a brief stunned silence. A few seconds later, everyone burst out laughing.

During breaks and in other presentations, people talked about this remark. It’s especially appealing to me because so many of my clients start out thinking about SEO as a purely technical challenge. That’s so wrong!

SEO is about becoming a detective, a hunter, an explorer. You’re out looking for opportunities hidden inside the psychology of your prospects and customers.

This is a mindset that’s totally foreign to an IT manager, server administrator, programmer, Web designer or other technician. If you want to put food on the table, hire a hunter!

At the same time, it is wise to keep in mind that SEO is a team game. One of my clients runs a large website with over 10 million pages indexed in Google. Optimizing each one of them individually is simply not feasible. It would be too costly in time and money. Manually tweaking every page isn’t practical, even if it’s the ideal solution.

Therefore, an SEO strategy is critical.

Where is the highest profit lying hidden? Where should we focus to reach business goals set strategically for the long term?

The answers to those questions are important. And automation is important. So is optimizing the website structure and coding. A comprehensive plan to work on such a big site is mandatory. Having an expert programmer and great server administrator as part of the team is helpful. With literally millions of page views each day, it won’t help to hire just a great SEO strategist.

It also pays to keep in mind that your website is probably the best salesman in your company. But you’re locking him up in a closet! Release him right away.

Knowing that SEO is one of the most cost effective forms of marketing out there, it’s surprising that more companies don’t invest heavily into this. Is it because it “looks too good to be true”? Probably, because so many of my clients seem to think so.

Explaining to them that it’s real, and possible, is quite a challenge.

A part of the problem is technical language, jargon and lingo used by SEO specialists to outline the benefits of their craft to regular business owners.

So, What Does SEO Cost?

If you’ve been watching closely, you’ll notice that I still haven’t answered Johanna’s initial question…  What does SEO cost?

I’ll stick to the same response. It depends.

How high are you willing to jump? How fast are you going to run? I need to know this if I am to estimate how much energy and resources you’ll need.

Pricing SEO is equally difficult. It is complex. There are many rich opportunities. Several external factors and ranking signals skew the scenario further. And then, there’s the natural skepticism of a client to overcome.

Is SEO too good to be true?  Are SEO consultants snake oil salespeople who are out to trick and cheat you?

Yes, there are charlatans and cheats out there, and you ought to keep your eyes open and your feet firmly on the ground.

But any Internet marketing manager or business owner who is still not taking SEO seriously should consider stepping down. Because, let’s face it… the most dangerous person is yourself! Especially if you’re a frugal penny pincher looking for cheap results. Remember, in SEO as with life, you reap what you sow!

In the construction industry, there used to be people who dug with shovels. A company that invented and used the “digging machine” made results happen faster, easier and at lower cost.

Effective SEO is just like that. It can bring you better results faster and at a lower cost. That’s why you shouldn’t even consider letting anyone else handle your SEO tasks.

What does a rope cost?

Asking how much SEO will cost is like asking how much rope costs. It will depend upon how many meters you need, the quality of the rope, what you plan to use it for, or how long you want it to last. You can buy the cheapest rope you find, but will it be good enough?

Hiring an SEO consultant is similar. Just like rope has its per meter price, SEO has a price too – maybe a per hour rate. How many hours you will pay for depends upon all these factors we’ve discussed earlier.

And what you pay for is not what it costs you. That is defined by the return you get on your investment. If an SEO consultant delivers a boost in sales and profit that’s 5, 10 or 25 times what you paid, it didn’t cost you anything!

So that’s how I answer Johanna’s question – which is the same question many clients ask their SEO consultants.

I’m sure you’ve faced some frustrating challenges while trying to explain the value of what you do, to a client who can’t see it as any different from the dozen other marketing and designing tasks underway. Or when you’re called in as an SEO specialist to fix things after the entire website is built and running. Got any interesting stories that come to mind?  Go ahead and share it in a comment.

What do you do when you’re asked about pricing your SEO services? Do you have any personal experiences or favorite analogies you use?  What happens when you’re asked to give a ‘fixed price quote’ upfront? Tell us how you overcome price objections.

As a customer, what do you look for with SEO consulting? What parts do you wish your SEO consultant explained better or insisted upon more firmly? Please let us know, too.

Image credit: Crestock.com

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Google: SEO

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/NjpuIxfi_6w/how-much-does-seo-cost-3-analogies-to-help-you-determine-its-value-108870

Local business marketers often hyper-focus on Google search rankings, but it’s important not to forget that even if Bing and Yahoo! do not have the lion’s share, even 15% of search volume can create a sizable number of potential business referrals. So, here are a few basic tips for optimizing for Bing Local search rankings.

Optimization of business profiles in the Bing Business Portal (or “BBP”) is not difficult nor time-consuming. Microsoft’s newish Beta interfacing for administrating business listing details is actually pretty slick and easy to use.

10 Tips For Optimizing Local Business Listings In Bing

1.  The first key is to claim your business listing

As with other local search engines, having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase “trust ranking” factors.

One of the hardest issues for local search engines and online directories to handle is figuring out which businesses have expired so that they can remove their listings from the databases — so, they have a horror of displaying stale listings to consumers. It’s reasonable to think that businesses which have some signal indicating they’re active will be more likely to be presented more prominently to searchers.

2.  Correct and standardize your basic business contact information

The core contact information needs to be consistently shown in all major places including in Bing Local. The basic contact data is the business Name, Address, and Phone # (a.k.a. “N.A.P.”) — along with the website URL.

3.  Add an image to your listing!

One striking characteristic of Bing Local searches is how higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings! (See also my earlier articles on optimizing images for local search here and here.) Could be that listings that have images are claimed, and rank higher due to that status, or it could be directly related to the presence of the thumbnails.

Either way, businesses that have pics may have greater chance of ranking well in Bing Local. Example – top two listings for a search for “intellectual property attorneys, chicago, il”:

4.  Set your hours of operation!

Bing Local business profiles actually include a small sign icon. While I haven’t tested this, I wouldn’t be surprised if businesses might be a little more likely to rank better during times when they list themselves as being open, particularly in mobile search.

Even if it isn’t a direct ranking signal, however, the fact that the profile page gets the bright, attention-getting icon makes it worthwhile as a possibly conversion-increasing element!

5.  Check your categories, and add more where possible!

Business categories like “Plumbers”, “Florists”, and “Attorneys” are core elements involved in local search rankings, yet they can often be wrong or so minimally specified as to detract from the promotion potential that business listings would otherwise possess.

When a local search keyword matches a business’s category — either partially as a “fuzzy match” or as a thesaurus match — the listing is far more likely to rank for it.

6. Go a step beyond categories

Bing appears to treat “Specialities” similarly to categories or like subcategories, so add relevant specialties.

7. For restaurants, integrate with OpenTable

Integrating with OpenTable to handle reservation scheduling will enable a convenient ”reservations” link to appear on the profile page in Bing.

8.  Add deals to your listing!

Bing appears to have also integrated with Groupon, so if you have a Groupon offer going on, it could appear with your local listing in Bing, too. But, Bing Group Deals may be set up directly within the BBP as well.

9.  Develop citations!

Just as with Google Place Search and Google Maps, Bing Local listings need to have citations and inlinks in order to rank well. Local citation sources which may be influential in Bing include YP.com, Superpages.com, Yahoo! Local, Manta, Judy’s Book, and more. Vertical directories also likely work well here, too, such as Restaurants.com, FindLaw.com, Dentists.com, Contractors.com, etc.

10.  Optimize your local business website

Having a well-optimized local biz website helps all of your external optimizations work hand-in-hand with the on-site optimization. Businesses with good website optimization have a better chance of ranking well and getting found by consumers seeking their products and services.

Bing and other search engines compare listing information against the information found on the website, so keeping the listing data and “N.A.P.” consistent helps reinforce and validate the vital local search criteria.

These basic local optimization tips are pretty obvious to any experienced local marketer, but it’s always amazing how many local businesses fail to check their listings for correctness, consistency and areas where information may be expanded or enhanced.

Sites which follow these simple tips often get an edge over their competition — and, in internet marketing the “early worm” which grabs marketshare first often gets an advantage that extends well into the future. For more details around optimizing local directory profiles, see my earlier article, Anatomy Optimization Of A Local Business Profile.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Local Search | Microsoft: Bing Maps Local

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/Mc76fgKYC7Q/10-basic-bing-local-optimization-tips-109158

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Data

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

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

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

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

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

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

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

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

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

Link Quality

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

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

Link Target

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

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

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

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

Link Locality

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

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

Social Metrics

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

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

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

In this scenario, suitable link building tactics include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

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

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

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

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

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

Link Quality

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

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

Link Target

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

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

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

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

Link Locality

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

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

Social Metrics

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

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

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

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

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SERP 3 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com

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

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

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

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

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

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

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

Link Quality

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

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

Link Target

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

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

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

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

Link Locality

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

Social Metrics

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

Links over time

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

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

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we take-away from all this?

There is a trade-off that needs analysing…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balance your link building tactic portfolio – adopting a combination approach

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

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

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

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

How to use the matrix

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

• New recipes

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

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

• Consume in moderation

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

• Staple diet

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

• Fruitless

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

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

Overall conclusion

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

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

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

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

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/NJKf7foTe94/strategic-link-building-why-you-dont-need-to-outrun-lions

In the real world, things go wrong. While we might all wish that everything we did was “fix once, stay fixed”, that’s rarely the case.

Things that were previously “not a problem”(TM) can become “a problem”(TM) rapidly for a variety of reasons:

• someone changes something unrelated / without realising it would impact you or just screws up (e.g. deploying a staging version of robots.txt or an old version of a server config)
• the world changes around you (there was a Google update named after a black and white animal a while back)
• the technical gremlins gang up on you (server downtime, DDoS etc.)

In all of these cases, you’d rather know about the issue sooner rather than later because in most of them your ability to minimise the resulting issues declines rapidly as time passes (and in the remaining cases, you still want to know before your boss / client).

While many of us have come round to the idea that we should be making recommendations in these areas, we are too often still creating spectacularly non-actionable advice like:

• make sure you have great uptime
• make sure your site is quick

Today, I want to give you three pieces of directly actionable advice that you can start doing for your own site and your key clients immediately that will help you spot problems early, avoid knock-on indexing issues and quickly get alerted to bad deploys that could hurt your search performance.

#1 Traffic drops

Google Analytics has a feature that spots significant changes in traffic or traffic profile. It can also alert you. The first of these features is called “intelligence” and the second “intelligence alerts”.

Rather than rehash old advice, I’ll simply link to the two best posts I’ve read on the subject:

• Here on SEOmoz by Rebecca Lehmann - 7 essential google intelligence custom alerts
• Over on Blueglass by Annie Cushing - stay alert with google analytics

This is the simplest of all the recommendations to implement and is also the most holistic in the sense that it can alert you to traffic drops of all kinds. The downside of course is that you’re measuring symptoms not causes so you (a) have to wait for causes to create symptoms rather than being alerted to the problem and (b) get an alert about the symptom rather than the cause and have to start detective work before paging the person who can fix it.

#2 Uptime monitoring

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to realise that SEO is dependent on your website. And not only on how you optimise your site, but also on it being available.

While for larger clients, it shouldn’t be your job to alert someone if their website goes down, it does no harm to know and for smaller clients there is every chance you’d be adding significant value by keeping an eye on these things.

I have both good and bad reasons for knowing a lot about server monitoring:

• the good: we made a small investment in Server Density in May last year (and scored our only link from Techcrunch in the process)
• the bad: we’ve been more enthusiastic users of our portfolio company’s services than we might have hoped – some annoying server issues have resulted in more downtime for distilled.net than I care to think about. To add insult to injury, we managed to get ourselves hit with a DDoS attack last week (see speed chart below)

There are three main elements you might want to monitor:

1. Pure availability (including response code)
2. Server load and performance
3. Response speed / page load time

Website availability

There are two services I recommend here:

• Pingdom‘s free service monitors the availability and response time of your site
• Server Density‘s paid service provides more granular alerting and graphing as well as tying it together with your server performance monitoring

Here’s what the Server Density dashboard looks like:

And here is the response time graph from pingdom:

You can see the spike in response time during the DDoS attack and the lower average response time over the last few days after we implemented cloudflare

Incidentally, you may not have noticed (it had passed me by until Mike gave me the heads-up the other day) that Google rolled out site speed to all analytics accounts without the previously required change to the GA snippet so you can get some of this data from your GA account now – here’s the technical breakdown from some of Distilled’s pages:

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

This was the most ambitious of my ideas for SEO monitoring. It came out of a real client issue. A major client was rolling out a new website and managed to deploy an old / staging version of robots.txt on a Saturday morning (continuous integration FTW). It was essentially luck that the SEO running the project was all over it, spotted it quickly, called the key contact and got it rolled back before it did any lasting harm. We had a debrief the following week where we discussed how we could get alerted to this kind of thing automatically.

I went to David Mytton, the founder of Server Density and asked him if he could build some features in for you lot to alert when this kind of thing happens – if we accidentally noindex our live site or block it in robots.txt. He came up with this ingenious solution that uses functionality already present in their core platform:

Monitoring for any change to robots.txt

First create a service to monitor robots.txt – here’s ours:

Then create an alert to tell you if the MD5 hash of the contents of robots.txt changes (see a definition of MD5 here):

If you copy and paste the contents of your robots.txt into an MD5 generator you get a string of gobbledegook (ours is “15403cbc6e028c0ec46a5dd9fffb9196″). What this alert is doing is monitoring for any change to our robots.txt so if we deploy a new version I will get an alert by email and push notification to my phone. Wouldn’t it be nice to get alerted in this way if a client or dev team pushed an update to robots.txt without telling you?

Spotting the inclusion of no-index meta tags

In much the same way, you can create alerts for specific strings of text found on specific pages – I’ve chosen to get an alert if the string “noindex” is found in the HTML of the Distilled homepage. If we ever deployed a staging version or flipped a setting in a wordpress plugin, I’d get a push notification:

Doing this kind of monitoring is essentially free to me because we are already using Server Density to monitor the health of our servers so it’s no extra effort to monitor checksums and the presence / absence of specific strings.

#4 Bonus – why stop there?

Check out all the stuff that etsy monitor and have alerts for. If you have a team that can build the platform / infrastructure, then there are almost unlimited things you could monitor for and alert about. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• status codes – 404 vs 301 vs 302 vs 500 etc.
• changes in conversion rates / cart abandonment
• bot behaviour – crawling patterns etc – given how disproportionately interested I was in the simple “pages crawled” visualisation available in cloudflare (see below – who’d have guessed we get crawled more by Yandex than Google?), I feel there is a lot more that could be done here:

PS – today is the last day for early bird discounts on our Linklove conferences in London and Boston at the end of March / beginning of April. (There’s also a sign-up form on that page if you want to make sure you always hear about upcoming conferences and offers). I hope to see many of you there.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/3NrOiwOuEnk/seo-monitoring