Imran ul Haq - Android & Social Media Enthusiast

[Instructions Included] Ice Cream Sandwich Now Rolling Out To The GSM Nexus S

2011-12-17T20:58:00.000+05:00

Well, that didn't take long. Here are the instructions to you your Nexus S rocking ICS right now. Do not try this on the CDMA Nexus S!

Download the OTA Package
Rename it to update.zip
Copy it to the root of the internal storage
Power off the device, hold Volume Up and Power to reboot into the bootloader
Select "recovery," then hit the power button
Once the warning triangle appears, hold the power button and hit volume up
Select "apply update from /sdcard" and choose the update.zip
Once the process is finished, simply choose "reboot system now"

Once it reboots, BAM! You've got ICS. Congratulations!

Good news GSM NS owners - your piece of the Ice Cream Sandwich is on its way! According to the official Nexus Twitter account, the update started rolling out today and will continue for the rest of the month.

Google's Nexus S support page has already been updated to comfort users transitioning from Gingerbread to ICS, offering helpful tips such as how to change the wallpaper, add a widget, and view recently launched apps.
There's no estimate as to when the CDMA version may be receiving its update, but I imagine that it shouldn't be too far out.
Let us know when this update hits your device!

How To Get A Working Amazon Appstore For Android If You ARE NOT American

2011-10-26T14:52:00.002+05:00

This will allow non-Americans to download FREE apps from the Amazon App store. It won’t work for paid apps because you will be using a fake credit card number. However, it WILL WORK for those daily free premium apps, which is one of the major reasons you’d want to use this.
Word of caution, you are best off creating a new Amazon account using a new email address for this, as Amazon are likely to ban your account if they find out Full details after the break!

Instructions are below:

Get yourself a fake email account.
Register on Amazon with your fake email ID.
While registering you’ll now need a US address, US mobile number and a US credit card.
Go to fakenamegenerator to get a fake american name, address, mobile number and a credit card number.
Fill this information for you account, and select this information as default.
Download Amazon Appstore APK and install it on your phone.
Run the app and login with the above created account.
If you get a notification saying that an update to amazon App Store is available ignore it.

[Source]

Root Nexus One with Android 2.3.3/2.3.4/2.3.6 Gingerbread

2011-10-20T00:52:00.000+05:00

After I got Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) updated on my Nexus One, I lost root. It seems there is no easy way to root Nexus One running 2.3.3. I did lots of searches and finally found an effective solution from a Chinese Android forum. I tried it, and it did work! So here I’d like to share this solution with you.

[ Notice! The bootloader should be unlocked before you do the following steps! If your bootloader has already been unlocked, you should see an unlocked lock icon when you turn on your Nexus One. If you don't know how to unlock bootloader, simply search "unlock bootloader nexus one", you'll find lots of tutorials. ]
1. Download su.zip, and put it on your phone’s SD card.
2. Download fastboot.zip, unzip it to C:\. Now you have a folder C:\fastboot\
3. Download recovery-RA-passion-v2.2.1.img, put it in C:\fastboot\
4. Shut down your phone. Then start your Nexus One in Fastboot mode by holding down the Trackball and press the Power button.
5. Connect your phone to your computer. Open a Command Prompt (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt), and run the following commands:

cd C:\fastboot

fastboot devices

fastboot flash recovery recovery-RA-passion-v2.2.1.img

6. Use Volume +/- keys to choose ‘Bootloader’ and hit the Power button.
7. Use Volume +/- keys to select ‘Recovery’ and hit the Power button.
8. From the menu, scroll the Trackball to select ‘Flash zip from sdcard’ and hit the Trackball.
9. Select the su.zip file you previously copied to your SD card and hit the Trackball. Hit it one more time.
10. When done, restart your Nexus One and you should be all set.
There you go. Enjoy your rooted Nexus One
[ To verify that your have root access, type "su" in Terminal, the prompt should change from "$" to "#". ]

Top Ten Favorite Social Media Tools For Daily Use

2011-05-23T11:09:00.000+05:00

Here’s my top ten tools:

1. HootSuite.com

A fantastic free online tool to manage multiple social media profiles, pre-schedule updates for specific days and times, monitor keywords and analyze statistics. Plus, check and reply to saved searches, Twitter Lists, @ mentions, Direct Mentions and more. Also available as a mobile app which provides an excellent way to pre-schedule your social updates on the fly. Paid version also available with additional features. (See TweetDeck.com as an alternative tool to try that is equally as popular).

2. Bit.ly

The top link shortening service, ideal for Twitter but just as useful for Facebook and even email marketing to track clicks. Copy your long link and paste into your bit.ly account. Easily make custom links and track how many clicks you get. For example, this is a link to one of my most popular blog posts with a directory of Facebook contact forms: http://bit.ly/FBforms.
Check the raw link and stats for any bit.ly link by simply adding a “+” sign at the end, whether it’s your bit.ly link or someone else’s. Plus, be sure to add the bit.ly sidebar to easily shorten and tweet any weblink. Another cool feature is the little popup notification of “trending bits” when one of your bit.ly links receives a number of clicks in a short time.

3. Twitter Lists

Easily build your own source of curated content by making a list of Twitter users in a certain field of expertise. Twitter allows up to 20 lists per account with up to 500 names in each list. Lists can be public or private. Anyone can follow a public list. (See Twitter List instructions here).
You might set up a list for top news in your industry (be sure to add your own name!). I refer to my own Facebook Marketing Twitter list several times a day to stay up to date on breaking news about Facebook. (See also Listorious for a wonderful compilation of lists to find and follow.)

4. Facebook Like Button

Adding a small piece of code to your website and/or installing the Facebook Like Button WordPress plugin allows visitors to your website and blog to share your content with all their Facebook friends. You can change the verb from “like” to “recommend” – great for placing on the top right of an entire website. Also, include the Like Button on all opt-in pages and sales pages for extra viral visibility.
I love the Facebook Like button for social proof and for quickly and easily sharing content with my Facebook friends. However, I must say since the Like Button changed from a one-line story to a full-on story with randomly chosen thumbnail and a description, I’ve actually been clicking on it less often. I liked the one-line as I could click several links in a row and it wouldn’t clog up the feed of my friends.
If you’d like to test the like button, click the recommend button below for my blog – then go check your Facebook profile wall to see what was posted!

5. TweetMeme Button

This is the Twitter equivalent to the Facebook Like Button. Add it to your blog, website, sales pages and anywhere you want to make it easy for your visitors to share your content with their Twitter followers. I love to use the TweetMeme button myself whenever I find great content on the web to share with my Twitter followers – the button is typically already formatted with a short link and the author’s Twitter ID.
You’ll see the TweetMeme button at the top and bottom of this post - that’s the WordPress TweetMeme plugin. (In addition to the Facebook Like Button and TweetMeme Button, be sure to also add the LinkedIn Share button to your website, blog, opt-in pages and sales pages).

Tweetmeme Retweet Button

6. Twellow.com

Twellow is the Yellow Pages of Twitter with tens of millions of accounts listed. Set up a free account, then find and follow targeted people by searching for keywords users have in their bio. Browse categories and also drill down to cities around the world to find top users in a specific location (see “Twellowhood” tab). Twellow is a great tool for building your Twitter following. Be sure to add your keyword-rich extended bio as the search feature also crawls this field! (As an alternative, more automated tool to try instead/as well, see TweetAdder.com).

7. ManageFlitter.com

Easily manage your Twitter following, unfollow inactive accounts, find out who isn’t following you back and more. There are many ways to sort including by profiles with no images, inactive, no bio and more. Free and paid versions available. This is such a fun tool to use and very effective. I haven’t found anything like it out there. (As an alternative, check out the popular tool SocialOomph.com. I use SocialOomph every day to auto follow those who follow me; then 1-2 times a week, I filter and clean up the following using Manage Flitter).

Manage Flitter

8. Echofon

Mobile App for Twitter – I’ve tried many, many mobile apps to manage Twitter on my iPhone and keep coming back to Echofon. The app offers a variety of great features and is always synched with your online Twitter activity. Check and reply to saved searches, Twitter Lists, trending topics, @ mentions, Direct Mentions and more.
Echofon also offers desktop apps for Mac and Firefox. (Plus, a Facebook mobile app! However, I find Facebook’s own iPhone app works just fine.)

9. Disqus Blog Commenting System

A wonderful, user-friendly addition to any blog, Disqus allows users to have their own portable profile for commenting. Comments can easily be shared with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Visitors to your blog can simply post a comment using their Facebook or Twitter account with one-click instead if they don’t have a Disqus login. Try out the Disqus commenting system on my blog here – scroll down and leave me a comment!

10. TwentyFeet

An easy and simple way to track and monitor all your social media metrics. You get two social media accounts for free for life. After that, the fee is extremely nominal ($2.49 a year!) for additional accounts. Track your Facebook profile, fan pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube, Bit.ly, Google Analytics and more. TwentyFeet sends you a daily email with activity reports as compared to predicted activity based on past performance. (See also SocialBakers.com to use instead or as well for tracking your Facebook metrics.)

TwentyFeet - Example daily email

I trust you found some nifty new tools here! Let me know what your favorites are – feel free to list them below in the comments. It seems every day there are more and more new tools available to assist in making our social media and online marketing more effective.
Do you tend to stick with the more established platforms and tools? Or are you always on the hunt for the holy grail of social media tools that does everything under the sun? Let me know in the comments below.

A Look At The Size And Shape Of The Geosocial Universe In 2011

2011-05-20T17:17:00.000+05:00

Thanks to Jesse Thomas of interactive design agency JESS3, we now have an updated look at the structure of the geosocial universe as it exists in anno domini 2011. It wasn’t so long ago that the International Astronomical Union booted Pluto out of the solar system or that MySpace was overtaking Yahoo! and Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. Well, a few rotations around the sun later, and the overall shape of the geosocial universe has changed dramatically. New stars have been born and others have been scattered out across the cold recesses of Internet space. Today, Myspace is sputtering, Skype is part of the Microsoft solar system, and LinkedIn is being traded publicly. The whacky flux continues.
As you’ll see, Thomas’ infographic shows the current size of major social networks as well as the other well-known online services we use on a daily basis relative to their peers. It also overlays the present size of each company’s mobile user base. You’ll see Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. You can also check out the agency’s infographic from last year to see the relative changes. Notable differences include: The rise of Chinese Qzone and Twitter, the fall of Myspace, and the stasis of Friendster.
Some other notable trends in the geosocial universe, courtesy of JESS3:

Mobile: 5.3 billion mobile devices are used worldwide — that’s 77 percent of the world’s population
Smartphones: 21.8 percent of all mobile devices are smartphones. Despite what one might think, Apple does not top the list in sales—Nokia does
Skype: Mobile usage continues to increase thanks to Skype’s wise investment in apps and its mobile platform
Facebook: Now tops 629 million registered users with almost 250 million people accessing the site via mobile
Qzone: China’s version of Facebook, Qzone, is experiencing supernova-like growth with 480 million registered users
Twitter: Broke the 200 million registered user mark with nearly 40 percent of people tweeting via mobile
Email: Hotmail still dominates email, but Gmail is gaining fast
Yelp: Yelp is topping 50 million unique visitors per month. Its move to team up with OpenTable earlier this year will only increase its relevancy
Foursquare and Gowalla: These geosocial specialists are still growing, but growth seems to be slowing down a bit

Facebook 'Likes' more profitable than tweets

2011-03-27T10:37:00.000+05:00

If event registration site Eventbrite's experience is any indication, social media marketers looking for monetary returns on their efforts might get more value from Facebook than Twitter.
The company announced Wednesday that an average tweet about an event drove 80 cents in ticket sales during the past six months, whereas an average Facebook Like drove $1.34.
The study, which used in-house social analytics tools to track ticket sales on the site, was a continuation of a similar analysis the company released in October after analyzing data from a 12-week period.

That study also indicated Facebook drove more sales for Eventbrite than Twitter, although the difference between the two networks' sales per post was greater at that point than throughout the entire six-month period (the "value" of tweets increased).
In addition to each individual Facebook Like driving more sales than an individual tweet, the study also revealed cumulative activity on Facebook was greater than activity on Twitter for Eventbrite. People shared Eventbrite events on Facebook almost four times as often as they did on Twitter. The company attributes this disparity to Facebook's wider reach and greater emphasis on real-world ties.
It's important to note that only a very small percentage of site visitors shared event pages on either network. Just 1% of people who landed on an event page shared it with their friends; 10% of people who had purchased a ticket did the same.
Obviously people are more likely to share events if they are attending. Their friends, according to Eventbrite's data, are also more likely to buy tickets to an event shared on Facebook by a ticket holder than one shared by an uncommitted friend.
But whether these trends, or any of Eventbrite's findings, are relevant to other types of purchases is still a matter of speculation. But Eventbrite is betting they are.
"We carefully track sharing behavior in an effort to help event organizers tap into a new world of distribution for their event promotion," wrote Tamara Mendelsohn, Eventbrite's director of marketing and former senior analyst at Forrester Research, in a blog post about the study.
"But the findings apply broadly to all e-commerce businesses, because the foundations of e-commerce are shifting as the social graph becomes a meaningful influence in driving transactions."

Read the original article here

Build Your Social Media Embassies

2011-03-25T11:07:00.002+05:00

I came across a great analogy over at Zen Habits, and it's got me rethinking how I view social media:

If my personal website is my digital home, then my social networking profiles on Facebook and Twitter, etc. are my embassies. Embassies exist to maintain relationships with "distant lands".

Although the post is really about gaining focus and managing your digital life, I think the idea of social media profiles as embassies in distant lands is fantastic, and I'm going to run with it. My apologies to the author (Tyler Tervooren), who probably didn't intend anything I'm about to say.
Here are 6 ways to build up your social media embassies without an international incident…

1. Declare Independence

Before you can really have an embassy, you need to be a sovereign nation. It's great that your Facebook page has 100 Likes and your band's MySpace profile just cleared the double-digit friend mark, but what happens when the rules change? An embassy isn't a permanent home – politics change, alliances shift, and you ultimately have no control over someone else's territory.
The impact of social media is growing, no doubt, but that doesn't mean you should surrender your entire presence to someone else's site. Make sure you have a permanent online home that you control. Your social media embassies should be an extension of that home.

2. Be a Model Citizen

Your embassy is, first and foremost, your face to the world. You don't see countries set up a lawn chair next to a cooler under an umbrella with "Embassy" written on it in permanent marker. It's ok to create a light profile for some recon – you may decide that a given social network isn't for you – but once you're in, remember that you're representing your home country. Finish your profile, and put a little time into it. Connect with people and participate. Nothing says "poser" (or "spammer") on Twitter, for example, like someone with 1 update, no bio, and an egg for an avatar.

3. Respect the Locals

Being on a social media site is like travelling in someone else's country. If you never plan on coming back, you can play the obnoxious tourist all you want. If you want to set up a home away from home, though, you need to respect the locals, their customs, and even their leaders. Don't assume that what flew in some other country will be acceptable in your new embassy. To put it simply: listen first, and then participate.

4. Learn the Language

This is an extension of (3), but it's important to enough to stand on its own. Every social network has its unique lingo, and talking the talk can really help smooth over any diplomatic missteps. Know your hash-tags from your emoticons, and remember that the slang that can be hip in one country can make you look like a loser somewhere else. I'm not saying you have to talk like you're in high-school or pepper every conversation with "OMG LOL WTF?!", but learn to appreciate the flavor of the local language. It will also help you avoid misunderstandings.

5. Bring Your Credentials

Anybody with an email address can set up a social media embassy, and it's easy to forget that being a stranger in a strange land is a privilege. What do you bring to the table? Can you produce the paperwork, if you have to? Treat this as a thought exercise – I strongly believe that the more you understand your own value proposition, the more effective you'll be in social media. Know why you're there, and you'll be able to back it up with real contributions.

6. Foster Allegiances

Embassies have an important function – to be in the right place at the right time when a crisis occurs and to be near the heart of international relations. Your social media embassies aren't just a place to broadcast your opinions and hurl links at people. They're an opportunity to build relationships. I'd estimate that 60-70% of my current consulting business has come from a combination of blogging and my participation in social media.
Take the time to learn about people – Twitter and Facebook blend business and personal relationships in a way that makes it easy to build rapport (if you're sincere about it). Pay close attention to existing allegiances – who do your allies know, and how many steps away are those contacts from you? Done carefully (without pushing your own agenda too hard), it's easy to broaden your circle of influence, sometimes in just a couple of steps.

How's Your Embassy?

How is your own social media presence like an embassy? Are you on good terms with the locals, or are you teetering on the brink of war? This is mostly a thought exercise, and I'd love to hear what other people think about it in the comments.
Photo borrowed from Bodew.com. It really has no relevance to the post, but I was looking for a picture of a flag umbrella with a lawn chair, found this, and loved it. I'm not even entirely sure what it is, but someone please go buy one.

Tips and Must-Haves for your eCommerce Platform

2011-03-09T11:31:00.002+05:00

Choosing an eCommerce platform can be a terribly frustrating experience because of the options and packages available, the misinformation, the pushy sales reps, the time and money investment, and so on. I want to talk about this decision because of this experience, but I don't plan on making any platform recommendations. No, no. That's really up to you and the resources available to you. But I'm happy to give you a rundown of the SEO elements you'll want to consider in your decision making process.
If you're not in the market for a new eCommerce platform, maybe some of these common platform missteps will convince you that it may be time to consider.

Proper Product Image Handling

Your product imagery can provide awesome conversion benefits and make a strong differentiator in your niche. Unfortunately, a lot of eCommerce platforms don't provide the necessary control and commit a lot of SEO missteps (like generating a new URL when the product images are cycled).

Images that create new URLs is a big no-no. Vat19.com's Giant Gummy bear page passes this test as the URL doesn't change when the delicious image is changed.

Page-Level Control of Head and Meta content

Sure, it makes sense for your title tag, H1, and image alt attribute to default to the product name, but if you don't have the option to create custom meta information you could be in for some frustration. One should be able to edit titles, H1s, image alt attributes, meta descriptions, etc. from every product page in the admin.
Additionally, it's important that the content in the HEAD section of each page is editable. If I want to drop a Google Website Optimizer script onto one product page, it shouldn't be impossible. The same goes for adding a rel=canonical, meta robots, or a page-specific JavaScript snippet.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are awesome for conversion, and it seems like many eCommerce platforms today offer some sort of built-in review system. Reviews can also have a positive impact on your product pages' rankings with the naturally keyword-rich UGC it generates. Unfortunately, tons of product reviews systems utilize JavaScript to call the reviews after the page loads, providing no SEO benefit.

Fortunately for Amazon, this review is seen by the Googlebot because it's rendered in HTML

To make sure your product reviews are search engine readable, view source on a page with reviews and be sure the text appears in the code.

Robust Sitemap and Product Feed Control

Most modern eCommerce platforms submit Sitemaps to the search engines, but there's so much more that can be done. For instance, segmented Sitemaps is an awesome way to monitor indexation of different sections of your website. If your platform doesn't allow you to adjust your Sitemaps, you'd be missing out.
Additionally, product feeds allow you to submit your products to comparison shopping engines like Google Merchant Center, NexTag, Shopping.com, and many more. Google Merchant Center is the big one; an eComm platform that auto submits to GMC opens up more possibilities to appear for queries that trigger products in blended search, as well as product extensions for PPC advertisements.

You want this. Your eComm platform should allow it.

301 Redirects, True 404 pages, and Other Rewrite Control

Some of the hosted eComm platforms allow no control over 301 redirects and URL rewriting, and this is a big problem. Similarly, many platforms don't send a proper 404 status for a dead page, opting instead to 302 redirect to a (status 200) 404.html, or worse, the homepage. As products are removed from your catalog, you should be able to 301 redirect that old URL to a related product, or send a proper 404 status message. Anything else will cause confusion for the search engines AND users. Lastly, and most obviously, URLs should be rewritable to allow for keywords-richness.

Contrary to the friendly message, everything is not ok. This "404" page is seen just like any other resolving URL by the search engines. Header checker courtesy of Andy Stratton's checkmyheaders.com.

Filtered Navigation that Doesn't Suck

Faceted or filtered navigation is a contentious point amongst eCommerce platforms as very few platforms do it exactly the same.
First and foremost, a filtered navigation that relies on parameters and session IDs can be very difficult, if not impossible to build in an search engine friendly manner. In many cases, the Googlebot could waste a ton of your crawl bandwidth crawling in and out of navigational filters. Additionally, it can become a information architecture nightmare, with the Googlebot crawling deeper and further from the homepage to reach product pages.
A more modern approach to faceted navigation is through using AJAX to filter products. Just make sure that there's an HTML crawl path to your products, and you're not hiding any really good organic landing pages within your AJAX navigation.
There's a lot of ways to approach this issue, and its worthy of its own discussion. See Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the matter. The general rules for a search friendly faceted navigation:

Keep the crawlers from crawling endlessly through filters. Remember, rel=nofollow and canonical don't preserve crawl bandwidth.
Don't hide great organic landing pages from the crawlers by using AJAX. AJAX is ok, as long as there's an alternate path to pages you'd like to rank.
Robots.txt can be used as a solution but must be done carefully (for example, creating a rule to disallow access to URLs with 2 or more parameters/filters).

Site Speed

At this point I'm really more concerned with site speed from a conversion standpoint, rather than as a ranking factor, but there's reason to believe site speed will see increased importance in the algorithms' future. An advanced cacheing ability is a must for the modern eCommerce platform.

A few more SEO elements

Automatically generated but manually editable HTML sitemap.
Simple breadcrumbs. Preferably generated in a way that triggers Google's enhanced snippet:
Navigation that non-JavaScript users (and crawlers) can navigate. Image-based navigation should use alt attributes or css image replacement. See Amazon's approach with css, images, and JavaScript disabled visible on the right:
DNS control to allow CNAMEs, content delivery network integration, subdomain usage, etc.
Customizable (or no) file extensions in URLs. domain.com/product/ rather than domain.com/product.php.
Blog integration on a subfolder. If this isn't possible and your blog has to go on a subdomain (or worse, another domain entirely), that could be a sign of even more frustrating control issues.

Some Non-SEO elements

There's obviously TONS of non-SEO related features that should be included in a good eCommerce platform. Here are just a few.

Strength in Numbers and Extendability - At some point your eCommerce platform will frustrate you for one reason or another, and you'll feel a lot better if there's a vibrant community and developers building extensions behind it to help.
Data Portability - Can you export and import all of your data from the admin? If one of your manufacturers makes a change to all of their products that requires a small edit to all of their descriptions, can this be done simply? And what about a few years later when you're ready to move to a new platform?
Internal Site Search - Your platform should definitely have a strong internal site search functionality, or at least allow for full integration of a third party's search solution.
Updated, but Not Too Often! - When was the last time your platform updated? 3 years ago? Well, a lot has changed since then, I'm not sure I'd trust that. At the same time, updates every other week can be extremely frustrating.
Great Checkout Process - We'll leave what "great" actually means to the conversion rate experts. Needless to say, this is a HUGE differentiator for eComm platforms. I'll also lump advanced control of shipping rules, gift cards, and coupon codes in here as well.

That's Everything!

I don't envy the engineers behind today's eCommerce platforms. They're tasked with building a system that's both simple yet robust, 'just gets out of the way' yet 'all-in-one', user friendly yet secure, and so on. No fun. I don't expect that I've covered every bit of must-have functionality either, but I hope I've got most of it. If you've got any particularly frustrating stories from dealing with your eCommerce platform, follow me on Twitter and let me know, or sound off in the comments.

Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday

2010-11-12T16:04:00.002+05:00

Back in February we wrote about Facebook’s secret Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.
This isn’t a big surprise — the event invites Facebook sent out hinted strongly that the news would have something to do with its Inbox, sparking plenty of speculation that the event could be related to Titan. Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.
Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.
Oh, and assuming our sources prove accurate, this explains the timing of the Google/Facebook slap fight over contact information.
We’ll keep digging for more details and will have full coverage on Monday.
Taken from Techcrunch.com

Google Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer

2010-11-12T16:02:00.000+05:00

In September I wrote about Google’s “extraordinary” efforts to stop employees, particularly engineers, from resigning to join pre-IPO startups like LinkedIn, Twitter and especially Facebook. In one case we confirmed an engineer making around $150,000 turned down a 15% raise plus $500,000 in restricted stock and left for Facebook anyway.
That’s all chump change now. We’ve confirmed today that a staff engineer at Google being heavily romanced by Facebook was offered a jaw dropping $3.5 million in restricted stock by Google (this means Google is handing over stock worth $3.5 million based on its value today, and that stock will vest over time). He quite wisely accepted Google’s counter offer. Facebook lost this one.
From our previous post in September:

Sources close to Google told us that about 80% of people stay when they’re offered a counter to a Facebook offer. But some still leave. Part of that may be that Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there’s no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that’s $100 million in stock. Now it’s a party.
Google isn’t making these kind of counter offers to everyone, but it’s not a one off, either. It seems to me that every Google engineer at least should be taking a personal day to go collect a Facebook offer. Even if it’s just to get a counter offer from their current employer.

However effective these counter offers are, they sure aren’t good for morale internally at Google. Unless, of course, you’re one of the ones winning the lottery.

LDA - Is On-Page Optimization the SEO Secret?

2010-11-11T15:24:00.002+05:00

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
How do I recap the SEOmoz PRO Seminar session on Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO? The title is so attractive that it produces Pavlonian symptoms as we salivate at the thought of uncovering a hidden SEO treasure. Ben Hendrickson of SEOmoz presented a model which appears to show how Google may assigning relevance to keyword terms based on context - topical relevance.
Is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that hidden jackpot?
1st - LDA is not new nor something SEOmoz invented. The Information Retrieval model has been around for 7 or 8 years, and IR geeks have talked about it before. There are a number of resources, as well as nay saying, about LDA and Google's possible use of it.
2nd - What is new is SEOmoz's LDA Topics Tool that produces a relevancy score based off a query (search term). It enables one to play with words that may increase a page's relevancy in the eyes of Google. It shows words that help Google determine how relevant the page is to a user's search query.
Game Changer?
Kyle Stone tweeted that the LDA tool is a game changer, and many retweeted.

Is SEOmoz's LDA tool a game changer? That's yet to be seen. The goal is to report Ben's research as presented at the Mozinar and how a layman (myself) interprets such. Rand is going to do a follow-up post to explain more.
Why all the hype?
The SEO Challenge
SEOs face the continual challenge of figuring out Google's hidden ranking algorithms. How do we rank higher? Which signals are the most important? We know search engines are "learning models" that attempt to understand "context” of words. Google has said for years that webmasters should concentrate most on providing good relevant (contextual) content.
There are ways to rank higher. Is it as easy as 1, 2, 3?

Create quality copy with keyword(s) on the page along with associated anchor text links.
Get good links.
What Ben talked about in this session.

LDA - Topic Modeling & Analysis
Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in layman's terms, translates to "topic modeling." In search geek terms, LDA is the following formula:

(Did you digest that? Don't worry; Mozzers groaned and laughed at the same time. PLUS: Scientist Hendrickson delivered this session after lunch!)
LDA Simplified - Here is Ben's way of explaining topic modeling:

(Okay, I was once proud that I got an A in Logic and Combinatorics - discrete math/set theory. However, that computer science class now feels like basic math compared to this formula.)
It made more sense when Rand Fishkin joined Ben on stage and when Todd Freisen moderated and deciphered during Q&A. (Manuela Sanches of Brazil was sitting next to me and said that Ben's "presentation needed subtitles!")
The objective of LDA, from my deciphering of Greek, is to understand how Google is using semantic contextual analysis combined with other signals, to define topics/concepts. It's how Google analyzes the words on a page to determine the "set" to which a word belongs - how relevant a search query is to pages in its database.
For example: How does Google assign relevance to the word "orange" on a page? They determine orange is related to the fruit set or to the color set by page context.
LDA Defined:
"Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al, 2003) is a powerful learning algorithm for automatically and jointly clustering words into "topics" and documents into mixtures of topics. It has been successfully applied to model change in scientific fields over time (Griffiths and Steyver, 2004; Hall, et al. 2008).

A topic model is, roughly, a hierarchical Bayesian model that associates with each document a probability distribution over "topics", which are in turn distributions over words."
Bayesian - ah, a term I recognize!! Bayesian spam filtering is a method used to detect spam. It draws off a database and learns the meaning of words. It's "trained" by us when we mark an email as spam. It looks at incoming emails and calculates the probability that the content of an email is contextually spammy.
I found a PowerPoint presentation about Bayesian Inference Techniques by Microsoft Research from 2004 that presents the possibility of using LDA. Go to slide 54 and read:
"Can we build a general-purpose inference engine which automates these procedures?"
Microsoft has been looking at LDA models. Do search engines use it as one of their primary methods?
Ben sampled over 8 million documents with approx. 1,000 queries. He believes Google is using LDA topic modeling to determine (learn) what words mean by their associations with, relevance to, other words on the page. (Other factors are included.) Ben called the results a "co-occurrence explanation" that use a "cosine similarity."
SEO Takeaway:

Results that are higher in Google SERPs, in general, have more topical content.
Search engines do APPEAR to apply semantic analysisÂ… when indexing a page and determining the intent of the words on the page.

Rand tweeted an explanation (in 140 x 4) as follows:

Dana's LDA Catwalk Metaphor for Topic Modeling:
Imagine the words on your page as walking down the fashion runway in Paris. Your keyword phrase is "dressed" in semantic accessories, words that correlate to and dress up your topic. Associated words bring meaning to and highlight the fashion model's outfit. Adjectives, modifiers and synonyms are like jewelry, hats, and shoes. The combination can transform your base layers (your target terms) from casual or conservative business attire into a sexy night-on-the-town ensemble.
Combinations and permutations of words on a page "dress" your skinny or curvy fashion model. Relevant words provide Google with an image of what she is wearing and the catwalk upon which she struts. LDA refers back to what Google already knows about these "accessories" (words) and their previous association with the topic terms related to fashion.
Enter Topical Ambiguity - I just broke the "rules" for context with the catwalk metaphor by referring to modeling in two contexts on this page:

I used "modeling" terms that relate to the "fashion industry" set.
The catwalk metaphor is irrelevant content that is off-topic for discussing "LDA topic modeling."

Google Algorithm Exposed?
Ben clearly said that LDA is an ATTEMPT to explain the SERPs. His scenario, a quote from his presentation slides, follows:
One of us needs to implement it so we can:
1) See how it applies to pages
2) See if it helps explain SERPs
One-two-three-not-it.
LDA is not LSI.
There were some tweets claiming SEOmoz was bringing back LSI or snakeoil. Ben clarified that LDA is not LSI, which deals more with keyword density. He explained that he is NOT talking about loading keywords on a page but about the relevance of the topics within the page. He said that:
"LSI doesn’t have the same bias toward simple explanations. LSI breaks down as you try to scale up the number of topics."
The LDA tool deals with context, semantic relevancy, not density - in addition to some other random factors. Example:
If SEOmoz has a page all about "SEO" and "tools," and there is another word on the page that can be explained by a word that is more related to SEO topic, then the related word would be used. Meaning, "seo tools" doesn't have to be repeated over and over, and the related word would be interpreted by Google as being relevant.
Ben, who appears to have the brain of a search engine, noted that it "appears" LDA is what Google is heading for in the near future. He said (paraphrased):
If they are not doing it, they seem to be doing something that has the same output. They are probably already using it.
Rand deciphered:
It’s a super weird coincidence if Google is not using it.
Are On-Page Signals Stronger than Links?
Are we heading toward more emphasis of on-page topic modeling? I'm not an IR geek, but I do plan to spend more energy focusing on understanding how search engines retrieve informaton. We are dealing with a semantic Web. LDA may indicate that good old on-page optimization sends stronger signals than links.
SEOmoz's LDA tool attempts to show how relevant content is to a chosen keyword. It computes relevance of queries.
The following shows how relevant SEOmoz's Tools page is to Aaron Wall's SEO Book Tools page.

The score at the top is an indicator of how relevant the content on that page is according to LDA.

Aaron's content is 72%* relevant for the query "seo tools."
SEOmoz's tools page is 40%* relevant.

*NOTE: (I inserted the logos.) You can run the same pages and get different results. The results are similar in that SEO Book always scored as more topically relevant, but the percentage varies. Is this the random Monte Carlo algorithm at work? Ben?
Mozinar Question:
"How do we execute this for SEO?"
Ben's Answer:
"I don't actually do SEO. I write code."
That's up to us, the SEOs, to play and test in our Google playground.
Use the tool to decide if you can win with LDA to optimize your on-page signals.

Use the LDA Topics Tool to return words that could be used on a page for a query.
Then determine who is ranking for that term.
Simply write content that is highly on-topic based off the findings you observe.

If you are not performing that well in the SERPs, think about classic on-page optimization. In the example above, rather than putting another instance of "seo tools" on the page, LDA shows there are better ways to tell Google that you are about that topic. The tool provides a way to measure that.
IMPORTANT: There is a threshold at which too many related words will appear as too spammy. LDA is not something to be used to game Google.
Test the LDA Tool out for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
***
DISCLAIMER: I'm not claiming this methodology has uncovered hidden SEO treasures. Time, testing and playing around with a new SEOmoz tool while observing the SERPs will reveal the answer. In the meantime, I'm going to dress up my pages and accessorize them with relevant terms that make them dazzle so they look good climbing the Google catwalk.
Taken from SEOmoz.com

Why Most Conference Presentations Suck

2010-11-11T15:23:00.000+05:00

Normally, I tend towards the uncontroversial when I write. I haven't been the author of many posts that have caused debate.
But I've had enough. I need to speak up.

Most conference presentations suck

There. I said it.
I remember being amazed (and, back then, pretty heartened) when I went to my first SEO conference and realised I already knew most of what was being said. Amazement turned to disappointment at my second conference, which was billed as "Advanced" and where the same old basics were trotted out by too many of the speakers.
Since then, I've been to hundreds of presentations. I've learnt a lot, but from a surprisingly small proportion of them. (Thank you to those speakers who consistently turn out the excellent stuff!).

I'm no exception

This is as much a criticism of myself as anyone else. Looking back, there are some presentations I've given that make me cringe now (especially early ones). Early on in my speaking career, it wasn't necessarily that I phoned them in. I was suitably scared / motivated to do a good job - I think I just didn't know how. More recently, I think it's probably happened when I agreed to talk on a subject I didn't really know enough about. I'm definitely trying to learn that lesson.
So before I go any further, if you've had to sit through one of my presentations and learnt nothing, I'm sorry.
If it happens in future, email me and tell me (my contact details are easy to find and always on my last slide).
I'm a strong believer in the idea that you should praise in public and criticise in private so I'm not asking you to tear presentations apart on Twitter. I'd love it if we saw more strong praise of great presentations, and more honest private feedback to speakers and organisers when they haven't delivered the goods.

Basic has its place

Before I go any further, I wanted to point out that I am often called upon to give "SEO 101" type presentations and these wouldn't teach any of you anything. I hope this doesn't mean that they are bad presentations. It's all about knowing the level of the audience I guess. This rant is squarely aimed at "advanced" presentations of one form or another.

Delivery is important, but it's not a substitute for content

If you start googling "how to give a great presentation", you'll find masses of advice on slide design, how to speak at the right speed, the kind of opening line to use, what to wear etc. All of this stuff can help, but I would ~~urge~~ implore you to work harder on the other axis. Make the content kick-ass and I'll listen to you even if you mumble at your feet in a monotone looking like a scarecrow. (Yes, I know I talk too quickly when I present. One day I'll fix that).

I do like listening to great speakers and entertaining presentation does improve things, but there are better places than SEO conferences to go for stand-up comedy, so generally, I'm there to learn things. You can get away with slightly weaker content if your delivery is awesome but please remember this highly scientific chart:

And you know what? I don't even care if it's a sales pitch if you are teaching me stuff. It sets the bar higher and I'm more likely to criticise you if you pitch your own stuff without teaching me anything, but if you do teach me stuff, you can bet I'm going to check out whatever you're hawking.

By content, I mean new stuff

In the past, just to avoid embarrassing myself, I have:

Learnt new things (this was about how to do first touch tracking in Google Analytics):

Carried out research (this slide shows a correlation I established between search volume for the 2006 world cup and the 2010 world cup before this year's competition started - it was part of a methodology for forecasting search volumes that haven't happened yet):

And published data (this is actually one of Tom's slides):

Don't worry about being too advanced

That's what Google is for. Give me the ideas and the data that I couldn't get anywhere else. If there's terminology I'm not familiar with or you skip over something too quickly, I can easily do my own research. But please don't spend half an hour telling a room full of experts what Google Insights is.

Why should you bother?

At the Seattle mozinar, I gave a presentation on "how to pitch SEO". One of my core themes was that the best way to win business is to avoid competitive pitches by giving yourself an unfair advantage. Being known for being smart is one of those advantages. If people get to know you through learning from your presentations, you will find yourself in a disproportionate number of uncompetitive pitches... Just sayin'.

Recipe for success: Speakers

At Distilled, I have been thrilled to see great first-time presentations from our guys - this isn't something that only comes with experience. For example, Sam's Advanced Keyword Research presentation at SMX London was more highly rated than those of many more experienced speakers including mine. In advance of the show, Sam asked Tom and I to run through our secret recipe. It's actually pretty simple - just follow these steps:

Only agree to speak if you actually know the subject and have something new to say
Ask yourself what you can give away in your talk that will be new for the majority of the audience
What action can people take as a result of your talk?
Be prepared to do work / research to discover or demonstrate your new stuff
Unless you are an incredibly gifted public speaker, practice before the event. There's a huge difference between preparing the slides and giving a great talk. Although I truly believe that content > delivery, it's worth working on the delivery at least a bit! Check out Lisa Barone's post last week about How To Rock Your Presentation for more great presentation delivery recommendations.

If you need a little bit more incentive to be awesome, I've found that having a head to head competition and then a vote at the end of your session (thanks Rand!) is a good way to make you up your game.

Recipe for success: Organisers

This rant is mainly aimed at speakers, who I think are the primary culprits, but for organisers, while I realise that larger conferences especially don't want to micro-manage every session the way Rand and I have been for the Pro training seminars, can I beg for one small thing?

Don't invite speakers back if they didn't add value last time

Everyone runs those follow-up surveys and knows which speakers were loved by the audiences and who phoned it in. Please stop inviting people back if they don't want to teach things to the attendees. [Rand wrote a whole post a while back with his thoughts on this from an organiser's perspective].
Rand and I actually tend to harangue our speakers with instructions a little bit like those above asking them to bring their 'A' games. Beyond a certain point, it hopefully gathers momentum because no-one wants to be the guy giving the sales pitch when everyone else's presentation is rocking. At the beginning of September (almost two months before the show), I had a call with every speaker for the London Pro seminar to help shape what they were going to talk about and make sure that they are bringing their secrets. It's not too late to get in on the action and see the result of all that hard work:

There are still tickets left for the London Pro SEO seminar

It's lucky that we have a bigger venue this year. We passed last year's total (sold out) sales a few weeks ago and unfortunately all the VIP breakfast tickets are gone, but there are still tickets left at the time of writing. Like last year, we anticipate that there will be a rush of bookings as the date approaches so it is likely that we will sell out. If you are wanting to come and see me put my money where my mouth is (yes, I'm feeling the pressure a little bit after writing this) don't leave it too late to book:

The Details:
Where: The Congress Centre in London's West End
When: October 25th and 26th
Price: £699 +VAT

Taken from SEOmoz.com

Yahoo is now Powered by BING!

2010-11-10T16:03:00.001+05:00

Finally Yahoo is powered by Bing. Its mean on checking some results on Yahoo you will find search results of Bing Search Engine.On searching “south african fur seal” on Yahoo and Bing following results have been found.

Yahoo Search is Powered by Yahoo

Pics taken from Atif Zain.com

Bing Showing similar results on Yahoo

At the start of this year Yahoo and Microsoft announced their mutual operation for Yahoo Search. In last month Yahoo started showing 25% results from Bing Search in US regions. Now they are showing Bing powered results in more areas as well, like I find it at Pakistan.

Yahoo also mention this collaboration in footer of Yahoo search page where you can find “Powered by Bing” caption. Well its look a like end of typical YAHOO search which is the 2nd largest search engine. Now we have to see what impact will be happen on website like AliBaba.com and others which was well ripped in Yahoo and as compare to it have very low ranking in Bing.com.

How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker

2010-11-10T10:57:00.002+05:00

Today I want to talk about tracking organic ranking in Google Analytics. Previously, we were able to determine the page from which a Google organic click was coming from (detailed on the Distilled blog by Will Critchlow). This was nice because we could append this to the end of our keywords in Google Analytics for some interesting data (André Scholten's post at Yoast.com has a step by step) as seen below.

Image courtesy of Yoast.com
This solution provides limited utility, and if you're like me, you implemented it, maybe checked it out once in a while, but never really turned this into actionable or otherwise meaningful data. I'm going to detail how rank tracking in Google Analytics can be made a lot more useful thanks to custom variables and a change in Google's referring URLs. But first...

Some History

When Google began testing an AJAX search interface in early 2009 there was a flurry of concern that it could mean the end of traditional rank tracking, web analytics packages, and I'm sure someone said SEO was dead, too. The concern wasn't without merit; Google was serving results in AJAX with the URL pattern as http://www.google.com/#q=keyword, and most analytics packages ignored the hash and everything after.
Fast forward to September 8th, when Google introduced Google Instant. The AJAX SERP usage had been steadily increasing over time, but shot up in usage when Instant was rolled out. Fortunately for Omniture, WebTrends, and other third party analytics packages, Google worked out a way to pass the referrer information from the SERPs, rank tracking still works, and I'm still working as an SEO in a living industry.
As it turns out, Google includes even more information in the AJAX SERPs than they previously did, including one really interesting parameter: "cd=". The cd= parameter contains the exact ranking position of the search listing, which makes for some really awesome possibilities, especially when paired with Google Analytics' custom variables.

Why Custom Variables?

Custom variables are a bit of an enigma to even advanced Analytics users. I'll admit that I never really made much use of them in the past. You'll often see examples where custom variables are used to track logged in vs. unlogged in users, which is definitely a great use. Rob Ousbey's 6 cool things YOU can do with custom variables is a good set of examples to get your feet wet.
In André Scholten's example above we're using Google Analytics user defined value, isn't that just as good a custom variable? Well, the difference depends on how you intend on using your data. With custom variables, you're granted much more flexibility within Google Analytics for slicing and dicing data. For instance, through the use of either custom reporting or advanced segments with custom variables, I can pretty easily track how much revenue a keyword has brought in when ranked in the 2nd position, as opposed to the 4th. While this may be possible with the user defined variable, it would require quite a bit of work after an excel data dump.
Now, let's get to business:

The How

Getting this properly set up was remarkably easy for me, and I have so very little programming knowledge, so I would imagine most wouldn't have much issue. I used PHP, as I was working with a WordPress site, but I'm sure you crazy hackers can do the same in most any language.

Step One - Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

I used this snippet to do this.

<?php preg_match("/cd\=(\d+)/",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $matches);$str = $matches[0];preg_match("/(\d+)/",$str,$matches);$rank = $matches[0] ?>

Please don't make fun of my hacky coding
This assigns the cd= value to the $rank variable. We'll reference this in...

Step 2 - Call cd= Value in our Google Analytics snippet

Now, we want to insert the custom variable call between the setAccount and trackPageview lines in our Analytics snippet (shown below using the asynchronous code):

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Rank','$rank',2]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);"

We've set the custom variable slot to 1, and the scope to the session-level (the last argument, set as 2). If you are already making use of custom variables, be sure to not overwrite a previously occupied slot. For more information on how the custom variable is formatted, see Google's help page on the topic.

Step 3 - Create an IF Statement so the CustomVar isn't Called Every Time

We only want to include this line when we have a cd= value, otherwise every new click will overwrite the last value. To do this, I used the following IF statement, again coded in PHP. This is the final step, and the complete Google Analytics snippet:

<?php if ($rank != '' ) {echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Rank','$rank',2]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);";echo "\n"; }else {echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);"; }echo "\n";?> (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();</script>

Here we're checking if $rank has a value. If it does, we'll include the custom variable call with that $rank value, if not, we'll print the Google Analytics code as normal. Also included in the above are some line breaks (\n), so that the code formats correctly.

The Most Important Part - Analyzing Our Data

What's the point of going through all this effort if it doesn't provide you with any analytical insight? None, of course. But this rank tracking solution has some added benefits over the traditional rank tracking software that may be really useful to some SEOs. These include:

Rankings by City, Region, Country

Traditional rank tracking software suffers in that its ranking results are dependent on the location of the servers. With custom variable rank tracking and a little spreadsheet pivot table magic it's pretty easy to get your site's rank for any location.

Historical, Definite, Data

Once this is properly set up you've got access to definite rankings within your Analytics data from that point on. So as holiday season 2011 rolls around, its easy enough to review where your site ranked during the 2010 holidays, helping to set budgets, goals, and expectations.

Bounce Rate/eCommerce Data/etc. by Rank

Whatever your KPI, you can compare it against search ranking. Reporting the ROI of link building efforts or on site optimization becomes much easier when you've got rankings included in your dataset.
Some of the quick ideas I had around this include:

Average rank over time for top 50 keywords
Average rank over time for 4+ word keyphrases
Bounce rate for 2nd+ page clicks
Revenue % increase for Keyword X when ranking increases from 2 to 1

I should note that getting averages is a lot easier in Excel with a pivot table, as seen below:

This can also be adjusted to show your minimum rank, as well

Creating Custom Reports and Advanced Segments

Custom variables aren't included in the default reports for Google Analytics, so unless you do all your work in Excel, you'll probably want to create some custom reports or advanced segmentation to work with the data directly in Analytics.
Advanced segmentation is great for this data. Below is the function one would use to track rankings between 11 and 15, which might be strong candidates for on-page optimization that could provide the boost onto the first page:

You can apply this particular advanced segment with this link.

The Downsides

The most obvious downside is that you're only receiving a ranking when a listing is being clicked on, so for very small sites there may be limited utility. Ranking data will be spotty past the 2nd page, as well.
Additionally, the AJAX SERPs are not being served to all users in all locations. Small sample size warning here, but I'm seeing about 40% of organic Google traffic coming from the AJAX SERPs (done through a simple calculation of visits with our custom variable divided by total Google organic visits over the same time period). Michael Whitaker is seeing this number over 50% in his data. This number is likely going to increase as Instant is rolled out further.
The #-pack local listings can really throw things off, too. If a particular query gets one of these to start the SERP, the cd= continues after:

Lastly, there does exist the possibility that Google discontinues its use of the cd= variable for whatever reason.

Go Analyze

I hope some of you can make some good use out of this functionality. I've only had it installed on my sites for a short time, but I've definitely found it interesting to play around with. If you don't already have Excellent Analytics installed in your Excel I would highly recommend doing so, even if you don't implement this tracking, and especially if you do.
I'd like to thank Michael Whitaker of Monitus for his help. He's been installing this setup for his clients for a bit now. Monitus offers proper eCommerce Google Analytics installation for Yahoo! stores, which is surprisingly difficult without Monitus.
If you've got any other ideas for working with this data, sound off in the comments or let me know on Twitter . Personally, I'm really excited to have this data rolling in and the possibilities are nearly endless. I'll be sure to report any interesting ways to manipulate the data in future blog posts. Cheers!
Originally taken from http://www.SEOmoz.com

Content Optimization: Revisiting Topic Modeling, LDA & Our Labs Tool

2010-11-10T10:54:00.002+05:00

Many times as SEOs, we think about the "on-page optimization" process as simply following the best practices for placing our targeted keywords (and possibly, some variations of them) on the page. My previous blog post about Perfecting Keyword Targeting covers this in some detail. But, we also know that search engines aren't nearly naive enough to care only about the individual terms/phrases that the user queries. For years, search engines have been doing work with topic modeling (this paper from Berkeley researchers does a nice job exploring the concept as it relates to IR).
While it's challenging as SEOs to know where this work has taken them, we can certainly assume that the words and phrases you use on a page likely influence its ranking, as well as how and where you use the targeted query term.
For those of you who've been following our blog posts about research into this area over the past few months, you know we've hit some stumbling blocks. Initially, we thought the free LDA Labs Tool had an extremely high correlation with Google.com rankings (higher even than most link-based metrics). However, after analyzing some results from others who ran tests, we saw biasing in our results and went back to the drawing table.
At the PRO Training Seminar in London, Ben Hendrickson shared our latest findings - much more conservative numbers, but consistent with the data and defensible.

As you can see, these numbers are lower than our previous datapoints, and the true correlation of the tool in its current format (which has been re-engineered) is now between the "LDA even vs. odds" and "LDA w/ bias" numbers. This makes our version less predictive than, say, # of links or linking root domains, but more predictive than any other on-page factor we analyzed (save features around exact/partial keyword match domains).
Since this research and the tool was released, people have been asking me "How Do I Use This?" Luckily, this video put together from WebProNews is an excellent resource to help answer that.

More WebProNews Videos

If you've got more questions about LDA, the tool, topic modeling in general or anything else related, feel free to ask below. We're still very excited about this topic, and while Ben is taking a short sabbatical until January (his first vacation in 3 years), I'm happy to help where I can. We hope that sometime in Q1 of next year, we'll have even more work on our LDA model, better correlations, and recommendations of specific words/phrases that may be adding to or hurting scores.
p.s. For those who have been following the posts closely, you may have noticed that a number of individuals who often don't like the work SEO publishes were particularly vehement in criticizing our LDA research. I don't have much that can address those concerns other than to say - as before, we're still in the early stages of work on this. It's very challenging to do from a coding, mathematics and analysis perspective, so more polished results may still be several months away.
We've been excited to have others analyze our work (which is how we discovered our initial error on the correlation numbers) and we look forward to more people experimenting with it. We do feel, however, that despite the criticisms, we're going to continue conducting and presenting research like this, with similar caveats. If you believe our work is wrong, misguided or non-useful, there's certainly no obligation to use it. We can promise that until we feel very strongly about our research, evidence and the value it provides, we won't be making this a formal part of our Web App, PRO tools or best practices. But, in the meantime, for those who like playing on the cutting edge, we feel it's part of our core values to continue working and sharing in areas like this.

An Email from SEOforums.org - Do you want a live Chatbox?

2010-11-10T10:46:00.001+05:00

Thats what i got few days before.

> I've been playing about with a live chatbox for the last few days for the forum - and its ready!
>
> My only concern is whether it will be of use to you, our members - or if it will just degenerate into a spamfest?
>
> I would love to hear your feedback (on Twitter), please follow me on
> http://twitter.com/seoforumsorg
> and mention @seoforumsorg in your comments on whether we should include a chatbox.
>
> IF the feedback is positive, we will try it out for a week or two.
> If nobody is interested, I guess we won't!
>
>
> Thanks for your help guys,

> http://seoforums.org

Posted via email from imranuh's posterous

Linkscape Update, New Stats and an API Dashboard

2010-05-28T20:29:00.001+05:00

Update: Why did my Domain Authority change?
In this index update we re-calibrated our Domain Authority metric to better reflect the relationships between all domains on the Internet. This means that many websites' Domain Authority (DA) changed.
Not to worry! If your domain authority went down, so did all of the other domains that had similar link profiles before the index update. (Don't think about it like something bad happened to your site, think about it like we changed how we view the entire Internet) You can read more about why we did this in the section below.

The good news is, we have an index update for you! And it's a couple of days sooner than previously announced. The bad news is, things were, as you might have noticed, a little rocky this morning. We had more traffic to the API than ever before, and, through the magic of being a scrappy startup, we all jumped into action. Fortunately, through the magic of Amazon Web Services, we've quickly increased our infrastructure and are serving better than ever. I do apologize for any issues this might have caused.
I've got a few things to say in this post, so you can skip forward if you like:

Page Authority and Domain Authority Change

We've gotten a lot of feedback about Page Authority and Domain Authority. We're excited about these metrics and are using them to power a lot of what we do: sorting links, crawl selection, keyword difficulty. But lately, it seemed as if things were getting a little... clumpy. We were packing our numbers too closely together to give a real sense of the spread in authority over the web. I'll defer to Ben and Rand, who are working on this a lot, but just to give you a taste:

As you can see, we've pulled apart a lot of great sites. This spread, for example SEOmoz with a PA of 80 and Amazon.com with a PA of 89, better reflects different authorities.
This will have effects across tools, including Keyword Difficulty. So take a minute to check those out and make sure that what we're showing you matches your intuition.

New API Dashboard

It's actually very fitting that we should have more traffic than ever before, because we've been hard at work on better serving one of our biggest API consumers: You! Today we're launching our SEOmoz API Dashboard.

This dashboard will be the place to go to manage your SEOmoz API account. Right now we're including all of your API usage. This gives you visibility into your API consumption, critical if you're on the paid plan. And if you're on the free plan this gives you some idea of the usage of your tools. As we improve what we offer both in the API and to support application development, you'll see more and more here.

Stats on Nofollow vs Rel=Canonical

Last week I had a great chat with Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting. We talked a little bit about the usage of nofollow and rel=canonical over the last year (a big year for both!), but I didn't have anything concrete to share at the time. I dug into it and it's pretty interesting:

As you can see, rel=canonical is really taking off. Since we started keeping really good stats on its usage in our data, it's grown in usage by about 50%, in just six months! We see rel=canonical being used more than either internal or external nofollows. And internal nofollows have fallen off quite a bit about eight months ago, but are reasonably stable since then.
My hypothesis (without supporting data at the moment), is that two mindsets are winning:

use rel=canonical right away
if rel=nofollow is working leave it

I'll leave it to the expert SEOs to debate this (in the comments, please!), but that could well be sound advice.

Index Update Stats

Here are some charts and graphs of the data we've updated since last month.

We're staying on course with our current update rate for pages. We've got updated information for about 43 billion pages.

And we have a corresponding update for links to and from those pages.

We've got two focuses for our data updates:

Get those domains which we used to think about as niche
Get deep on those domains that are highly authoritative

This is actually a big initiative we've been working on this year. And we're already seeing great improvements to our data quality.
I hope you enjoy the data. As always, feedback is much appreciated!

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Futuristic Ways of Creating Automated Link Building Tools for SEO

2010-05-28T20:15:00.001+05:00

Rand recently asked you all for feedback about improving the blog. The two areas that you asked us to write about more were linkbuilding and tools. In a shameless populist move, I thought I'd write a post about tools for automating (bits of) linkbuilding.
Recently, I keep coming across ways that we are actually living in the future. I don't mean the jet-pack-wearing-holidaying-in-space-hover-car future, more the holy cow, you can actually run select * from internet where... kind of future.

Yes, I know it's not as cool.
I believe that technical skills are important in SEO. There are plenty of non-technical roles in SEO agencies or teams (especially on the creative side of things) but if you have ambitions to lead teams, set strategy and run SEO projects, you kinda need to understand how the internet works under the covers. For me, that means knowing how to build stuff - even though I'm not a developer and should never be let near production code, I like to understand the concepts and principles. To keep on top of things, this means occasionally getting my hands dirty and building stuff. It's fun. I can highly recommend it.
In order to bring you something useful and actionable, I decided to pick something simple that my team wanted, something to help with linkbuilding, but also something I could put together relatively quickly. I chose to build a prototype tool for monitoring the web for mentions of a website that don't link to that website. Hopefully it's pretty clear how this could be helpful - but just to give one example - if you are running a PR campaign, you may well get coverage that doesn't link to you, but if you just drop the journalist a line straight after publishing, they can often get a link included. For those of you who think better in pictures, here is a diagram of what I mean, with my limited drawing skillz:

I recently wrote about some moderately technical tools (e.g. Mozenda, Smartsheet) in my post on data visualization techniques. The tools I'm going to cover today are even more technical and advanced - but they are also infinitely more flexible. I don't want to scare you into thinking this is something you can't do yourself though. I learnt all the techniques and tools below and finished my mini-project from scratch in 2 hours. In fact, it'll take me longer to write the post than it did to do everything in it. If I can do it, so can you.
At 1pm UK time on Thursday 15th April, I tweeted this:

Why those particular tools? Well:

xpath allows you to navigate and select elements and attributes from an XML document (including HTML). This gives you a really simple way of pulling information out of HTML pages
- How this helps my mini-project: I get a straight-forward way of pulling all links out of a page in order to check whether the page in question links to you
YQL (Yahoo! Query Language) is the select * from internet where ... magic I referred to earlier. It provides an API that you can use to grab pages, RSS feeds and a whole load of other cool stuff
- How this helps my mini-project: with one line of code, I can grab RSS feeds of mentions (for my proof-of-concept, I used a Google Alerts RSS feed) as well as grabbing the pages referenced in order to run xpath on them (did I mention that YQL supports xpath?)
Google App Engine allows you to deploy web applications without worrying about most of the usual environment, server and configuration issues. It is also a way of dropping buzzwords into your conversation by deploying your newly scalable application to the cloud. FTW
- How this helps my mini-project: I didn't want to assume any prerequisites like having servers at your disposal, but I also didn't have time to set anything up from scratch. App Engine is free for small-scale use, and I went from not having an account to deploying my code in under 2 hours
Python is one of the two programming languages supported by Google App Engine. The other being Java. I know a tiny bit of Java from years ago, whereas I didn't even know Python gives indentation semantic meaning before I started my project
- How this helps my mini-project: I needed some kind of programming language to enable me to build loops, display the output etc. and I needed to pick one that I (a) didn't already know and (b) could be used with App Engine

Getting Going

Before I start, let me warn you to read the disclaimer at the end of this post: I build a prototype / proof of concept here and you should definitely not rely on my code. Use at your own risk!
My 'specification' for the project was:

Grab mentions from a Google Alerts RSS feed (I chose to hardcode 'SEOmoz' [RSS link] into my proof-of-concept)
For each mention, see if there is a link to any page on http://www.seomoz.org
Output a list of mentions that don't link

Pretty simple, right?
With the clock ticking, I started by downloading the install files for App Engine and Python while reading up on YQL.
The Python download was taking a while, so I spent the first half hour building the YQL queries I needed on the console.
To grab the Google Alerts, I used:
select * from feed where url='http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/02091889458087148316/10137124638087203861'
and for each page in that list, I could grab the list of links using:
select * from html where url='<target URL>' and xpath="//a[starts-with(@href,'http://www.seomoz.org')]"
The xpath there probably needs a bit of explaining - I built it using a combination of the basic xpath documentation linked above and the ever-awesome stackoverflow. You can consider it in three sections:

//a means select all 'a' (anchor) elements (i.e. links)
//a[@href] means select all href attributes of all links
//a[starts-with(@href,'http://www.seomoz.org')] means select all href attributes of all links that start with http://www.seomoz.org

By the time I'd cracked that, my downloads had finished and I set about getting my environment ready using the App Engine quick start guide.
I also had a lucky break at about this point. I discovered that there is a YQL library for Python. Holy awesome batman! I figured it was going to be pretty easy to build something in Python to query the YQL API, but I didn't realise it was going to be as easy as yql.Public().execute(query). Sweet!
It took me a while to work out how to import third party libraries into my App Engine environment (turns out you just grab the source code and include the folder in your application's root folder). My time was running out by this point. I was about halfway through my two hours and I hadn't yet written a single line of code.
Uh oh.

Writing Python Code

I'm not the right person to teach you how to write Python code. Especially because about 10 minutes before the end of my challenge, I realised I didn't know how to create an if statement. My approach to learning Python is not to be recommended; but there are loads of great tutorials out there. I really wish I could step through and explain my code line-by-line, but honestly? I'd probably just expose my horrific lack of knowledge.
[Want a link from SEOmoz? Understand Python? Write up an explanation for beginners, drop me a line and I'll link to it here. For bonus points, you could show how to improve my code ]. In the meantime, working through the code has to be (as my university lecturers used to say) left as an exercise for the interested reader.
All you really need to know is that in 33 lines of code (at the time of writing), I built my basic prototype. You can see the resulting code over at Google code.

The Outcome

With time running out, I clicked 'deploy' and.....
mentionmonitor
.... huh. That was easy.
OK, so I get time-outs / server errors from time to time and it's really only a proof-of concept at the moment (see below) but I still think it justified my tweet exactly two hours after the previous one:

Huge Caveats

My prototype is essentially just a proof-of-concept. Among loads of other things, note that it doesn't have:

Any error-handling
Much testing
Any documentation (including comments)

And that it does have:

Hardcoded variables
Massive limitations even given the hardcoding (only grabbing 10 results, for example)
No way of automating it or doing anything other than running it manually (though App Engine does provide simple ways of extending into this)

In its current form, it's not really useful for anything, but hopefully it will become interesting soon. If you want to build anything off it (or the ideas contained in it), I'd love to hear about it (but please bear in mind that it really is the definition of non-production-ready code, so if you do use it, you do so entirely at your own risk!).

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Cooking Up Great SEO: An Analogy in Photos

2010-05-28T20:10:00.005+05:00

I've long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There's a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO.
SEO, however, is incredibly difficult to understand and to explain. It's a thorn in the side of nearly everyone I talk to in our industry that they can't easily explain the concept and process of their work outside the web marketing and development communities. That's why I'm creating this post. If someone in your personal or professional life simply doesn't understand SEO, send them here. Hopefully, the silly pictures of me cooking up some pasta on a sunny Sunday can help to inspire that missing connection.

Sunday night's dinner tasted even better than it looked...
And for the SEOs reading this post who already know this process intimately, perhaps you can find some nuggets of information, or at least work up an appetite.

The Planning Process: Structuring and Improvising on a Recipe (or SEO Strategy)

Phenomenal dishes require two things - the right ingredients (which we'll discuss below) and the right strategy to prepare them together. Too much heat for too long and your food will burn. Too little salt and it won't carry any flavor.
SEO is remarkably similar; the wrong architecture can make it impossible for search engines to find your pages (see Site Architecture Issues to Avoid - as true today as in 2006 when it was written!). A bad implementation of duplicate content (whereby the same works appear on many pages - see the Illustrated Guide) can make the engines go crazy trying to figure out which page to rank in the results.
Careful planning, combined with precise implementation is the only way to ensure good results - in both cooking and SEO.
For my recipe, I knew that our guest for the evening, SEOmoz's COO & Blawger-in-chief, Sarah, loved braised lamb. And, perhaps not surprisingly since I'm married to an Italian, I love pasta. These, I thought, were two great tastes that go great together. I looked up some recipes and found a few terrific ones... But my plans changed when I got to the market.

Choosing the Right Ingredients

Great chefs don't plan a menu around a fixed menu, they visit and talk with their suppliers to understand what's fresh, what's good and what's great.
Likewise, no SEO worth their salt simply produces a website and a set of content without first discovering what their customers want. Google helps to make this easy with tools like Google Insights for Search, which allows us to see how many people are actually searching for, say...

Braised lamb's popularity wanes substantially in the summer each year
When a good SEO sees that some searches are more popular than others, he targets those keywords instead. When a good chef sees great food, he leaps at the same opportunity.

Goat shoulder straight from the farmer who raised them! How could I resist?
That's the great thing about bringing an open mind to the kitchen (or to the SEO process) - sometimes the tastiest things are the ones you never considered.
This process certainly doesn't stop at Goat meat (or at keyword demand). SEOs need to choose the right content management system, the right nvaigation structure and even the right marketing channel(s). I needed to choose the right wine:

Chianti, Nebbiolo, Barolo, Montepluciano, how can I choose?!
After a midday shopping extravaganza, I had my basic components and was ready to proceed:

Left to right: Goat shoulder, eggs, Sangiovese, semolina flour, carrots, celery, pancetta, onion, garlic, thyme, rosemary, sage, crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, flat-leaf parsley
Like the SEO who researches a market and discovers that opportunity lies in keywords and content he'd not previously considered, I was now faced with the prospect of cooking a meat I'd never prepared before.

Applying a Sound Technical Process

Talented chefs don't necessarily need the best ingredients or even the best equipment. They can make do in any environment. SEOs need to be equally flexible. We'd all love to be in professional kitchens with the freshest ingredients sourced from sublime locales, but we're often making do with someone else's 5-year-old implementation of second-rate SEO advice and a website design that was barely clinging to relevance in 1999.
Great processes in cooking, in SEO and in business across the board can help transform even the mediocre into something palatable.
In SEO, technique is of paramount importance. If you can't properly analyze a site's accessibility and identify the errors and opportunities, you'll always be working with one hand tied behind your back. Successful keyword targeting & on-page optimization are well documented practices and yet many SEOs fail to overcome this relatively moderate, achievable burden. Employing tactics like XML sitemaps, canonical URL tags, proper pagination systems, smart 301 redirects & rewrite rules are akin to adding ingredients to the pot in the right order, with the right heat in the correct proportions. You can mess up a few of these a little bit, but a big breakdown in any area makes for an inedible experience.

I don't claim to be a great chef by any means. In fact, much as with SEO, I've learned through trial and failure, through watching others do it right, by eating great meals prepared by great foodie friends and asking them their secrets and, most of all, through practice. My wife can attest to the hundreds of failures I've had over the years, just as my experience at SEOmoz has shown plenty of failures (e.g. up until today, we forgot to put any content on the new Keyword Difficulty Tool page for logged-out users, aka Googlebot - doh!).
But there are tactics and strategies that are tried and true as well as a sixth sense that both chefs and SEOs come to with time and practice. For example, in the top-right photo above, you can see how the onion has been pre-sliced such that horizontal slices now create a mirepoix-ready dice (I hated cutting onions until I learned that technique). In the center-right photo, you'll see a well made of flour with eggs neatly nestled inside, ready to be spun into a great pasta dough (try doing it on a mound of flour, but prepare for an eggy floor).
In SEO, the same principles hold true.
I no longer use ridiculously outdated metrics like keyword density in an attempt to add relevancy to a page. The days of building links through low quality directories are long since past. Even smart strategies like linkbaiting need updating to stay relevant and valuable (just as Julia Childs' recipes are still good, but can feel a bit dated). Applying smart tactics around microsites and domain authority, keyword cannibalization and multiple keyword targeting can mean the difference between a dish fit to be king of Google's rankings and one that suffers on the pauper's page 10 of results.

The Difference Between Good & Great

Sometimes, getting the basics right is good enough. For a dinner with friends, applying the tactics I know in the kitchen with some unique ingredients and a bit of elbow grease worked out just fine. But there's a huge gap between the meal I made and what great chefs are turning out in the world's great kitchens. This video is one of my absolute favorites to help illustrate the issue:
The NFL hires some of the fastest runners in the world to compete at the professional level. The difference between the player in the video (Jacoby Ford) and an average guy (Rich Eisen) is stunning to watch. The same holds true in cooking. My goat ragu with homemade orecchiette might impress my wife and Sarah (hopefully), but it won't hold a candle to what New York's Mario Batali or Seattle's Tom Douglas could put together.
Likewise, the SEO world's best and brightest can achieve results so astounding and impressive that they can scale businesses overnight. We may be a web-addicted, geeky, quirky bunch, but the range of talent varies just as far as in any other pursuit. A phenomenal SEO can build a true competitive advantage with their skills & knowledge by leveraging the best tools and data out there along with an unrelenting dedication to excellence.

An Analogy Taken Too Far

There's no doubt I've stretched this metaphor to the point of breaking, but hopefully it's been fun and valuable. I'll say just this one last thing on the subject:
To be truly great at any endeavor, individuals need to strive for perfection. Even the world's fastest athletes need to work on that sloppy toe scrape at the start of a race. The mindset and the discipline to learn all that we can about a subject and apply it in the smartest, best ways is what separates good from great in cooking, athletics, academics, programming and yes, SEO. Our field has "optimization" right in the acronym - it describes a profession built around to achieve perfection in spite of massive barriers - a set of unknowable algorithms, a constant moving target, financial & economic incentives for our competitors to outgun us not just the day of the race but every hour of each day.
If you're just learning about SEO, welcome to our tiny corner. We can be a scrappy, insular bunch at times, but we've got tons of heart and an incredible passion for this oft-neglected marketing discipline that's we can't wait to share.
If you've been doing this for years, I hope you'll stick around and share your tips on how to better dice an onion and achieve maximum carmelization on the goat. After all, a great meal is best shared with friends and family - and that's exactly what we're trying to build here at SEOmoz.

Goat meat falling off the bone, fresh pasta that's still al dente - what more can a man ask in life?

Apparently, nothing.
For those who are interested, you can see the full documentation (183 pictures from market to table) below:
p.s. A special and huge thanks to my lovely wife, Geraldine (who asks that in return, could we maybe link to her blog and help her SEO?) for the photography, and to SEOmoz's Sarah Bird (who joined us for dinner and helped make the pasta) for indulging me in such a geeky weekend activity.

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Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

2010-05-28T20:10:00.003+05:00

We all know that there’s gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. Avinash Kaushik affirmed recently at SMX Toronto, that the long tail provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail.

The problem is that the long tail is hard to track and analyze. For example, on a sample website, 35 keywords yield 5,000k uniques. The balance of 26,000 keywords yield an additional 35,000 uniques. Thirty-five thousand uniques is worth focusing on, but 26,000 keywords isn't manageable.

Here are a few solutions to help you cut this beast down to a manageable, profitable size.

Reduce long tail overkill by working with a combination of YOUR BRAND + KEYWORD. For the example site, on the same sample website, segmenting out key phrase sets that included the brand name plus a keyword yielded 340 super actionable, interest-and-probably-purchase-intent-driven, highly valuable keywords. Now, that’s manageable.
Tag Clouds:Use tag clouds to see how your site is performing against your prime keywords.
Try this: Check out this tag cloud based on search data for Blackberry from Compete. it's abysmal. Your site should do a lot better.

Tag Cloud 1: Shows all their data
Tag Cloud 2: Removes the word "blackberry" and shows the rest of the traffic (which is a tiny fraction of it all)
Keyword Trees: Try Juice Analytics' Concentrate Long-Tail Search Analytics. Plug in your brand and see the intricate relationships between your name and your prized keywords. You may find content development opportunities and gain a much better understanding of what your customers really want from you. Which brings us to…

Segmentation Analysis

The problem is that we quite frankly, have lots of stuff on our websites that no one wants and we don't spend enough time making what they do want accessible, interesting, and user friendly. The solution is to segment your customers, understand what they want and when they want it, and give it to them.

Take a look at the AMOUNT of info you have on your site and relate it to how many visitors actually PICK UP that info.

In that same session I mentioned above, Avinash provided a case study of a hospital website that contained huge volumes of content on healthcare. Come to think of it, do you know a hospital or clinic website that doesn’t? Isn’t that what web developers suggest hospitals and clinics do in order to attract ‘targeted traffic’?

By segmenting the type of pages of the site into areas such as forms, healthcare information, contact and about us pages, find-a-doctor pages, etc. they were able to determine how much traffic each type of content was receiving. The most visited pages were find-a-doctor pages and forms. By a huge margin, most of the content – and most of the expense, time, and effort – was focused on the healthcare content pages, which received almost no traffic (read: customer interest) at all.

Segment your website’s pages and track traffic by page type to provide a road map to improving the value of your website to your customers. Another good reason to dig more deeply into your analytics it to determine the first touch tracking. Most people don’t buy most products or services on the first visit . Here’s a cautionary tale that will help you do something about it to improve your conversion rates.
Expedia was pushing the BUY NOW message on almost all its pages when the story began. They segmented visits by keyword meaning and intent and changed the messaging on landing pages to adjust to the stage of sale and the desires of visitors. Then they provided services that supported the needs of visitors, including a "Save session" option and an offer to "email me if the price changes".

Using the "email me" option, Expedia increased their sales by $18,000,000 in three months. $18million! "Email me if..." gives you PERMISSION TO EMAIL your customers! It’s a marketer's dream. If you come away from this blog post with no other takeaway, take this with you:

Ask yourself this: How can I finish this sentence? "email me if..."
Then use it on your site to increase conversion rates even a few percent.

Posted via email from imranuh's posterous

The 8-Step SEO Strategy, Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs

2010-05-28T20:10:00.001+05:00

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Until recently I headed up technical marketing for Yahoo Media, where our competition was in verticals like news, sports, movies, games, and finance to name a few. In terms of online competitiveness, this is nothing to sneeze at. This is how I learned to base everything I do on strategy.
A LESSON LEARNED
Let me tell you a story. Early in my tenure at Yahoo we tried to get into the site dev process in the early stages in order to work SEO into the Product Recommendations Documents (PRD) before wireframing began. But as a fairly new horizontal group not reporting into any of the products, this was often difficult. Nay, damn near impossible. So usually we made friends with the product teams and got in where we could.

On one specific project, one of the SEOs on my team was brought in during the wireframe stage. The entire product team held SEO-specific meetings every week to go over specific recommendations, taking them very seriously, and leaning on every word our team said. We were thrilled. We were hailing their efforts, promising big wins for the relaunch, and even hyping up the launch and it’s projected SEO results in the company SEO newsletter.

Then the site relaunched. Initially we saw a drop. This is expected, especially when you relaunch an entire site of that magnitude. Three weeks passed, and results were flat. Five weeks passed, no upward trend. Three months passed and the product team stopped talking to us. Results never went back up.

Like many SEOs, I was hired with one vague responsibility: to set up an SEO program and achieve results. Like many SEOs, we jumped right in and started spewing out SEO audits, rewriting title tags, offering up link suggestions, rewriting URLs and so on. And like many SEOs we promised results. But what we didn’t do, until that fateful launch, was develop a comprehensive strategy. Sure, we did keyword research, we recommended partnerships and widgets and architecture advice, but we didn’t step back and take a good look at our target audiences, what sites were meeting their specific needs in search results, and what we specifically could build into the product that would be far more desirable than what everyone else had (not even thought of yet ideally) to make sure our ! entire site is superior, resulting in the inevitable stealing of search traffic from our competitors.

Instead, in this instance, we started at wireframe stage, plopping in keywords and meta tags. Of course, the site really needed those things, and although it launched technically “optimized”, it wasn’t enough to provide a better product than our top competitor(s). A product that people want to visit, revisit, email to friends, share on social networks, and link to more than our competitors. It wasn’t even enough to move up in the rankings.

From that point on, if a property didn’t consult our team during the early concepting stages of a project, we shied away from working on that project at all. And let me tell you, things got a lot better.

AN 8-STEP STRATEGY FOR YOU TO USE
Doing SEO strategy right takes targeted competitive insight and very specific recommendations, beyond any SEO basics rulebook. And ideally a good relationship with the product (site) manager.

Over the next few posts, and starting with this one, I’m going to share with you a detailed 8-step process for creating your own SEO strategy (what I often refer to as an SRD (SEO Research Document)), beginning with defining target audiences and taking it all the way through some fairly comprehensive competitive research, search traffic projections, content strategies, and specific goals and prioritizations. The steps behind this are something you can templatize and use for every project, and your boss/clients will love it, I promise.

I’ll be writing this as I go, so I’d be interested in hearing how you do strategy now, and if there are any types of things you’d like to see covered in the posts.

Strategy is the type of thing that moves you up to the next level of SEO superstar. Ready?

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AND THEIR INTERESTS

The first step in most marketing campaigns, Search Marketing included, is to start by defining your target audience. Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to.
Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations, and especially their needs (aka pain points). Check out usability.gov’s description of personas and how to do task analysis & scenarios for more details, or better yet, read Vanessa Fox’s upcoming book about personas related to search and conversion.
What we want to zero in on for our SEO Strategy are those pain points. What do they want? What are their needs that aren’t being met? Knowing these things will help us better define a content strategy and prioritize content to bring to the forefront.
There are two reasons we start with audience needs rather than jumping straight into keyword research

Content Strategy: You want to provide content and tools that are as relevant and useful as possible to your target audiences. This goes beyond regular SEO practices and into site strategy, although providing relevant, useful content in itself is linkbait. For example, let’s say I have a health site. I have several types of articles on health, drug information, and information on types of diseases and conditions. My angle on the site is that I’m targeting seniors. If I find out seniors are primarily interested in information on prescription drug plans and cheap Viagra, then I know that I want to provide information specifically on those things. This allows me to hone in on that market’s needs and deprioritize or bypass other content.
Targeted Keyword Discovery: Ideally you’ll want to do keyword research based on what the audience wants, not solely on what content the site already has (or plans to have sans audience targeting), which may be limited. I can do keyword research on health conditions and drugs (content I have on my site) and determine what the general population is searching for and optimize my current content, or I can cast my net wide and look at what my target audience wants first, then do my keyword research. You may find there are needs that your site is not meeting. Knowing my senior audience is interested in primarily in prescription drug plans and cheap Viagra, I can first make sure I’m providing that content, and then further determine the top keywords in these areas (in the next article Step 2), and use those terms in relevant and high visibility areas on my site.

This screenshot from my own Strategy template below simply suggests adding information on the target audience and what they want. Specifics are as good as the research you do, and will likely be very different with each project. Let your Strategy template give you breathing room.

So how do you get target market info? Lets start with these scenarios.
Scenario 1: I know who my target audiences are, but I don’t know their pain points:

Check out market research studies* online (you can find many free reports, but in-depth ones will usually cost you some money).
Conduct surveys of your audience by putting surveys on your site, sending emails, hiring survey professionals, or using survey sites like SurveyMonkey
Conduct focus groups – either on your own (if you can gather a group of people that you know are in your targeted demographic) or through a professional market research company
Use social media listening platforms that provide topic buzz volume and sentiment by demographic (Nielsen Buzz Metrics and NetBase are two options, although not cheap)
Forrester has a nifty little demographic profiling tool for social behavior online by audience

Scenario 2: I know my industry but don’t know whom exactly to target:

Check out industry research studies* online (you can find many free reports, but in-depth ones will usually cost you some money).
Search for industry statistics online. For example, here I found some great statistics on seniors that would allow me to better understand their current situation and what they need.
Hire a research company that specializes on your industry
Use social media listening platforms that provide topic buzz volume and sentiment by industry. I haven’t tested any social listening platforms with specific industries in mind to know exactly who provides demographic info based on industry. If you happen to know of tools that do this, please share with us in the comments.

*A few of the places you can find industry/market statistics:

Social media tools are especially useful if you’re planning on integrating search and social campaigns, as they are great research tools for both channels. Here’s a screenshot from NetBase that shows a demographics module on the left, as well as demographic results for the Crest Pro-Health brand being searched.

Research can get expensive when you really get into it, but you can find data if it exists on your industry/demographic, and you’re an experienced searcher. Be sure to check your sources, and don’t be afraid to email people and ask where they got their information if you need to.
Here’s what I found in free online info about my seniors audience in the Healthcare industry

Seniors’ specific conditions (source)
- Data found: Arthritis, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory disorders are some of the leading causes of activity limitations among older people. Alzheimer’s disease and dementia alone afflict 4 million Americans, a figure expected to increase 350% by 2050 if no cure is found.
- What this means to me: These are topics I will provide extra information and tools on
More senior women with disabilities than men (source)
- Data Found: Older women were more likely than older men to experience disability, 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively
- What this means to me: I will put a little more emphasis on targeting senior women on my site, with articles and tools specifically geared to women.
Top geographic locations where seniors are (source)
- Data Found: Florida, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia were the states with the highest proportions 65 and older in 2000: 17.6 percent, 15.6 percent, and 15.3 percent, respectively
- What this means to me: I can provide local information like pharmacies, doctors, caregivers, nursing homes, etc with those primary areas highlighted. I can also target PPC ads in those geographic locations.
Retirement info for single seniors (source)
- Data Found: Fewer [seniors] who are married with children from a previous relationship and single females have a clear vision of what they hope to experience in—and what they must do to prepare for—retirement.
- What this means to me: Provide advice column content on retirement, especially geared towards these seniors.
Caregivers are a secondary target (source)
- Data Found: 34 million adults (16% of population) provide care to adults 50+ years.
- What this means to me: I might want to consider a section and/or tools/and/or articles targeted at people taking care of seniors as well.
Potential advertising partners (source)
- Data Found: Forty-eight percent of caregivers reported using at least one of seven outside services (e.g., transportation, home-delivered meals, respite, etc.) to supplement their caregiving
- What this means to me: These outside services are good targets for partnerships and advertising for the site.

This was all free information I found online in less than an hour, that gives me some great ideas for content, partnerships and potential tools to build into my site to be relevant and useful to my target audience. Of course this is just some quick loose data, so I'll emphasize again: be careful where your data comes from (try to validate when possible), and think about how to use your data wisely.

START CREATING RECOMMENDATIONS IN YOUR STRATEGY DOCUMENT
Each of these discoveries is potential content or strategy, and should be written up in your SEO Strategy document. Provide as much data and reasoning as possible for why you recommend this content.
See the screenshot below for some of the sections for specific recommendations that you can add which will provide the meat of the document. Keep in mind this is a very flexible document – add recommendations that make sense (for example you may not always have specific design considerations for a project). Remember, it will be different every time you do it.

For each piece of content you are recommending, try to provide:

Backup Data: Provide information backing up why this content will appeal to your audience
Specifics: Be as specific as you can with your recommendations. For example if you’re suggesting partnering with meal home delivery sites, find out which ones are going to provide the most relevant info, at what cost if possible, and what the ideal partnership would look like for content and SEO purposes. Even provide contact information if you can.

This doesn’t have to be completely formalized right now because we’ll be getting even more insights to layer on top of this from our keyword research and competitive research in later steps. But add as much information as possible for now – you can always add more, change it or even change your mind and get rid of it later. We will finalize recommendations in Step 5.
NEXT STEP: KEYWORD RESEARCH
In the next article we’ll take a look at some methods for doing categorized keyword research that allows you to further prioritize content based on the popularity of categories of keywords

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SEOs and Developers: 5 Ways to Build The Relationship

2010-05-28T20:09:00.001+05:00

Who is the one person (or group of people) that you can't live without? Your developer. [Don't tell that to your spouse though.. eh?] As an SEO your life revolves around making changes to your site/application and getting all the pieces to fall into place. If you live in a perfect world, you have the ability to change all your on-page optimization including URL, Title tag, meta description, set up redirects, etc. But how many of us live in this fantasy la la land where everything is perfect? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say not very many of us.
We need our developers. As tough as it may seem some days (the feeling is more than likely mutual), it will make your life just a little easier if you can find a way to work with your development team. Whether that means just one person, or a team of 20 people, getting along with them will allow both of you to do a better job. (As a consultant you may not be able to get the same availability to talk to the client's developers but if you give your client these tips on how to work well with the dev staff, they'll thank you for it.)
So what are some things you can do to build a better relationship with your dev team? Here are 5 tips, in no particular order.

1. Show Them the Data

Remember the first time you showed your boss that traffic increased by 500% and the revenue for the month went up 200% just by removing those silly frames on the site? Well show that information to your development team as well! When a developer sees that a change that took a total of 2 hours including the push to production, brought in such an increase in revenue, he/she is going to see the value in their work. When you feel like the work you're doing, actually makes an impact on the company, your boss, your salary... you're more willing to help make additional changes in the future.

With a little digging, you’re sure to find something on your own site where you can show the developers exactly how much of an impact their work has had on the company’s success. Heck, throw them a party for reaching that monthly traffic goal that your sales team has been working towards but that your dev team knows nothing about. Data, data, data, that's where it's at!

2. Have Them Do it Themselves

I really love this one. Ask your development team to “SEO” their own websites. Most developers (or really anyone these days) will have some sort of website. Whether it’s a personal blog, they manage their aunt Betty’s jewelry store or they have their own business on the side, they usually have something.

As a developer when I was asked to make URL rewrite changes and create landing pages, etc. It bothered me that I felt like these changes were for nothing, just some marketing fluff that wasn’t really going to help much. But then I took my husband’s website and started to implement some of the same changes. I also did my own research and started learning SEO on my own (which is the way many developers work) and voila I drank the Kool-Aid quickly. As soon as my husband’s site started ranking really well for different terms, I wanted to learn more at work. I knew that the changes I made on this small site were fairly easy and I was targeting local and very long tail searches.

Show them the tools in your SEOmoz PRO account (or buy them their own!) and the other tools under your belt and let them learn on their own, with their own sites. Once they understand the basics (or the more advanced depending on their skill levels) and do their own research, you’ll find that it’s easier to 1) talk to them about SEO in general and 2) get them to make the necessary changes to the site.

3. Let Them Teach You

Sure, you’ve read all the blogs, you’ve done all the research, you’ve been to the conferences and you’ve seen it work on many websites. But you’re not the one changing the code (in most cases). When you go directly to a developer and ask her to set up seventy five 301 redirects because of xyz reason and you give them the code to do it… they’re going to laugh at you (I know I did… sorry Lindsay). Don’t tell a developer HOW to do something.

Help them understand WHY it needs to happen and ask them to figure it out. Remember they’re the expert when it comes to the technical side. Obviously there are many SEOs out there who are also very technical, and this puts you in a great position! You can use that to your advantage, but I’d still recommend letting the person in charge of making the actual development changes, figure the majority of it out on their own. If they seem to be running into roadblocks, point them in the right direction.

Let them teach you about the issues with your current platform, why certain SEO “best practices” simply can’t be done. Let them come up with relevant alternatives and figure out how to solve the problem without doing it the “normal” way. Your developer is wicked smart, let him show you just how well he can find a solution!

4. Find an Advocate

All you need is one. One person on the development team who has the ability to sway others as well. This doesn’t mean that you want someone who can persuade people into doing something that doesn’t make sense. But you want someone on your side, who understands SEO as well as the infrastructure of your website and the development team.
If you see one developer who seems to be somewhat interested in SEO, try to send them to a conference, preferably one with developer specific sessions. SMX often has a “Developer Day” or “Technical SEO Track” these are super valuable for your technical staff. (I went to SMX Advanced Developer Day a couple years ago and now I work for SEOmoz! Word.)
Sometimes pulling yourself out of the limelight of always being the one telling them what to do, and letting an "expert" (in quotes, because you're more than likely also an expert but they might not see that) explain the world of SEO to them, will help them to see the light.
However you can get that person on board, do it. Once you have an in, they can be your advocate. Believe me on this one, I was that developer!

5. If All Else Fails...

Buy them beer! Or coffee, or Jack Daniels, or pizza or whatever the heck it is that they like. Make friends, be nice, and go give your developers a hug. Tell them J.Lo sent you. Unless of course that is just too creepy and you could get sued for sexual harassment, in that case, stick with the coke. :)

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Why Won't Google Penalize/Ban the Site I Spam Reported?

2010-05-28T20:08:00.001+05:00

One of the most common complaints I've heard from webmasters and SEOs in the past 18 months has been around Google's inaction on spam reports. While the web spam team has been aggressive about asking webmasters to contribute via their spam report form (though they prefer the version in Webmaster Tools as this helps verify the identity of the reporter), they've (seemingly) been much more hands-off in penalizing sites that are engaging in these practices. Naturally, many SEOs feel that this validates the spam tactics, but there may be more to this story.
It's certainly true that 2-3 years ago, spam reporting that happened publicly in the SEO world - on prominent forums/blogs/sites - would often find themselves the victim of swift punishment. The SEO community has noticed that trend decline dramatically and at the same time seen (or, at least, felt) that Google's web spam team is no longer taking a significant quantity of actions directly against individual sites. Common webmaster complaints (and plenty of Q+A we get here at SEOmoz) goes something like this:
My competitor has clearly been buying links from low quality sources in obvious ways. I've spam reported them for the 5th time in the last 6 months, but they're still ranking. I'm thinking I should just give up and buy those same links so at least I'm not behind them - it seems that Google doesn't care much anyway.
I've got more messages like this in my inbox than is healthy, and I suspect that while the web spam team may be taking some targeted action, they've chosen to go a different route in the last couple years. Why?
There's likely a number of factors at work, but I'll try to detail those I'm familiar with, have heard about directly from folks on the web spam team (and other Googlers / community members who interact with them) and some of my own speculation:

Zapping Individual Spammers Isn't Scalable
It's certainly the case that hundreds, possibly thousands of spam reports pour into Google each week. It would take a literal army of reviewers 20-30 minutes to review each case, make the right call and determine whether to remove the links' value, penalize the acquirer the provider or both and add comments to the case. There's no way that process can work with a team as small as web spam (which, to my understanding, has fewer than 500 people worldwide, possibly much less).
Far preferrable in Google's eyes is to record interesting and new types of manipulation, classify a solid quantity of each type and then work on coding algorithms that catch the worst stuff first, then go in descending order of "negative impact to the search results." This process takes time - sometimes even years, as Google needs to ensure that their changes don't have negative blowback on innocent parties. From what I've heard, they use much the same instinct as judicial theory and say they'd rather have 10 guilty spammers get away with it then penalize 1 innocent site. This obviously makes engineering these system very hard.
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Removing the Value Certain Links Pass May Be a Better Option
Instead of penalizing or banning the site(s) responsible, Google may, in many cases, prefer to simply remove the value the links pass. This is virtually undetectable by webmasters, particularly if some links lose their value but the reported competitor continues to gain other links (legitimate or not). It could very well be that much of what webmasters perceive as inaction is actually already being addressed and it simply isn't "those links" that are making the site rank as well as it does.
At SEOmoz, we certainly want to help with this, but our link analysis tools have nothing like the sophistication of Google's webspam team. Comparing mozRank and toolbar PageRank may be of value in some cases, and looking at mozTrust on a page or domain may be helpful as well. However, the sad truth is that there aren't any foolproof ways to determine whether a competitor is gaining value from a manipulative link short of engaging in this (relatively intensive) process.
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Webmaster Spam Reporting Volume Has Dramatically Increased
It's certainly possible that webspam is struggling under an unexpectedly high load and one where it may not be ROI positive for Google to put massive talent against the problem. Webspam engineers are handpicked from other parts of the search quality and web search team and they need to be 100% trustworthy, loyal and committed (as well as incredibly smart and talented). Google won't abide by speculative hiring of a few hundred or thousand extra hands to help police spam and then potentially release those individuals out into the wild. As SEOs who've attempted to hire former Google webspam team members know (Dave being one of the more vocal of these), there's close to zero opportunity there.
If it is indeed due to high volume, then it could be Google is taking just as much action (or maybe more) than in years prior, but the sheer quantity makes it so that many webmasters feel their requests are being ignored. Frustrating? Absolutely, but I have strong convictions that it won't be a problem the company ignores for long. Bing is a credible threat, and while they're relatively poor at spam today in comparison to Google, it's an area that could, if exposed, cause Google real pain.
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A Shifting Mindset About Spam & Link Buying at Google
A possibility that I personally think is remote but many more cynical webmasters argue is the idea that Google has decided in many cases not to take action when the results are still good from a user's perspective. If CNN spams their way to the top for popular news queries or Amazon buys links to boost their books' rankings (please note that I'm not suggesting either of these are happening in any way), Google simply might not care that much. There's so many things the webspam team can worry about - international spam has certainly been something they've been vocal about and it's still a massive issue, so that could certainly be sucking bandwidth.
I personally find this explanation somewhat antithetical to Google's mindset and, more specifically, how the webspam team emotes about their job. However, it's certainly not impossible that a milder version of this exists in which webspam has simply prioritized spam complaints and worries less (and thus addresses less) those results and spammers whose sites do provide a positive, relevant user experience (which has generally been where I see/hear complaints).
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Big Changes are in Process at Google Web Spam
If you've heard Google's webspam chief talk about paid links in the recent past, he's certainly been hinting that they're cooking up something big for release in the "near future." It could be that Google's quite aware the problem has been getting worse, but have concentrated efforts on a scalable, big release and thus have been ignoring or putting off many of the individual requests which they feel will be addressed in whatever it is they're launching.
This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a system emerge that resembles (or at least takes cues from) Google MapMaker, which leverages a kind of social PageRank to allow users themselves to contribute to the construction of maps in areas where Google doesn't yet have them. I doubt users will have the ability to actually remove/penalize sites or pages, but a feedback army of spam reporters building up reputation and making suggestions that can then feed into Google definitely seems like a cultural and intellectual fit (it also might be a reason they've started a marketing presence with a Twitter account).

I'd love to hear more from those of you who feel impacted by this issue. Does this trend match your experience? Have you seen Google take some actions in the recent past? How do you deal with those who spam and seem to benefit? And which of these scenarios, if any, do you find likely?
p.s. For those who may not be aware, SEOmoz strongly recommends against link manipulation and buying links (not on ethical grounds, but for practical, business reasons).

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8 Secrets of Success Within SEO

2010-05-28T20:06:00.001+05:00

How does a person become successfully in the world of SEO? I wish I could tell you all the secrets but if I knew them, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti, sipping mai tais, instead of writing this post. About a year ago I ran across a video of Richard St. John giving a quick 3 minute presentation at TED about the 8 secrets of success and started to wonder if those same 8 secrets where true within the SEO industry. Take 3 minutes, watch the video and think about how you can implement his secrets into your SEO work and then read my take on his secrets related to SEO.

1.) Passion

The SEO is industry is full of successful people whose passion for SEO is unbelievable. Take Rhea Drysdale for example, she spent thousands of dollars of her own money to help protect the industry from someone that tried to trademark the term "SEO". that could have affected the whole industry. Rhea isn’t the only one with an intense passion for the SEO industry but she is the most recent example. How does your passion for SEO rate compared to the industry leaders? SEOmoz users have a huge passion for SEO and a large number of them are at the top of the top ranked user list.

2.) Work

Hard work is one secret that every SEO will tell you is true, things don’t come easy in this industry. SEO doesn’t happen overnight and isn’t something just anyone can do, it takes someone who enjoys diving into link reports, analytics, and writing reports to clients. SEO’s are a hard working bunch and to be successful you need to put a bit of sweat into your projects. Are you spending your fair share of time invested in your SEO techniques, if not, imagine if you were putting your full potential into all your project, the results could be endless! Prioritize your projects and put more effort into those that will give the most in return.

3.) Good

Practice, practice, practice – to become successful at SEO you need to practice everything you read in real world situations. Since SEO is ever changing, you need to continue to practice the techniques you have acquired and make sure those techniques are still valid and will work with your current project. Without practicing of SEO techniques we still might be stuffing our meta keywords tag, which is a scary thought. Setup a domain and website where you can test your theories and explore the results without effecting your clients websites.

4.) Ideas

Successful SEOs are always coming up with new ideas! Richards gave some great tips on how to come up with ideas, they included: listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, problem solve, and make connections. All of those things can be done in communities like the one here at SEOmoz, get out there and start making those connections and asking questions. Making comments on blog posts is a great way to start making connections or even creating your own YOUmoz post with techniques you use.

5.) Focus

Focus on the good techniques that are going to make your clients achieve results. Some of us are spread too thin working on web design, web development, and many of the other things that go into creating a successful website. Having the ability to focus all your energy into just SEO can really help you succeed within the industry or help you achieve your SEO goals. This might be easier for people in large organization who have co-workers who can focus on the other needs of the clients. If you don't have the man power to focus on just one topic make sure you are part of a community that shares their techniques and tips.

6.) Push

In the video Richard talks about how it’s not always easy to push yourself but that’s why they invented mothers. Personally my mother wouldn’t know what SEO is and would have no idea how to push me to be better at it. I’ve found that clients are always going to be pushy when it comes to rankings and that can be who pushes you to educate yourself on the newest techniques within the SEO industry and help you and them succeed.

7.) Serve

Serve your clients something of value and not just empty promises like some of the shady emails your clients receive. Happy clients will lead to great referrals and increase your bottom line. Along with serving them great results in the SERPs, provide them with some useful knowledge to help them understand why SEO is important to continue to do and not just a onetime thing. Increases you clients knowledge about the SEO process will reduce questions and concerns in the long run.

8.) Persist

Persistence is one of the most important tips for success as an SEO. I bet almost every successful SEO had a few failures in their SEO life but they kept moving forward and didn’t let it slow them down. Richard made a great acronym for the word “CRAP” that will help you persist through some of the C.R.A.P. out there. Don’t let one speed bump slow you down, put your head down and continue to grind forward. Nothing feels better than seeing something you have worked really hard on meet the goals you set down, though lessons can always be learned from your failures.

What do you think helps people become successfully in the SEO industry? What are the secrets to your success in this industry and what can a newbie do to get started on the right foot? We would like to hear what you think makes people successful in this industry and what you consider when calling a person successful in SEO.

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Negotiating Partnerships For Scale-able Linkbuilding

2010-05-28T20:04:00.001+05:00

I'm no business guru. I've never run or owned a business. But from what I've overheard from smart people who do run businesses, developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is crucial to succeeding. It's the essence of being remarkable which is what Seth Godin talks about a lot. It's one of the first questions that I ask clients when they come on board - "What's your USP? Tell me why you're better than your competitors".
Listening to clients tell you why they're better than the competition is a little like getting a client to sell their product to you for CRO (as the Conversion Rate Experts talk about in their SEOmoz case study). The answer to this question will often surprise you and start you thinking of all kinds of juicy ways that you can go about gaining links.
So this is one way of getting link building techniques. But once you have this information about a businesses USP there are other ways to leverage it. And that's what I want to talk about in this post.

Negotiating Partnerships For Links

Ok, so the stage is set - you've figured out what it is that makes your company (or website) better or different from your competitors. You've figured out your USP. Now, you need to package that USP up and exchange it for links. Let's take a really basic example; a successful blogger like Glenn Allsopp. He figured out that one of his USPs was writing kick-ass pieces of content. So he decided to do some guest posting (please read his awesome guide to guest posting). When you boil it down, all a guest post is at the end of the day is a little mini-partnership between two bloggers.
Let's look at a slightly bigger picture example. Let's say you're running a website with data on local pubs and bars. Let's call this website BeerMoz.com. Now they look hard at the competition and figure out that more or less everyone has the same data, but their USP is in packaging up the data in nice Web 2.0 ways while their competitors are stuck in Web 1.0 swamps. One of the consequences is that BeerMoz has some kick-ass widgets. These widgets let you see the top rated pubs and bars in your area. Awesome linkbuilding-sauce. However, they don't just stop there, here's the clever part - Beermoz take their widgets and create partnerships with other local data providers.
What does this partnership look like? Well it looks a little like regular users embedding a widget only it's done on a much larger scale. Take a camping website (say TentMoz.com) who has local data on campsites, they're interested in jazzing up their campsite pages by displaying the best pubs to drink in nearby. This data is provided by BeerMoz and there's a link back to BeerMoz via their widget.
This one partnership nets BeerMoz hundreds if not thousands of links. Admittedly it's only from one domain so the value of those links tails off but they're still great links to have - ideally to inner pages too (if the widget is set up correctly to point at individual pubs).
While it's not going to bring any classical SEO benefit, consider Twitter's partnerships with Google and Bing. These are exactly the kinds of deals that (done with anyone not a search engine) nets you some really strong links.

How To Find The Partnerships

Once you've come up with the concept, finding a website to partner with can often take just a little extra creative thinking. Often a good place to explore are those people who compete with you in the rankings but are not direct business competitors. For example, look at the people who rank for "SEO Tools" - you've got a mixture of sites actually offering their own SEO Tools but also blogs writing about SEO tools.
The hard part, however, is often getting to talk to the right people at the company once you've identified them. This is where having some business development experience comes in very handy. This stage of getting to talk to the right people, saying the right things and bargaining like a pro is something that business development people are very good at and I strongly recommend that you consider giving a little bit of SEO training to one of these people rather than trying to teach these skills to an SEO.
If you're struggling however, consider reading a sales book to get some ideas of how best to speak to the right people and say the things they want to hear. Also - consider using LinkedIn as a resource to find contacts or get introductions at a company that you're aiming for. Leveraging your personal network for an introduction can be the most effective way of getting a warm lead in these situations - twitter has saved my bacon more than once. Mmmm bacon.

Closing The Deal

Once you're into the detail of negotiating the partnership there's a few tips and things to bear in mind. Firstly, remember that you likely have more assets than the one you're offering. For example, consider throwing into the negotiations some free exposure in your email newsletter or some twitter love for some of their content. Try and figure out what it is that drives their online presence and offer them something that helps it.
Here's a story that my Dad loves to tell - many years ago (likely pre-internet!) he had a small dingy (like a small boat if dingy doesn't translate to the US folks) and was trying to sell it. He advertised in the local paper for a few months at a really reasonable price but got zero responses. It appeared people just weren't interested. Frustrated he decided to advertise again, but this time with a price tag several times what he was advertising it at before. Instantly he had several enquiries and sold it almost over night.
What we can learn about this story is that often attaching a price tag to something makes it's perceived value go up. If you think about it, there's no real reason for this to be true but nevertheless it's how us simple predictable humans work. So why not open these negotiations by trying to SELL them your USP? If your USP is genuinely valuable then there's no reason that you can't sell it to them. Couch it in terms of licensing, or syndication of data. As discussions progress you can gradually start to talk about removing the price tag if they'll only link to you in return for giving them this data. Boom! They see what you're offering as valuable, they think they're getting a steal and you get your links. (BTW - I wonder if this is technically buying links? I'm sure Google would never penalise you for it but it's an interesting hypothetical example...)

Reciprocal Linking Isn't Dead

If you're struggling to really stand out from the crowd or don't have a USP to talk of then firstly you have bigger problems than not enough links!! But secondly, consider reciprocal linking. Yes, yes I know I'll probably get shouted at in the comments but reciprocal linking done between trusted sites on a manual level from pages without large numbers of external links is a GOOD THING. There, I said it. So consider negotiating some reciprocal links from strong sites. A few things to bear in mind:

You want to carefully consider what you're offering and to who you offer it. There's only so many of these that you want to put in place so make sure they're high quality.
Don't link to their pages which link to yours. Try and spread it around a little.
Try not to create site-wide links. These are generally a bad idea. A smaller number of strong links will trump sitewide links every time.

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