Who Can Get Pinterest Analytics?

So, the million dollar question is, who is eligible to receive this kind of data? If you have a business account, with a verified website, you can tap into Pinterest analytic data. This means that you’ll be able to see data about how many people have pinned from your site, how many people saw the pins, and how many people clicked through and visited your site from each pin. You will also be able to see a limited selection of your most repinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so you will be able to understand what’s popular right now.

Here’s a sneak peek of what this looks like:

To get started, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Get early access to Pinterest’s new look.

2. Make sure that your website is verified. If you have a website listed on your profile with a check mark next to it, you’re verified. If not, follow these steps to verify.

3. Once your website is verified, go to the top right menu and click on Analytics.

4. Start exploring! Change your date range to see how things have changed over time or download your analytics and mull through the data on your own time.

So there you have it… are you as excited as we are about this? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

The post Web Analytics For Pinterest – Booyeah! appeared first on Vysibility.

The problem with this question is, there’s not a ‘perfect answer’ as it depends on the keywords you are optimizing and trying to drive traffic for. What I can tell you is, there are certain things I look for when doing a link analysis (regardless of keywords) to determine if there’s anything fishy going on and if there are any areas for improvement. I’d like to outline each of these areas below with a brief description.

Branded & Natural Anchor Text

One of the first things I look at when analyzing a link portfolio is the anchor text of the links already acquired. Here, I am looking to see if the backlink portfolio contains a good balance of branded anchor text, natural anchor text, and keyword driven anchor text.

In the first example, you can see that this website is building a lot of exact match keyword anchor text and not a lot of branded or natural anchor text. This could very well be a red flag to the search engines.

In the second example, this website has a lot of branded anchor text, with some partial match, and links with no anchor text at all. This is starting to look more natural.

Links To Deep Pages

The next thing I look at is link distribution across the website. Here I am looking at the number of links coming into the home page vs other pages deeper in the site. It looks very unnatural to have a high percentage of your links pointing at the home page.

In the first example, the website has built a high percentage of links to their home page, with very few to the other pages of their website. This could be a red flag to the engines.

In the second example, this site has a ton of links going to the home page, but also a high number and good percentage of links going to other pages of their site. This looks more natural to the engines.

Linking Root Domains

I also like to look at how many unique root domains are linking to the website. Having 100k links pointing at your site from one domain doesn’t do any good, in fact, can get your penalized or completely removed from the search engine indexes for being classified as a web spammer. I don’t think we need images to get the point across on this one.

Links From Unique IP Addresses

Along the same lines as linking root domains, I like to look at the number of domains across unique IP addresses that are linking to the website. Since the search engines look at links as ‘votes’, it would make sense that they would discount a large volume of links all coming from the same IP address since the sites are likely owned by the same person. No need for images on this one either.

Links From Trusted Sites

I then like to look for any links coming from highly trusted websites. For this example, I pulled the backlink portfolio of two websites in the SEO industry.

In the first example, the only link from a trusted website in the top 30 was Marketing Pilgrim.

In the second example, the site has several links from trusted industry websites.

Link Diversity

I also look for different types of links, meaning links coming from blogs, directories, news hubs, etc to see if there is a good distribution across many different types of sites. Just like with the other metrics I’ve covered in this post, too much of one thing is not natural! I don’t think we need an example for this one.

No Follow Links

Most SEOs try to game the system and by doing so, they build links that ‘pass the most link juice’. When doing SEO the right way, over time you will secure links that include the no follow attribute. This is natural and something that shouldn’t be avoided. A balanced backlink portfolio includes do follow and no follow links. If the number of nofollow links is dismal or non existent all together, it is a signal to the search engines that something might not be right. No example for this one.

Image Links

Lastly, I look to see if any links are coming from images, or if all are coming from text links. Natural link portfolios include image links and text links.

At the end of the day, if your backlink profile has a nice balance in each of these areas, you are probably okay and doing things right. You can also ask yourself, if Matt Cutts or Duane Forrester took at look at your link portfolio, would they be suspicious of anything? If so, you’ve got some work cut out for you to clean things up.

Do you have any questions or additions to the post? If so, please share in the comments section below.

The post What Does A Natural Link Portfolio Look Like? appeared first on Vysibility.

Because this is a common statement amongst new website owners, heck, I could go as far as saying any website owner who hasn’t engaged in SEO before, I thought it would be good to put together a post on the five things you should know about SEO if you’ve never done it before.

Obviously, there are more than five, however, I feel these are the most important things they should know. Let’s get started.

SEO Is Not A ‘Pass The Baton’ Strategy

Many website owners believe that SEO is as simple as signing an agreement and making a monthly payment. Truth be told, it’s not. Three years ago, this type of SEO would work, however today, not so much. In order to be successful at SEO, your business needs to be bought into the cause. They need to be ready and willing to help with site changes, writing content, leveraging business development relationships and so fort.

Please, if you think you are ready for SEO, remember this one thing (it’s the most important) and also read this post.

SEO Is A Long Term Strategy

Like my example above, many website owners think that SEO is a short term strategy, it’s not, SEO is a long term play. There are a few reasons for this, first, it takes time to prepare a website to be crawled and associated with keyword sets. You need to do your keyword research, mapping, site optimization, and content creation and then wait. Second, chances are, many of the websites you are up against have been doing this for a long time. They have big, and often times authoritative backlink portfolios. It takes time to build the right links to be able to compete with them.

SEO Has No Secret Formula

Many website owners (and horrible SEOs) believe that there is a secret formula that can be applied to any campaign and you will have success. Nope! Every single campaign is different. Every set of keywords out there has a different set of competitors and different set of obstacles that need to be overcome. This is another reason that SEO is a long term strategy.

SEO Requires Content… Lots of Content

Gone are the days of a website with one or two pages being able to compete in the search engines. Today’s search engine requires lots of amazing content (not just any content, but amazing content) that provides real value to its users. You may think you can sit down in an afternoon and write all of the content you will ever need, or even rip some content off the web and spin it, but it doesn’t work like that any more. You need to blog regularly, create guides and resources, use images and videos, and provide an awesome experience for your users.

If You’re Not Moving Forward, You Are Moving Back

Lastly, if you’re not moving forward, you are moving back! What I mean by this is that when you start to coast or kill your SEO campaign all together (thinking you are in maintenance mode), you start slipping immediately. Although your rankings and traffic may not start slipping immediately, your competitors are gaining ground while you are staying stagnant. Once you embark upon the SEO journey, you are in it for life.

So there you have it. The five things that new website owners need to know about SEO. Did I miss anything? If so, please feel free to share in the comments section below.

The post Five Things New Website Owners Need To Know About SEO appeared first on Vysibility.

It’s true when marketers say that if you are ignoring mobile, you are losing visibility and losing market share. In today’s post, I wanted to address five mobile optimization strategies that your business can’t afford to ignore. Before we jump in, I want to clarify that when I say mobile optimization, I am not referring to building and optimizing a mobile website. I am talking about optimizing your business to be found through mobile usage. Let’s get started!

Responsive Web Design

First and foremost, having a website that is easily accessible (and usable) from any mobile device is critical to the success of your business. Five years ago, this was accomplished by developing a “mobile version” of your website that would be served to you if you were on a mobile device. Today, mobile versions are out and responsive design is in.

For those who are unfamiliar with responsive web design, to put it simply, the website and each design element is resized based on the width of the browser. It doesn’t matter if you are viewing a site on a 24′ Thunderbolt monitor, or an iPhone, the site will resize and be easy to use. This is just the first thing you need to do to get your business optimized for mobile.

For more information about responsive web design, here’s a great beginners guide.

Maps Optimization

The second thing you need to do to get your business optimized is to make sure that you have your Google+ Local Page (Google Map) and your Bing and Yahoo maps set up and optimized properly. If you’ve run any local search queries on a mobile device (city name electrician), they are triggering maps results and if your map isn’t set up or optimized, you are losing potential revenue.

We’ve written about setting up your Google+ Local Page, however, David Mihm has written extensively on the topic of maps optimization, you can check out his blog here for other optimization tips.

Social

The third way to optimize your business for mobile is to get social! Social media consumption continues to grow every day and more people are using services like Yelp and Foursquare to find new places to eat and shop. They are also turning to their friends on Twitter and Facebook for recommendations. The goal here is to have a presence wherever your potential customers are, so be strategic about it. First understand who your customers are and then where and how to reach them.

Siri

The fourth way to get your business optimized for mobile is to get serious about Siri. Yup, you heard right… Siri! As the demand for devices powered by iOS continues to grow, so will Siri usage. I use Siri daily and I’m positive that millions of other users do as well.

Since Siri is so new, marketers are still testing and figuring out how to optimize to show up higher in the returned results. Matt Siltala of Avalaunch Media has led the charge with testing and teaching the rest of us how to optimize for Siri and from his research, it seems as though results returned from Siri are highly correlated with Yelp data. Instead of rehashing everything from Matt’s amazing presentation at SMX East last year, here’s a link to his slide deck. You’re welcome!

App Development

The fifth and last way to get your business optimized for mobile is to develop a mobile app. I put this one last because it may not be reasonable for many businesses, but when it does make sense, you should develop one and push it to your customers. Having a mobile app is not only perfect for increasing your stickiness and growing your customer lifetime value, but to also attract new customers.

So there you have it. These are our top five business optimization strategies to help you grow your revenue through mobile usage. Please share with us any comments or questions you might have in the section below.

The post 5 Mobile Optimization Strategies You Can’t Afford To Ignore appeared first on Vysibility.

In my post today, I want to talk about how to build a job description that generates the exposure you need to drive site wide SEO results. Let’s get started!

Dump The Generic, Super Boring Description

Let’s face it… most job descriptions published onsite and offsite are generic and boring and at the end of the day, don’t get linked to and don’t get shared. To make matters worse, most of the time, they attract the wrong people for your organization. Not really your problem from an SEO standpoint, however, it’s a problem for your company.

So what should you be doing instead? Let’s discuss the details.

Get Personal

Let’s put on our HR or recruiter cap for a sec, when you are looking to hire someone, you aren’t looking to hire any average person, right? You are most likely looking to hire the one person who will go above and beyond for you and drive real value for your business. The only way you can do this is by getting personal with your job descriptions. As Jeff Haden said in a recent Inc Magazine article, “a great job posting is a personal letter to one person”. He also referred to it as a “love letter”.

So how do you write this personal “love” letter? You can start by asking yourself these five questions:

1. What real business needs will this individual solve by coming to work for us?
2. What key performance indicators (KPIs) will we measure in this role to determine who our top performers are?
3. What are the most common attributes of our organizations top performers? (Kind of like building buyer personas)
4. Why would the ideal candidate want this position?
5. Are there any odd requirements the candidate should know about? (Be honest)

You can then take the answers to these questions and craft a killer job description that will get you the links and shares you deserve.

Seed Your Job Descriptions

The last thing you need to do is seed your descriptions. Let’s face it, friends and family usually won’t share or forward on a super generic job description, however, they will share and forward a description that sounds like the “perfect fit”, even if their friend or family member has a job they love. So how do you seed your job descriptions?

• Submit your descriptions to the major job boards (Monster, Indeed, Etc) and make sure they link back to your original description.
• Make your job description pages easy to share. Include share buttons (including an email button) at the top and bottom of the description.
• Perform outreach to targeted individuals in your social network who can help spread the word.

At the end of the day, when building and seeding job descriptions that are are more than just a boring list of requirements or expectations, they are going to become link and share magnets which will help grow your overall domain authority.

Do you have any additional thoughts on the subject? If so, please share in the comments section below.

The post How To Turn Your Boring Job Descriptions Into Linkable & Sharable Assets appeared first on Vysibility.

This roundup post is going to be a bit different from others we and other search marketers have published in the past. Instead of hunting down all of the recap posts published, we decided to hunt down all of the slide decks from the presenters at the conference. We spent about three hours scouring the interwebs and reaching out to the presenters to find out if they had published their slides yet. I’d say we got about 60% of them and expect more to come trickling in today and tomorrow. We will update this post as the presenters publish them online.

This is great stuff, so take sufficient time and enjoy!!

The Switch To Content Marketing Strategy

Ian Lurie – Content Is A Product

Michael King – The Season of Our Discontent Marketing

Paid Search

David Rodnitzky – Iron Clad Google AdWords Campaigns

Dan Sundgren – [Slides not posted yet]

Social Media

Matt Siltala – Growing Your Brand With Pinterest

Will Scott – Spreading The Love – Casting Your Content On The Facebook Waters

Schema, Open Graph, and Semantic Markup

Jeff Preston – [Slides not posted yet]

Aaron Bradley – [Slides not posted yet]

SEO for eCommerce

Ross Hudgens – eCommerce Content Marketing For Search

Adam Audette – [Slides not posted yet]

Digital Evangelism Inside & Out

Joanna Lord – Digital Evangelism In & Out

Mel Carson – [Slides not posted yet]

Social Media Analytics: Discovery and Attribution

Mike Pantoliano – Social Media Analytics – Giving Social The Credit It Deserves

Rhea Drysdale – Social Media Analytics – The Peanut Butter To Business Metrics Chocolate

SEO Bootcamp

Marshall Simmonds – [Slides not posted yet]

The Applicable Side of Technical SEO

John Doherty – The Price of Technical SEO Debt

Justin Briggs – Technical Hacks For Content Marketing

Facebook Advertising

Merry Morud – [Slides not posted yet]

Adam Berke – [Slides not posted yet]

Mobile

Aaron Weiche – Mobile Search Marketing

Greg Sterling – [Slides not posted yet]

UX & Audience

Jonathon Colman – Why Our Content Sucks & How To Make It Better

Susan Delz – [Slides not posted yet]

Advanced Analytics

Rachel Gerson – Tagging Matters

Conrad Saam – [Slides not posted yet]

What Drives Local Rankings

Darren Shaw – Review Tactics For Local Rankings

Mike Ramsey – [Slides not posted yet]

The post The Ultimate SearchFest 2013 Roundup appeared first on Vysibility.

I’ve seen three major shifts over the last year, one of which I’m going to address in this post (co-citations), one of which I’m going to address in my next post (page vs whole site SEO), and the last being a shift in brute force link building to a natural link attraction play via content marketing (we’ve covered this a lot on our blog and will continue to cover it in depth in other posts).

In today’s post, I’d like to cover co-citations, what they are, and how to leverage this strategy to associate keyword themes with your web page content. To start out, let’s talk about what co-citations are.

What Are Co-Citations?

According to a definition that I found on SourceForge.net, co-citations are:

Bibliographic Co-Citation is a popular similarity measure used to establish a subject similarity between two items. If A and B are both cited by C, they may be said to be related to one another, even though they don’t directly reference each other. If A and B are both cited by many other items, they have a stronger relationship. The more items they are cited by, the stronger their relationship is.

My interpretation of the definition, in terms of how this affects SEO, is this: If you have a piece of killer content about wedding rings (A), and a link that says “click here” to a website that sells wedding rings (B), then the website that it is linking to must be about wedding rings (C).

It’s pretty straightforward and we are seeing a lot of evidence that Google starting to shift their ranking signals away from anchor text (it’s not dead yet) and more toward the idea of co-citation.

Where To Start With Co-Citations?

First of all, a lot of co-citations are earned by producing amazing content that people like to link to. These can be blog posts, they can be how-to guides, they can be tools, or any other linkable asset. Here’s an example from our very own blog:

Trackur has an amazing brand monitoring tool and I naturally included it in a section of content that was about brand monitoring. This is co-citation at its best!

Outside of earning links and citations naturally, you need to start building this into your strategy and processes. Any time you are producing and publishing content online, that content should be focused around a very specific theme and include non-keyword related anchor text links near the keywords you are targeting. Here’s an example of a guest post author bio we put together recently:

Again, the whole point of co-citation is to associate words or themes with internal or external links on a page.

As with all off page SEO strategy, you are aiming to not only look natural, but be natural. If every single co-citation has your target keyword right in front of a “click here” link, Google and the other engines will be able to sniff you out, so vary things up and BE natural!

So what are your thoughts about co-citation? Please share in the comments section below.

The post Dump The Anchor Text & Start Focusing On Co-Citations appeared first on Vysibility.

Video SEO has been around for several years now, however, I believe this is going to be one area where marketers are going to put a lot of focus this year. The reason being is because it is proven, that on average, visitors stay on a web page for less than 43 seconds when the page only contains text and images. When video is added to a web page, the average time on that page is almost six minutes. Six minutes is a lifetime when it comes to catching your visitors attention and attempting to sell them on the product or service at hand. In today’s post, we are going to talk about how to optimize your videos for the search engines so that the video and the associated web page can start showing up higher in the SERPs and drive more qualified traffic to your site.

Self Hosting vs Third Party Hosting

After you create a video for your business, the biggest question is, should I submit this video to a site like YouTube, or should I self host the video on my server? Let’s talk about the pros and cons of each.

The number one advantage of hosting your video on a site like YouTube is to be instantly visible to their audience for the keywords you optimize the video for. This can drive loads of qualified, referral traffic to your site with the high probability of it converting once it arrives on your site. The down size is, hosting your video on YouTube doesn’t necessarily help your web pages to rank any higher in the search engines.

The number one advantage of hosting your video on your own server is to drive organic search traffic (not referral traffic) to your website. This can only be accomplished by self hosting and optimization of your video for the search engines.

The decision to self host vs using a third party should be made based on your business and marketing initiatives. If I am looking to tap a wide audience of referral traffic, I typically go with YouTube. If I’m looking to capture more real estate in the search engines, I’ll self host.

Let’s talk about how to optimize your video for the search engines if you choose to self host.

Keywords & Meta Descriptions

Optimizing videos for the search engines is pretty much the same as optimizing anything else for the engines… It all starts with keywords.

The first thing you need to do is perform some basic keyword research to determine what kind of words your potential visitors are looking for. Here’s a great write up on keyword research and how to do it.

Once you know what keywords you are going to use, it is time to do some optimizing. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure that your keywords are found in the video file name. Just like with image optimization, this shouldn’t be a spammy file name, but something that clearly describes what the video is about, while including your keywords.
2. Create a unique page for every video and make sure that your keywords are found in the URL of that page.
3. Create a piece of unique content that clearly describes what the video is about and make sure to use your keywords naturally in the content.
4. Make sure the title tag and meta description of the page includes your target keywords.
5. Utilize schema markup for videos. Don’t know what schema markup, find out more here.

Video XML Sitemaps

After you create and publish your first video, you will want to create and submit a video XML sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing via their webmaster tools platforms. This will help them get indexed quickly and send a few different signals as to what the videos are about. Not sure what should be included in a video XML sitemap, there are five things you should include:

1. Video title
2. Video description
3. Video thumbnail URL
4. Video play page URL
5. Raw file URL

You will want to update your XML sitemap and resubmit every time you create and publish a new video.

Yoasts Video SEO Plugin (For WordPress Users)

For those of you running on WordPress, you can simplify the process by purchasing and installing Yoasts Video SEO plugin. You can learn more about it here.

Creating, optimizing, and publishing videos will definitely give you a leg up on the competition going forward, so I hope that this post as been a valuable resource in helping you understand how to optimize a video for maximum effectiveness. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share in the comments section below.

The post Generate New Revenue By Optimizing Your Videos For Search appeared first on Vysibility.

Also, for those who know me, I am a huge advocate in building efficiencies in processes and over the last few years, I feel like I’ve built a pretty efficient process to both monitor your brand reputation and secure high quality back links simultaneously. This is crucial to not only protect your brand, but secure top organic search engine rankings. Let’s get into the process.

Setting Up Brand Monitoring

The very first thing you need to do is set up the monitoring process. There are several tools on the market that can do this for you, but I would recommend two of them. First, the free option, Google Alerts and second, the paid option, Trackur. I’m not going to go through the detailed process of setting each of these up to monitor your brand (it’s pretty straightforward), however, I’d like to address what you should be monitoring:

• Brand name
• Names of your company executives
• Names of your top products or services

Make sure to really think this through and add every variation of word your brand is associated with, doing so will allow you to proactively monitor negative content that shows up online.

Setting Up A Review Schedule

Because I’m a time management and efficiency freak, I usually don’t check my monitoring tools on a daily basis. For some brands… you know, those big ones like Dell, Nike, or Nordstrom, you may have to monitor daily, sometimes even hourly. I mean, Dell has a Social Media Command Center where they monitor their brand 24/7. I’ve seen it in person and it is freaking awesome!

When setting up a review schedule, you will need to make a business decision on how often you need to check in and see what’s being said about you. I recommend at least once per week and increase it as your brand awareness grows.

Opportunity Analysis

Once you have your review schedule set up, the next step is to look for opportunities. There are two different opportunities you are looking for.

• Content that is negative toward your brand
• Link opportunities
  • Brand mentions without a link back to your site
  • Use of an image, video, or digital asset without credit given

You should be able to open up the content, review, and determine if you need to take action in as little as a few minutes per piece.

Perform Outreach

Once you find an opportunity, you will want to put together a game plan to address it. Obviously, the way you address it will depend on the situation (negative or link opportunity). If you are doing some outreach for a negative post, you are going to have to put your customer service cap on, maybe even get someone from the client services team to help with messaging. Your goal here is to remedy the situation and get the negative content removed or updated.

If you are doing outreach to secure a link back to your site, you need to put on your marketer hat. Depending on the situation, you will need to craft a message (I like to go positive of course) as to why you would like them to link back to your site. Personalize it and sell it hard. This is often times one of the easiest forms of link building.

Outreach Management & Follow Up

To make sure that these brand mentions don’t disappear from Trackur or Google Alerts and become lost forever, I like to add them to Buzzstream. This helps me manage each opportunity and helps me to remember to follow up. You will want to spend some time reviewing and following up on a regular basis. This will increase your chances of getting negative content removed and of securing killer links.

So there’s my process… all laid out for you. What do you think? Am I missing anything? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Let’s take a look at the first set of numbers:

As you can see from the companies polled, the digital marketing channel is holding strong, which is why this is an excellent industry to be in. Now, where will companies be putting these marketing dollars in terms of strategies? Let’s look at the next set of numbers:

Looks like content marketing comes out on top followed closely by organic search engine optimization. It will be interesting to see how this actually plays out this year, but it doesn’t surprise in the least the content marketing wins the day!

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