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Four Creative Link Building Tactics – Whiteboard Friday

Aaron Wheeler — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:10:02 +0000

In this week's Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven't heard about. Given the importance of link building to SEO, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p)

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Hey, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the SEO sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site.

Let's start with number one up here, giving testimonials. I know this sounds a little odd. You're thinking to yourself, "Wait, I'm a marketer. I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company." But in fact, give and you shall receive.

So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service. I enjoy using it. If you'd like to use this as a testimonial, feel free." You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of SEOmoz." When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site.

So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you. I would definitely not do this disingenuously. Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend. It will come back and bite you otherwise. But if you do this, you can get those great links too.

The second one, design galleries. This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops. If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing. I don't even know why I put so many boxes and lines. I am sure there was a reason. You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery. If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great.

Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired. See what makes it. See what is hot right now. Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users. Using CSS properly means that you're loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate. It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well. Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship. As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site. They'll find you more credible. They'll want to show you off. They'll want to share. This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future.

Number three. This is sort of an interesting one. Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is. Can we interview you, show off your business?" Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well. When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link.

Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story. I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don't always do great things with that data. They'll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways. It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research. If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means. I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what's happening. I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source. When I combine those, I have great link and media bait. The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that's interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you.

A good example of this, check out www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts and you'll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we've combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data. We didn't even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we're going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that." Now when they do, they link back to SEOmoz and have the source in there. We'll always say what the original source is too. But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links.

All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today. I look forward to the discussion in the comments. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.

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Five XML Security Drafts Published

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:52:23 +0000

The XML Security Working Group has published five working drafts today. XML Signature 2.0, Canonical XML 2.0 and the XML Signature Streamable Profile of XPath 1.0 are part of an ongoing effort to rework XML Signature and Canonical XML in order to address issues around performance, streaming, robustness, and attack surface. The Working Group has also published updated Working Drafts for its XML Signature Best Practices and XML Security Relax NG Schemas Working Group Notes. Learn more about XML Security.

Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Draft Published

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:33:56 +0000

The Voice Browser Working Group has published a Working Draft of Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0. Voice XML is used to create interactive media dialogs that feature synthesized speech, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, telephony, mixed initiative conversations, and recording and presentation of a variety of media formats including digitized audio, and digitized video. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.

W3C Launches HTML Speech Incubator Group

W3C Staff — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:40:46 +0000

W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the HTML Speech Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the feasibility of integrating speech technology in HTML5 in a way that leverages the capabilities of both speech and HTML (e.g., DOM) to provide a high-quality, browser-independent speech/multimodal experience while avoiding unnecessary standards fragmentation or overlap. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: Voxeo, Microsoft, Openstream, Google, AT&T, Mozilla. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a starting point for a future Working Group.

7 Different Visualisations of Link Profiles

Tom_C — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:12:23 +0000

Posted by Tom_C

We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let's mash those two things together. In this post I've collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained...... :-)

Which Are My Top Folders

The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I've been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:

Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.

Creating Geo Link Maps

Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled's backlinks:

Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep's wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic.... I can but dream :-)

Pretty Tag clouds

Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website....

These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let's you make the pretty pictures.

Visualising Directory Links

When quickly scanning a site's backlink profile there's a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It's not that the non-quality links don't work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:

=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")

This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn't catch everything I've found that it get's you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:

Venn Diagrams

Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor's links that looks a bit like this:

Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.

Broken Links

I know this tool has been written about before and it's not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole's chrome extension "SEO site tools":

Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it's useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:

I like this view, especially when I'm looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.

SEOmoz Labs

While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:

Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.

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Linkscape’s August Update: Better Domain Authority Numbers, New Partners and More

randfish — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:35:57 +0000

Posted by randfish

Today I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.

50% Improvement to Domain Authority

You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page's importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We've been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved Domain Authority.

Thus, you'll generally find that sites that perform better in Google's rankings will have higher DA, while those that don't do tremendously well are much lower. We also noted that a lot of the "bunching" of DA scores in the 60-65 range is now considerably better, with a lot more even distribution for "mid-performing" domains between 35-55.

This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn't have time to make an updated chart)
_

We plan to keep improving and hope to have even better numbers and overall index improvements by the end of the year. You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.

New Partnerships

Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge's enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they've shared a few screenshots with us:

Like our beta web app, Brightedge's software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).

They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you're getting). This isn't yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!

You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" - something we haven't done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.

We're also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:

Flippa - the web's leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
Raven Tools - an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section

We've previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you're interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.

Improvements to Anchor Text

If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:

We've gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape's API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:

Following tonight's update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)

Index Stats

This month, as always, we've got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:

41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links

Some other interesting numbers this month include:

5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical - the highest yet!
3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses

Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year's end.

And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you've got!

p.s. We're taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:

We believe our testing for this index wasn't robust enough -we've now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren't logical moves.
While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
We're taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I'll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.

My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.

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E-Commerce SEO: Making Product Pages into Great Content – Whiteboard Friday

Danny Dover — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:52:30 +0000

Posted by Danny Dover

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.

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Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Today we're talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them
unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural
links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites --
it doesn't matter what you're selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example -- you've got a big
problem in that people just don't want to naturally link to those pages.
The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to
change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the
same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product,
your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think
this can be a big, big positive.

So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example.
Here's Acme Store. They've got the standard manufacturer's picture that
the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing
data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly.
Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the
description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add
to Cart" button.

You haven't added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I
don't know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not
exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see
that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it
uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price.
But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web
is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I
have some vested interest. The search engines don't like to count those
kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight
from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to
every other ecommerce provider.

Let's take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here
I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I'm going to
walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much
more exciting, and they're not that much additional effort. Right? To some
degree, but that's what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page,
everyone would be doing it and you couldn't have the competitive advantage.

Here I've got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I've sort
of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there.
But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they
essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are
searching for it, you probably don't want to change up the title
dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might
consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure,
maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at
what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and
add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don't have to do this. I could
just keep the standard title if that's what it takes, and I can add
uniqueness in other places.

Let's start with the images. If you just take the one image that the
manufacturer suggests, you're really losing out. A great example of this
story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They
make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single
angle. They've got the shoe. They've got the side of the shoe. They've
got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom.
They've done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The
great part about this isn't just that these images are now yours and yours
alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say,
"Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do
use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page.
You've got tons of opportunity.

I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and
different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people
the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger
version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images.
Sometimes you'll see websites where you click a different one of these and
the URL changes. You don't want that unless it's in a hashtag, because it
will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.

Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at
companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A
unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well.
It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so
compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people,
who weren't interested in the products at all and probably never bought
something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and
read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that
were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different
products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got
a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we're
aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If
this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who
are passionate about it, you're going to get such better content there.

Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit
with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the
popularity in a specific category. I think that's a good one. It lets
people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write
books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on
Amazon, they can see how well they're performing in the category. Other
people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about
this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.

There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You
could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do
people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they
buy them at the end of summer? I don't know. Let's see. Those sales
trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this
and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they
also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product.
Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data
points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your
customer database, that are anonymous. It won't be sharing privacy issues,
but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link
to it and make this page more unique and valuable.

Number five, I love the comparisons. If you've ever been to a site like
CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell
phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against
each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn't
have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are
a real unique value proposition, because now you're not just the source for
where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can
do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are
also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they'll
buy from you.

Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be
done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You
can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There
can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don't Like." The
comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out
like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or
not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What's your
experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or
five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you
have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we're an
office supply store. Let' see if we can get everyone to rate the usability
of this, whether it's travel worthy versus whether it's rugged and durable
versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different
aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.

All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites
from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don't know. We'll see how
long it takes to develop. Hopefully you've enjoyed this edition of
Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.

Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!

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Dear Google: Big Brands Aren’t Enough

Dr. Pete — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:12:19 +0000

Posted by Dr. Pete

Google's recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let's look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here's a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google's argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?

Unraveling Search Intent

One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It's nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.

Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":

"itunes"
"facebook"
"youtube"
"apple"
"best buy"
"apple store"
"google"
"craigslist"
"itunes download"

Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn't get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don't succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there's also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.

Bing Search Funnel

Unfortunately, Google doesn't have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:

Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:

"bestbuy"
"ebay"
"ipod"
"dell"
"appleipod"
"circuitcity"
"apple vacations"
"apple.com"
"sony"
"target"

Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.

The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown's Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn't want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

What Do We Want?

Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there's a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it's obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.

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5 Actionable Takeaways from SES San Francisco 2010

jennita — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:21:32 +0000

Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?

At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.

How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they're on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.

But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn't only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.

This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let's see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.

Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn't send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.

These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!

2. Don’t forget about mobile

My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.

Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!

I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools. :)

That's 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.

3. “UGC is content that rocks”

That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.

Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.

In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.

Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!

The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions. :)

The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!

4. Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people

This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.

For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.

There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.

Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there's no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let's motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.

Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we're currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?

5. Public Relations, the other PR

Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!

She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you've optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:

Use a social media newsroom like PRESSfeed
Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
Look at LinkedIn and Facebook

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn't spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the... what?!

One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I'm stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.

This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?

Final Takeaways and Actions

Don't forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can't?
UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
Public Relations is social now, so get on it.

This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we're completely sold out!

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6 Ways to Replace Yahoo’s Link & Linkdomain Search Commands

randfish — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:16:18 +0000

Posted by randfish

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it's fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft's Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it's a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that's now unavailable.

While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results.

For the query above, Yahoo! previously showed pages that pointed to any page on SEOmoz.org from sites with the .edu TLD extension (these now return no results)
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Webmasters and marketers will no longer be able to use advanced parameters on link: and linkdomain: searches such as inurl, intitle, site, etc. breaking many data sources for software tools and limiting link research abilities. However, there are several worthwhile solutions/replacements, including tools from SEOmoz (though I'll also cover a few others).

#1 - Linkscape Advanced Reports

SEOmoz PRO members now have unlimited access to Linkscape advanced reports, which can apply filters through the UI in much the same way one could with Yahoo! link searches.

Using the filters and search capabilities, I can add nearly all of the filters previously possible through Yahoo!, and many others unique to Linkscape.
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This tool is available at www.seomoz.org/linkscape

#2 - OpenSiteExplorer CSV Exports

Another methodology without quite as many bells and whistles, is to use Open Site Explorer. While Linkscape offers filtering right inside the interface, Open Site Explorer is built for speed, meaning you can see lots of links, but only in the views directly ported from our API. To get into the deep filtering, you'll need to use the CSV export + Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet program).

The filters in OSE are more limited than Linkscape, but most reports take <10 seconds to generate
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When I export the results to CSV and open in Microsoft Excel, I can easily filter for the .edu links (or any other modifier I'm interested in). OSE also shows up to 10,000 links per report vs. Linkscape's 3,000.

Using the "find" command in Excel is the simplest methodology, but you can do all sorts of awesome filtering using more advanced techniques
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This tool is available at www.opensiteexplorer.org

#3 - Majestic SEO

A UK-based search engine built using distributed crawlers, MJ-12, offers an SEO tool for backlink research. The index varies slightly to how major search engines and Linkscape build - instead of new indices built from regular crawls, MJ-12 adds new links and pages as they're discovered to an ongoing index. This means a much larger dataset, but not always the same level of freshness and limited de-duplication/canonicalization. However, many SEOs like this project a lot, and MJ-12 enables the same filtering available in Linkscape:

Many cool filters and ordering are available via MJ's tool and reports typically return fairly quickly
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This tool is available at www.majesticseo.com

#4 - Yahoo! Site Explorer CSV Exports

Just as CSV exports from Open Site Explorer can enable link searching, so too can exports from Yahoo! 's Site Explorer. The big limitation is the 1,000 link limit (1/3rd that of Linkscape and 1/10th that of Open Site Explorer). Previously, SEOs would use modified queries to make requests and get more link data from Yahoo!, but with this switch, the only remaining option is to request links for many pages on a single domain to help get a better sense of sites with greater than 1,000 external links.

The "Export first 1000 results to TSV" button + Excel filtering option enables marketers to do research, but is limited in quantity
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This tool is available at search.siteexplorer.yahoo.com

#5 - The SEOmoz API

For those with some programming skills, SEOmoz offers a free API for link data with up to 1 million calls per month, as well as a larger, full featured link data API starting at $500/month. This is the same API that powers both the Linkscape tool and Open Site Explorer, as well as integrations with Conductor, Hubspot, Flippa, Brightedge and many others.

The APIWiki offers lots of information and examples on how to make calls to the service and integrate with your own softare or practices.
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This API is available at www.seomoz.org/api

#6 - Use Yahoo! in Other Regions (Temporarily)

It appears that while Yahoo! Search in the US has been replaced by Bing, these commands can still work in other regions, such as Yahoo! India and Yahoo! Italy. However, this is likely a short term solution, as Bing will be rolling out to power Yahoo! serach in these countries over the next 1-2 years.

Hat tip to Himanshu in the comments!

#7 - Other possibilities

In addition to these sources, there are a few other options, albeit with less fully functional or open systems. These include:

Google's Webmaster Tools (which enables you to export links, but only for sites you own/control)
Bing's Webmaster Tools (with similar limitations, and fewer link options)
Exalead (a European search engine with limited link command functionality)
Blekko (a new search engine with a comparatively small index, but interesting link functions - though it's still in private beta)
Alexa (which contains a limited set of link data for some sites)

Other sources may yet emerge, and certainly players like Majestic and SEOmoz are working hard to improve their coverage, quality and functionality. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the link research landscape - hopefully Bing is working on something valuable to help replace this functionality and to serve up data when Yahoo! Site Explorer is also retired (currently scheduled for 2012).

p.s. If you're hankering for more information on link research and training on SEO tools, we've got just a few tickets left for next week's PRO Training in Seattle.

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