My take is that you should use only what is necessary and which speeds up your workflow, in my case it seems that I use a bunch of tools, but I rely on each and every single one of them to scale my work and improve my productivity and results. These are the best SEO tools, no, the essential SEO tools for any webmaster or SEO if you want to have the best performance with your SEO campaigns.

1. Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics

These are the two most essential tools not just for SEOs, but for every webmaster. Maybe you can do your work without the rest of the tools or their alternatives, but these two tools are irreplaceable. Learn to use them as much as you can. Webmaster tools can help you easily identify errors on your website like technical issues, speed issues, 404 pages and dead links, missing meta descriptions and titles or too long or too short titles, all of the important technical staff that can prevent your pages from ranking highly in the SERPs. You can submit your sitemap through GWT and also set defined URL parameters for crawling or skipping, instead of poking around your robots.txt file or even .htaccess file, which can be more advanced than most users know.

It will also help you find the most used keywords to get to your site and show you referring websites. Analytics will feel in the gaps, demographics, user behavior, conversions, everything you need to know to form a full picture of your users and their engagement. Now with the real time analytics in place we can finally see how are visitors are really using our website, we can learn from their behavior and improve the site, the options are limitless. We can see out post as soon as it goes live how each of the social media sites react to our new posts, that can help us identify the best platforms to focus on for social media marketing as well as geo targeting. For advanced users, Analytics are all about tracking conversions, so if you run an ecommerce store this is probably the most useful web tool for your business.

2. Adwords Keyword Tool

The most used keyword research tool we have, the most useful and with the biggest data of keywords. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be, it gives us what we need to know. For those of you that are still new to website optimisation it may be easy to trust the results you see and then pick your head later on when you see that you achieved the number one rank for a certain keyword but your don’t get 5% of the search volume shown in Google Adwords Keyword tool.

The data is not perfect, but it can give us an insight. First tip is to use exact search volume and not broad search. Exact search will give you a much better insight into the real search volume for the keyword, and the broad search volume encompasses all the phrases that have your main keyword as a part of the query. This can be really useful to figure out how much traffic can be found in long tail keywords.

Example: VPS Hosting

Broad: 135,000

Exact: 33,100

So we have around 33,000 exact searches for the term VPS hosting, but a broad match of 135,000. That means that there are 102,000 searches that have “VPS hosting” as part of them, the long tail derivates we can take advantage of like “windows vps hosting”, “cloud vps hosting” and “cheap vps hosting”. This helps us see the bigger picture and do basic research for possible keyword phrases we will target.

3. Google trends and Google insights

To improve our keyword research we can use a few more tools provided by Google. Insights for search will show us which keywords related to the main keyword are on the rise, what is the search trend for our keyword and we can even see which regions are searching for that particular keyword, which will help us with geo targeting. This helps us identify breaking keywords that are rising in popularity and could be taken advantage of, as well as for which regions we can target these terms. Also helping us figure out the potential of a given phrase in global, especially if we match the data with broad vs exact match numbers we got from Google adwords keyword tool.

Google trends will pretty much do the same; they will show you the geo regions, even cities and languages which are most commonly used to search for your keyword. This helps us determine if the keyword is saturated or not, if there is a consumer need and if the keyword is still worth pursuing. It also helps us figure out where to start and what to target, vertical searches are an important part of website optimisation, so geo targeting should not be dismissed at any point, in fact this way of searching can give us more insight into local SEO potential than Google adwords tool.

4. Lipperhey

Lipperhey is a great new tool for beginners or even professional SEOs that want to scale their work load and get some basic onsite recommendations, but not on a general scale where you can’t see a thing, but for an actual page. The tool scans your website and gives you actual recommendations for each page that needs improvement while creating to-do’s so you won’t forget. So the tool will help you improve your description, titles, scale content, remove excessive keywords and even with technical stuff like style blocks, H tags and even recommendations for internal linking.

This is not just a great tool for newcomers and DIY SEOs, it’s also great for experienced SEOs that want to improve their productivity by letting this software run website analysis and give them actual recommendations to improve a certain page or pages. No need to stress out how time consuming that can be going from page to page, and this website offers you the opportunity to cut that time by almost 90% in my experience.

5. SEOmoz or Raven

When it comes to advanced SEO and some professional link building, competitor research, keyword difficulty, onsite audits, SEOmoz and Raven are the tool to have. You can use either one of them, or you can use alternatives if you know of any good ones. I hear good things about Ahrefs, but still haven’t tried it.

These tools resemble analytics, but they also give you a great advantage for link building and backlink research as well as real SERP ranks for you keywords. I find both of them irreplaceable in my work, SEOmoz can give you a quick peek into authority of a domain as well as other useful metrics and of course great link building tools, while Raven has social tools and link building tools that help you identify prospects and engage them.

Both of them are massive and include several standalone tools that make the whole suite, we will mention some of them below as talking about all of them would take an entire post. But each one of these SEO suites gives you a great insight into your website analytics, technical issues, backlinks as well as social media metrics and of course a great overview of your competitors.

6. Linkdex/Ontolo

For advanced link building these are the best tools you can use. Linkdex will serve some hot prospect into your mail just based on the keyword and few filters you set up and Ontolo is the godfather of advanced search queries. These two tools combined can keep your link building campaign run a very long time.

Linkdex will identify some hot prospects for you, sites already linking in, potential sites that link to your competitors or hubs as we call them which is the most likely place for you to get a link. Not just that, filtering the type of links you want to get will help you get some really specific recommendations, so if you choose blogs as your filter you will be given a list of highly potential blogs to give you a link. That also goes for directories, news sites and a dozen other types of websites you can use for filtering.

Ontolo on the other hand is a bit more advanced, and is intended for expert link builders, but novices can use Ontolo as well. The most basic concept is creating advanced search queries to find prospects. You just type in your chosen keyword and check off a few filters like type of content, type of website and Ontolo will give you a huge list of advanced search queries you can use to find link opportunities. You can also set Ontolo to find links for you and report them in your dashboard, so it can also work like Linkdex does.

7. Xenu/Check my links addon

There are two reasons why we use broken link checkers, the first one is to make sure our websites and our client websites don’t have any, Google doesn’t like them, we don’t like them as we don’t want our visitors to land to dead pages by following dead links on our website. The second one is to help us in our link building. A great way to approach a webmaster or a blogger is to let him know that he has a broken link on his website and that you have a nice resource/post/review he can link to instead. You are doing him a favor from the start, so it’s a win-win situation.

For your website GWT will do the trick 90%, it will miss some or it will show you some canonical versions that you removed and it may keep them there for a long time, like we said, GWT isn’t perfect, which is why we need tools like these to check our own websites and not just competition.

8. Rank Checkers

You want to keep track of your rankings to see how your link building and your general content is doing, knowing when and where to push if needed. If you have SEOmoz or Raven you have rank checkers already, but if you don’t there is a free limited version of SEOmoz rank checker or a completely free SEObook rank checker plugin for Firefox you can use.

The full suites of Raven and SEOmoz suites give you access to a great number of keywords you can track and even receive reports on the changes each day or as they change. The free SEOmoz version has limits on daily usage. The SEObook rank checker on the other hand is free and has no limitations, but recent it’s not working perfectly, and with personalization on checking your ranks will give you only 70% of actual results, as 30% of searches are changed through personalization setting for each user. After all, what matters are your conversion rates and not the rankings.

9. Mozbar/SEO for Firefox

There are two more addons, toolbars from SEOmoz and SEObook that can make your life easier regarding website analysis and link building, yup, Mozbar and SEO for Firefox. Both give you insight into certain metric that are helpful to evaluate the website on a first glance.

SEO for Firefox offers Alexa rank, Majestic Rank as well as Page Rank and other very useful data like age of the domain, number of backlinks as well as Google cache and even whois information. These are all useful metrics that can give you a picture of the website’s value, in terms of link building these are the metrics we want to take a look at before we dive deeper into exploring a website and determining whether or not a link there would be useful.

Mozbar on the other hand shows their own metrics including domain authority, mozrank, basic analysis of the page, attributes and link data gathered from Open Site Explorer, of course if you really want to capitalize on this you need a pro account, but the basic data it shows for free accounts is not to be neglected as well, it can be rather useful. Mozbar also has a very useful feature that allows you to highlight nofollow, dofollow, outgoing or internal links of the page you are visiting.

10. Useful bonus tools

And finally we have some misc tools that don’t fall into basic categories but are really useful to have around. The first one is TinEye a reverse image search tool. Yeah, you can do that with Google image search now, but you can do it from your browser, as this is an addon from Chrome. So any image you stumble upon, or your logo, or even a picture you have on your computer, just right click on it and TinEye will find where that image is posted on the web. A great way to do some link building by finding your copyrighted images on other websites and asking them to give you a contribution.

CopyLink is a great plugin to install on your website. It helps with link building without any effort. Anytime someone copies a part of your text, even a single letter, under the copied text will be the title of your page as well as the URL. Some webmasters might delete and just post what they intended, but it is a good push for most webmasters to actually include a link back.

Of course there is a tool no webmaster, designer, programmer or SEO should ever be without, and that tool is Firebug. Yeah you can use view page source from any browser, but a few functionalities that Firebug has, Chrome is not lagging behind though, will make your onsite analysis much better, not to mention if we are looking for hidden code meant to throw of Google.

These are the tools I use on a regular basis; they make my life as an SEO and link builder much easier and more productive, but remember, the power of these tools is determined by the knowledge of the user, not the other way around. Any of these tools can be a great help with SEO and website promotion if you know how to use them. Just knowing the basics will leave you out stranded and your competition will take advantage of that, so learn how to use these tools to their full potential.

Author bio:
Alex Petrovic – Advanced SEO strategist
Link builidng team leader -  Dejan SEO company.

SEO Tools for Best Performance in SEO Campaigns

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Sometimes we’ll shrug it off and think it’s just co-incidental, other people may use these songs as a “sign” that they should (or shouldn’t) do something… I don’t know how good an idea that is, but despite how you react, doesn’t change the fact that this strange phenomenon has happened to me on more than a few occasions and I’ve heard a lot of other people make similar comments too.

The reality is that this isn’t some strange mystical force driven by fate and destiny to determine what songs should be played at what times – it’s all to do with our subconscious.

Have you ever been in the market for a new car, decide what make and model you want and then strangely start noticing there seems to be more of that particular car on the road than any other. It’s the same thing.

Some psychologists would say this is based on the principal of Priming – where an early piece of stimulus influences your response to a later stimulus. For instance if a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with the letter “T”, the probability that subject answers table is higher than for non-primed people.

Other new-age psychologists will call this the “Law of Attraction” most commonly associated with motivation books like “The Gift”. Where, basically, if you think positive thoughts, you’ll be much more likely to notice opportunities that occur around you that may otherwise have been missed if you were too busy thinking about how crap your day has been.

But regardless of what you want to call it, or how you wish implement this in your day-to-day life, doesn’t change the fact that if we’re thinking about something (consciously or subconsciously) we’re going to start noticing things around us that relate to those thoughts.

So, why have I just spent the last 300 words prattling on about music, cars and psychology on an SEO blog?

Because it doesn’t matter what business you’re in or what your website is about – if you’re aware of this concept and can tap into the mindset of your prospective clients, you’ll have a much better chance of converting them.

Let’s say that you sell blue widgets. If you’ve optimised your site well, and/or have some pay per click ads running, the search engines will do half the job of getting your product in front of the eyeballs of anyone thinking about purchasing some blue widgets.

Now it’s time to start thinking about what’s going through the head of this potential customer.

• Why are they looking for blue widgets?
• Was there something wrong with the red ones they had so they’ve decided blue is going to be better for them?
• Do widgets wear-out really quickly and need to be replaced?
• Are the blue ones cheaper, or better quality, or different in any way (other than colour) to the other widgets?
• Will the client even know why they’re looking for blue widgets in the first place, or is it the type of product that they’ve just heard someone say “sounds like you need a blue widget for that job”?
• Do blue widgets have a good/bad reputation?
• Are there other products that people will often try before deciding that maybe a blue widget is probably best?
• Is this purchase going to cost them a lot of money?
• Is this purchase essential or just something for fun?
• etc. etc. etc.

These are just a handful of possible questions and I’m sure that you’ll be able to think of many more that pertain to your products and services.

Once you’re aware of how your product is perceived in the marketplace, the questions people commonly ask about it, the problems people have with it, the concerns they might have about spending the money in these tough economic times etc. etc. You can start to address these issues in your website and ad copy.

If I’m shopping for a non-essential, luxury item, the thought is always in the back of my head “Do I really need this?” – so if I then happened to stumbled across a website that said “Sure you may not need this item, but imagine how much more fun your life would be if you did buy it… plus, if you compare how much you’d spend on [insert random item you buy everday] – our product isn’t really all that expensive in comparison”…

I’d be a lot more likely to buy that product because they seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. They knew that I wanted to buy the product (otherwise I wouldn’t have been searching for it in the first place) but also knew what barriers could potentially be stopping me.

Many businesses think they’re already doing this quite well by putting words like “Cheap” or “High Quality” in their ad copy, but just by using generic terms that could relate to any product really doesn’t cut it.

To do this properly requires detailed product analysis, market surveys, research, testing and should be an ongoing process. Then once you have this information, it’s important to understand how and where to put the most important details so as to catch the attention of your prospective clients.

For the initial impact, you usually don’t have a lot of space to get the most crucial reasons to buy your product.

• If you’re going to do this in PPC ads, you only have 3 lines of text (with 25 characters in the title of the add and 35 characters… including spacing.. for each of the following two lines).
• In the organic search results, Google will only show 65 characters of a website’s title tag and 156 characters in your meta description.
• To broadcast info about your products on social networking sites like Twitter, you need to concisely explain the benefits of your product within 140 characters.

Fortunately once you get people to your website, you’re only limitations are the amount of content your prospective client is willing to read.

You can make the process even easier by structuring the content well, using headings to break-up the info into it’s relevant parts, use formatting like bold text or italics to draw further attention to the most important parts and try and keep all the best content ‘above the fold’ (so people will see it first-up without having to scroll down the page too far or click to various sections to get to it).

When people find you in the search results, see your ads or end-up at your website, it should just be like hearing a seemingly random song that co-incidentally relates directly back to what they were thinking. If you can do this effectively, I can assure you your conversion rate will increase substantially.

My iPod knows what I’m thinking…

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Well, not all the points mentioned in my last post were covered (a lot were, but we didn’t get to all of them) however a lot of other great stuff was discussed and (in my humble opinion) the night went really well. The following info may not flow perfectly as I’m trying to recollect some of the more interesting/important things before I go to bed and forget.

Questions started with:

Q. Is it better to get links from relevant websites that relate to my business?
A. Most definitely

Q. Is it better to get links from .edu and .gov domains?
A. Yes, when relevant… but even if not entirely relevant, they’re still very good to have. The reason that these types of links are so well trusted is because most .gov and .edu sites just won’t link-out to anyone.

We discussed linking out to authoritive sites as being a good thing.

The topic of ‘no-follow’ links came-up and if you’re really keen on learning more about this (as well as how to use it to sculpt PageRank, have a look at Matt Cutts’ article (for those of you who don’t know this guy, Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Search Spam devision)… now here’s the article: PageRank sculpting. Also, don’t avoid using forums, blogs or other social media sites that use no-follow because even though they may not pass any linkjuice, the content is often syndicated on other sites that DO follow.

For those wanting to know how to view their own PageRank, it was recommended to try downloading Google’s toolbar.

Also using internal links (ie. links to pages within your own site) can be a great way of maximising keyword-rich anchor text.

If you’re going to have a blog, host it on your own site and don’t use externally hosted blog systems like Blogger or Wordpress.com. Also microsites have their place, but if you really want to get the greatest benefit for all your online efforts, keep everything on your own domain.

On the point of blogging – blogs rank far faster than any other standard website content. This is due to a concept called ‘Query Deserves Freshness‘. To take advantage of this you can blog or keep your general website content fresh (although if you’ve got a site that is ranking well with the current content, it’s better to ADD new pages or content instead of just replacing the old stuff).

While obvious paid links should be avoided, some paid links are beneficial such as links from the Yahoo Directory are helpful and Google actually endorses Yahoo’s services in this instance. Another good directory to be listed with is Dmoz, but make sure you choose the right category to list in and be prepared to wait.

For linkbaiting, there are 5 major hooks that are most commonly used:

- resource
- contrary
- attack
- humour
- news

The example Matt used was SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 awards (a prime example of the resource hook plus an additional hook later mentioned – flattery)… and now they have another link to add to their 6000+ links.

To view some of the more influential links to a site, Andy introduced us to Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

Embedding relevant YouTube vids to your site is yet another way to add flavour and if you’re the one who created the vids you can use this as a technique to have the vid appear in the search results. This is when Andy pulled-up the Will It Blend example. On a side-note, when videos and other items like this are blended into the general search results, this is referred to as Google’s Universal Search.

Flash and splash pages should be avoided because the search engines have trouble reading them, they can be slow to load, cannot be viewed on mobile browsers and in many cases (other than looking kinda cool the first time you look at it) they don’t really give any great value to your customers.

The concept of deep linking was mentioned a few times through out the evening but not really clearly defined – so deep linking basically means getting links to your internal pages as well as links to your homepage. While most links you gain will point to your homepage, getting deeper links pointing to your internal pages will have a much greater impact on your overall SEO performance.

P.O.S.T. method should be used if/when you decide to embrace social media:

People – find the right people to connect with (and then actually communicate and connect with them)
Objectives – decide why you want to use social media and what you want to get out of it
Strategy – prepare a plan of how best to connect with the right people in order to achieve your objects
Technology – then determine the best technology and social media networks make this all happen

My explanations for the POST acronym probably aren’t 100% perfect as Matt explained it far better than I could. Matt also went on to discuss how well Dell use social media and their philosophy that there is no traditional marketing anymore, only adapting marketing. Dell’s many twitter accounts were mentioned along with their site: IdeaStorm.

The night was finished with Andy re-enforcing how crucial it is to have great content, Matt saying that as well as inbound links, you should also ensure your site architecture is perfect to get the greatest value from all the inbound links… and I closed the last question about how you shouldn’t trust SEOs that guarantee top rankings.

Overall it was a brilliant night – lots of really great questions were asked and hopefully we answered them adequately.

If you were at the event and believe I overlooked anything, please let me know via the comments.

Networx Panel – Updated Info on ‘How to win links and influence people’

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I’ll also be making an effort to live tweet the event, so if you’re interested, follow me on Twitter or just keep an eye-out for anything with the hash-tag #networx

Also, as a perk for anyone reading this or who attends the event, SiteMost is offering a FREE MONTH of SEO services when you purchase a website audit and mention the promotional code Networx.

Now, here’s what I’ve prepared so far…

What do we mean by links / What is a link?

A link is basically a connection between one website (or webpage) to another. A link is usually shown as text with a blue underline, however links can be styled any-way the site owner likes (so it can be different colours or styles and doesn’t always have to be underlined). Links can also be contained in images, logos and banners. The quickest and easiest way to tell if a word, image or other element is a link is to hover your mouse over it and see if the arrow changes to an icon of a little hand.

In a text-based link, the words that form the link are called the ‘anchor text’ which will be discussed a little more later.

What impact do links have on search?

Google was the first search engine to focus primarily on links as a major part of it’s search algorithm. In essence, this was one of the key points of difference between Google and all the other search engines.

When Google finds a link, it treats it like a positive referral, recommendation or vote for the site you’re linking to. So if I link from my site to yours, I’m saying to Google (and to everyone that looks at my site) that I think your website is interesting, informative, helpful or relevant to my readers and they should have a look.

To measure the value of these links, Google assigned a ranking system to each and every page on the internet based on how many (and the quality) of the links that a page has and this ranking system is known as PageRank (or PR)… which is measured from a score of 0 to 10.

In it’s most basic form (and it’s a lot more complex than this, but to get the general idea…) let’s say a page has a rank of 6 and that page links-out to 3 sites.. then each one of those 3 sites would gain 2 units of value, sometimes referred to as ‘linkjuice’.

The PageRank values increase exponentially, so getting a PR of 1 isn’t too tricky, but it’s twice as hard to get a PR2 and then twice as hard again to get up to 3 etc. etc. all the way up to 10. There are only a handful of sites on the internet that have a ranking of 10.

Here are a few common examples of how website owners will link:

click here
http://www.sitemost.com.au
Best looking man in Brisbane

While a lot of links are beneficial, the wording and type of link will have an impact on how beneficial that link is.

Google looks at the text used in the link to determine what it expects to find when you click on the link. In the example above, “click here” doesn’t really give you any idea of what’s going to be at the other end because ‘here’ could mean anything. So Google gives additional weight or preference to those links that use descriptive anchor text (such as the ‘Best Looking Man in Brisbane’ example above).

So we now know a few examples of types of links.. now let’s look at types of link relationships:

- genuine / organic / natural text links (best)
- reciprocal links (or links associated with link exchange networks)
- purchased links
- link bait
- social media links (links via twitter, blogs and blog comments, web 2.0 news/article sites like digg etc.)

As mentioned previously, Google likes links that appear natural. So the type of link, where the link is located on the site, how relevant the link is, the anchor text of the link etc. all have an impact. If you’re interested in finding-out a lot more about link factors, have a look at Wiep’s Link Value Factors report (very detailed and technical, but well worth the read).

Getting high quality natural links can be one of the more challenging things a website owner can do.

So as website owners became more aware of the importance links have, they started trying to get links in any way possible (and in many cases, getting links purely for the sake of the having the link and not because of relevance to their site).

This created the phase or reciprocated links – where one website owner says “Hey, i’ve got a website…. you’ve got a website… Google like links, so if I link to you and you link back to me, we’ll help improve each-other’s search rankings”.

In theory this concept is fine if the purpose of the link exchange is because the two websites provide complimentary products/services… but in many reciprocal link relationships, the sites weren’t related and Google started picking-up on this and stopped counting these links. Here’s an example of a sites using reciprocated links.

In excessive examples, Google penalised some of these sites by dropping the PR of the pages containing the links making them pretty-much useless.

So when reciprocal links stopped working, website owners needed to find another easy method of getting links, so they started purchasing them – “Hey, i have a website with a PR5, so I’ll sell you a link at the bottom of my page for $100″

If you scroll-down to the bottom of this page, you’ll see a bunch of links that show exactly what I’m talking about.

These worked well for a while too, but due to the irrelevance of the links and the fact that a site selling links is really profiting by exploiting a feature of the Google search algorithm, Google started penalising sites that they identified as displaying obvious link selling.

For more info about penalties, here’s a reasonably comprehensive list of search penalties that Google have dished-out over the years.

So if you Google doesn’t like link exchanges or buying/selling links… what are some ways of attracting good links?

Ask suppliers, clients, friends or other companies you work closely with for a link. It’s best if you can keep it relevant to your industry, but if you can’t, testimonials can be a great way of making a non-relevant website link seem more legitimate.

Use linkbait – which basically relates to any piece of content (be it an article, video or anything really) that is designed to attract links. Here are some articles with examples of linkbait and how to use it effectively:

How to Build Links with HOW-TO Content
Link Baiting Example: How to Build Links in Any Niche
10 Link Bait Tips
LinkBait Launch Cycle
Every Site is Linkbait & Linkerati Worthy

But sometimes the best linkbait goes unnoticed if it isn’t picked-up by the Linkerati

The linkerati are like the paparazzi in the real world. The paparazzi that earn the most money and street-cred (at least in their own industry) are the ones that know exactly where, when and what celebrity to snap and are always looking for tip-offs from trusted sources to help accomplish this. The linkerati are the same, but instead of looking for celebrities to snap, they’re looking for great articles, videos and other content that, by sharing it, will improve their own online reputation by association.

Here’s a good little article explaining this concept in more detail: Who are the Linkerati?

Final tips for creating links to your websites – must do, nice to do.

Must create good content and try to make it interesting and engaging. Must understand the importance of links so that if the opportunity arises you can take advantage of it and hopefully gain the best links possible.

It would be nice if you could create a link building process within your organisation so you’re always approaching website owners for links and creating fresh and interesting content on a regular basis. As well as using social media to help promote that content and connect with your customers, peers and the general internet community as a whole.

Don’t try and do sneaky manipulative things like hiding links on your site, using excessive reciprocal links, purchasing spammy links unless you’re fully aware of the potential risks.

And one last thing – don’t forget about the offer of a FREE MONTH of SEO services when you purchase a website audit and mention the promotional code Networx.

Networx Panel – How to win links and influence people

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The rest of this post is a run-down of what we’ve been up to lately and doesn’t contain any proper SEO-related techniques, tips or tricks… so if you’re ok with a few paragraphs of shameless self-promotion poorly masked by what I like to refer to as ‘achievements’ then read on … Otherwise check-back in a week or two when the usual blogging should resume.

A couple of months back we had a guest blog post feature on Canada’s premiere SEO blog – Search Engine People, about Google Trends and Insights for Search – read more here: What’s Hot Google.

We then headed down to Sydney to the best annual Australian search marketing conference / expo – SMX Sydney. Thanks to Kalena, Barry, Lisa and the team at Search Strategies I was fortunate enough to win a free pass by designing a promo shirt for the Search Engine College. You can read more about the two-day conference here, here, here, here and here.

Since then, I’ve been helping the Search Engine College catch-up with a backlog of SEO-related questions on the Ask Kalena blog… launched a fun viral project called Epic Boss Fail and now I’m guest speaking on the topic of link building at a Brisbane Networking event.

If you’re in the Brisbane area, there are still tickets available to attend the networking evening – How to win links and influence people which is happening on Monday night the 22nd of June. You can book online here (and as an added bonus, if you mention the word ‘PurpleCow’ when you register you’ll be able to bring along a friend for free).

As mentioned above, the regular weekly blogging schedule should resume in a week or two, so if you have any ideas or suggestions you’d like to see on here in future posts, please let me know via comments or follow me on Twitter.

Where have we been? Everywhere but here…

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On average, these video’s wouldn’t have been more than 3 minutes each, and despite some being entertaining, some funny, some educational the rest just plain strange, few of them were compelling enough to keep my attention to the very end.

This surprised me enough to Google some statistics on what could be considered an ‘average’ adult attention span. Knowing how reliable the internet is when it comes to proper factual information, I settled on the following as it seemed reasonable (and to be honest with you, I was distracted before doing any further research):

• Average continuous attention span of a literate adult:8 seconds
• Maximum possible continuous attention span for a literate adult: 30 seconds
• Average general attention span of a literate adult: 10 – 12 minutes

As a website owner, this means you have less than a minute of to get people’s attention and even if you do manage to grab their attention, you’ll only be able to hold it for a few more minutes.

This means it’s crucial to not only know exactly what your potential (and existing) clients expect from your website and where they expect to find it – but to also do so in such a way that keeps them coming back for more.

Here are a few simple tips for how to achieve this:

• As a business owner, you should know the common things that clients ask when they make an enquiry about your products/services. Make sure this information is easily accessible – put it on your homepage, or within one intuitive, easy-to-find click from your homepage.
• Put all your contact information (especially phone number and address) on your homepage. Clients need to feel comfortable that they can easily contact you. Having to fill-in online forms, emails or support tickets might seem like a good idea, but nothing beats the power of a simple phone-call, so make it easy for your clients to do this.
• If you have an online store, minimise unnecessary steps in the ordering process, where possible, remove navigation options and make sure you label how many steps are involved in the purchasing process, so clients don’t feel like they’re on a never-ending quest to reach the final check-out page.
• Direct people to all the important parts of your website through well-placed text-links in your main website content. Having a menu is great, but sometimes if you’re in the middle of reading something and want to find-out more, being able to click directly on the word or phrase you’re reading can be far easier than having to figure-out where the item is in the menu structure.
• Incorporate a search feature on your site as well as a site-map.
• To get people coming-back for more, keep the content fresh and up-to-date. One simple way of doing this could be to add a blog, online newsletters or regularly updated industry-specific articles.

It should also go without saying that the site should at least look somewhat aesthetically appealing. Sure, we can’t all afford to pay expensive graphic designers, but it doesn’t take much to search around for an affordable (or even free) template.

There are lots of other usability tips and techniques that can be applied, but if you try and keep things simple, and employ common sense when it comes to the positioning of information, you’ll be doing a lot better than many of the sites I see on a daily basis.

The easier and quicker users can find what they’re looking for, the less likely they’ll lose interest and end-up browsing else-where.

How to appeal to web users with a shorter attention span than a goldfish

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• You have a functional set of legs and an understanding of how to use them
• You have (at the very least) a reasonable level of fitness
• And it helps if you’ve done some training and/or other preparation for the big race

None of the above points provide any guarantee that you’ll win – they simply mean you’ve got the basics to participate… but there are a lot of other smaller factors that we often don’t think about, yet greatly impact on how you perform in the race and whether or not you’ll even be allowed to run.

For instance, if you turned-up on the day of the race completely naked or with a bomb strapped to your chest – the only race you’ll be running is away from the cops.

Another random consideration could be your running shoes. While a comfortable pair of shoes isn’t necessary to run, if you were wearing Dutch clogs, you’ll perform a lot worse than someone wearing a pair of Nike’s.

But even owning a pair of good running shoes isn’t enough – the shoes need to fit, plus they need laces and you need to know how to tie the laces (or at least know someone who can do this for you) in order for the shoes to stay on your feet once you start moving.

I could go on and on about every minor and seemingly unrelated detail that needs to happen for a successful race to take place, but you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with SEO?

While all of these points may seem like common-sense when referring to a running race, there are many similarities to owning and marketing a website. Many website owners will be aware of the big things (like having legs and knowing how to use them) and some will even appreciate that they’ll need to have done some preparation and training… but it’s all the little things that are overlooked.

Having a visually unappealing site is not unlike turning-up to a race naked. If you use a content management system which hasn’t been updated/upgraded/patched or modified in years, it’s most likely full of security holes. This means it’s easy pickings for hackers, and once your site is infected with malware it will be flagged by Google and you might as well have turn-up to the race with a bomb strapped to your chest.

If your site is lacking in functionality, has broken links or is simply too difficult to get from one page to another, you’re running wearing clogs. Sure, you will still make it to the finish line, but it’ll take you a lot more time and effort than a site that is streamlined, efficient and easy to use.

Some sites might look nice, are easy to use and even incorporate features such as blogs or utilise other social media. This is brilliant and not only helps with getting your pages indexed faster but also acts as a great marketing tool… but simply having such features and not using them properly is like not tying the laces on your Nike’s causing them to fall-off a few feet into the race.

Like any race, there are no certainties or guarantees – so you should never stop training, ensure you have the latest and greatest running shoes and always keep your ears open to the hints and tips offered by professional trainers and experienced runners. After-all, SEO is more of a journey instead of a destination.

But the sites that tick all these boxes (along with the countless other little factors) are the ones that have the greatest chance of winning. And even if you don’t come first, at least you’ll know you weren’t the overweight, one-legged, naked guy wearing a wooden clog and a bomb on their chest.

On your mark… Get set… SEO!

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When chatting with a friend recently, it made me realise that social media works in a very similar way to a Rube Goldberg Machine.

Before I explain the relationship between the two, it’s important to note a few small things about social media.

From my experience, a lot of businesses don’t quite grasp the concept of social media. Some will create a Facebook page or a Twitter profile and think simply by creating it, they’ve done their part and can cross ’social media’ off their list of things to try… and then they wonder why it doesn’t appear to be working for them.

Then there are the companies that go to the other extreme. The ones that tweet everything that happens from arriving at the office, saying good-morning to the staff, making a coffee, reading emails etc. While they may technically be ‘using’ the social media tools, they aren’t really sharing anything beneficial – and they too will wonder why they aren’t achieving the results they were hoping for.

Every social media platform is different and subsequently requires different approaches to gain the best results, but one commonality between all the social media tools is that you need to connect with others and most importantly, share relevant and useful content that your target audience will be interested in.

Once you find the right mix of information to share and how to best interact with your community (which can take some research, testing and time) you’ll find that your community will start working with (and for) you.

This is where the Rube Goldberg Machine analogy comes into play.

First off, you should set a simple goal. It could be to gain readers for a new company blog you’ve just started or perhaps to promote a particular range of products that you have on sale in your online store or any number of other things.

Now that you know what you want the machine to accomplish, you need to work-out the steps required to get there.

Anyone new to social media often finds that getting the perfect mix of readers/followers/fans can be difficult. The best way to find the perfect mix of followers is to look towards those who are already using social media effectively within your niche. These people shouldn’t be too hard to find as they’ll be the ones sharing the most relevant info, have the most followers, engaging in conversations with others and using the various social media sites on a regular basis.

Befriend these social media celebrities and start interacting with them. When doing this, don’t just say “hi” – share something useful that they may find interesting. Make positive comments and feedback on conversations and use their influence as an opportunity to leverage some exposure of your own. This will take some time and you should try and utilise a range of social media networks to help with the process.

Once you’ve made some connections and you’re starting to establish a social media presence, you need to keep the conversations happening and sharing useful items, but now you can slowly start to promote some of your own work. Don’t plaster your site over every tweet, post and comment you make, and when making reference to your own work, ensure that it’s fitting with the current discussion.

Be sure to keep sharing other items of interest external to your site, keep the conversations flowing and don’t spam people with ongoing shameless self-promotional plugs. If you follow this approach, people will be a lot more accepting of you mentioning your own content allowing you to start focusing on the initial goals that you set.

By this stage, you should have a reasonable amount of trust and respect so that you can start approaching some of those social media celebrities within your niche and asking if they’d be willing to look at some of your work (be it blog posts, specials or other promotions you might be running or anything you think they will find particularly interesting). If the content is good enough and you haven’t been too pushy or annoying, you might be lucky enough to gain some endorsement boosting your exposure even further.

So as you can see, like a Rube Goldberg Machine, it may have taken a number of convoluted and seemingly time consuming steps to achieve some simple results, but the connections you’ll make and exposure received when you finally crack the social media space is most definitely worth it.

Social media has been around for a while now and it just keeps evolving and growing – so what are you waiting for – get your Rube Goldberg Social Media Machine started now.

Social Media – The Rube Goldberg Machine of the Web

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Not online? I hear you thinking… If something isn’t online, then how can it possibly gain me links… and why is a Search Marketing company telling me to do stuff outside of the Interweb?

They say we come in contact with over 3000 product endorsements every day – be it billboards, magazines, radio, TV, etc. Some of these endorsements stick with us, others don’t.

The ones that do stick, are often talked about, blogged about, Twittered, shared on Facebook and throughout all sorts of other social media networks because that’s how we share interesting and relevant information in this crazy, online society we live in.

And it’s not just individual’s sharing this information – the media is really not that different. If something is newsworthy (which in today’s standards could mean anything) it will be mentioned in multiple news sources – radio will quote something from TV, TV will quote newspapers, and inevitably, it will end-up online.

So you’re probably thinking – I know how word-of-mouth and general media works, but how is that going to help me get links?

In its simplest form, a link is really just a citation or recommendation connecting you to the relevant location where you can find more information about a specific topic. So following that logic, link building should be treated no differently to branding.

When building a brand, the aim is to interest people and get them talking. Social media’s most basic definition is ‘people communicating/interacting with each other’ so an offline branding exercise can quite easily turn into an online discussion, and if the offline component was done well, links are sure to follow.

So how can I do this?

One method is getting quoted in a news story and or even issue your own news/press release (which has the benefit of being printed or may lead to getting you quoted in other sources). These types of articles are great to send to local journalists for their offline publications (knowing that many of these have online equivalents) and if they don’t, a topical news story will often be picked-up by other news channels. If that fails, you still have the rights to the articles you’ve written and can quite easily submit them to article/PR websites which is another good way of getting the odd link.

If you do manage to get the odd news article printed, stay in contact with that journalist/publication. If you come-across as being authoritive in your field, when a breaking news article pertaining to your industry goes hot, the journo may call on your expertise to make a comment/statement.

When people see a quote about how “the current economic climate is affecting online marketing trends by Peter Newsome, Search Marketing Director of SiteMost”, they are likely to go searching for this ‘SiteMost’ company and who this character ‘Peter Newsome’ is.

When others make reference to this news item, they’re making reference to you as well. This could result in a link, but even without the link, the offline endorsement has triggered a search to your website – it has driven traffic from someone interested enough in the topic and wants to find-out more.

This is just as (if not more) beneficial than some random link in a blogpost.

So next time you’re thinking about starting an online marketing campaign, don’t forget that the offline efforts are equally as important as the online ones, and if done well, will yield links and exposure that you may not have been able to achieve if you had just stuck to a purely online approach.

Linkbuilding Offline

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We’ve been meaning to do this for sometime, so we figured now was as good a time as ever.

Hopefully the change-over should be fairly seamless, but there is a chance that we could lose some subscribers due to a change in RSS Feed address. The new address will be: http://www.sitemost.com.au/blog/feed/ so please check your readers and if required, I’d appreciate it if you could update the details.

Thanks

Peter Newsome – SiteMost

We’re Moving

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