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LDA – Is On-Page Optimization the SEO Secret?

webmaster — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:19:12 +0000

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

How do I recap the SEOmoz PRO Seminar session on Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO? The title is so attractive that it produces Pavlonian symptoms as we salivate at the thought of uncovering a hidden SEO treasure. Ben Hendrickson of SEOmoz presented a model which appears to show how Google may assigning relevance to keyword terms based on context – topical relevance.

Is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that hidden jackpot?

1st – LDA is not new nor something SEOmoz invented. The Information Retrieval model has been around for 7 or 8 years, and IR geeks have talked about it before. There are a number of resources, as well as nay saying, about LDA and Google’s possible use of it.

2nd – What is new is SEOmoz’s LDA Topics Tool that produces a relevancy score based off a query (search term). It enables one to play with words that may increase a page’s relevancy in the eyes of Google. It shows words that help Google determine how relevant the page is to a user’s search query.

Game Changer?

Kyle Stone tweeted that the LDA tool is a game changer, and many retweeted.

Is SEOmoz’s LDA tool a game changer? That’s yet to be seen. The goal is to report Ben’s research as presented at the Mozinar and how a layman (myself) interprets such. Rand is going to do a follow-up post to explain more.

Why all the hype?

The SEO Challenge

SEOs face the continual challenge of figuring out Google’s hidden ranking algorithms. How do we rank higher? Which signals are the most important? We know search engines are "learning models" that attempt to understand "context” of words. Google has said for years that webmasters should concentrate most on providing good relevant (contextual) content.

There are ways to rank higher. Is it as easy as 1, 2, 3?

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

LDA – Topic Modeling & Analysis

Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in layman’s terms, translates to "topic modeling." In search geek terms, LDA is the following formula:

(Did you digest that? Don’t worry; Mozzers groaned and laughed at the same time. PLUS: Scientist Hendrickson delivered this session after lunch!)

LDA Simplified – Here is Ben’s way of explaining topic modeling:

(Okay, I was once proud that I got an A in Logic and Combinatorics – discrete math/set theory. However, that computer science class now feels like basic math compared to this formula.)

It made more sense when Rand Fishkin joined Ben on stage and when Todd Freisen moderated and deciphered during Q&A. (Manuela Sanches of Brazil was sitting next to me and said that Ben’s "presentation needed subtitles!")

The objective of LDA, from my deciphering of Greek, is to understand how Google is using semantic contextual analysis combined with other signals, to define topics/concepts. It’s how Google analyzes the words on a page to determine the "set" to which a word belongs – how relevant a search query is to pages in its database.

For example: How does Google assign relevance to the word "orange" on a page? They determine orange is related to the fruit set or to the color set by page context.

LDA Defined:

"Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al, 2003) is a powerful learning algorithm for automatically and jointly clustering words into "topics" and documents into mixtures of topics. It has been successfully applied to model change in scientific fields over time (Griffiths and Steyver, 2004; Hall, et al. 2008).

A topic model is, roughly, a hierarchical Bayesian model that associates with each document a probability distribution over "topics", which are in turn distributions over words."

Bayesian – ah, a term I recognize!! Bayesian spam filtering is a method used to detect spam. It draws off a database and learns the meaning of words. It’s "trained" by us when we mark an email as spam. It looks at incoming emails and calculates the probability that the content of an email is contextually spammy.

I found a PowerPoint presentation about Bayesian Inference Techniques by Microsoft Research from 2004 that presents the possibility of using LDA. Go to slide 54 and read:

"Can we build a general-purpose inference engine which automates these procedures?"

Microsoft has been looking at LDA models. Do search engines use it as one of their primary methods?

Ben sampled over 8 million documents with approx. 1,000 queries. He believes Google is using LDA topic modeling to determine (learn) what words mean by their associations with, relevance to, other words on the page. (Other factors are included.) Ben called the results a "co-occurrence explanation" that use a "cosine similarity."

SEO Takeaway:

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

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

Dana’s LDA Catwalk Metaphor for Topic Modeling:

Imagine the words on your page as walking down the fashion runway in Paris. Your keyword phrase is "dressed" in semantic accessories, words that correlate to and dress up your topic. Associated words bring meaning to and highlight the fashion model’s outfit. Adjectives, modifiers and synonyms are like jewelry, hats, and shoes. The combination can transform your base layers (your target terms) from casual or conservative business attire into a sexy night-on-the-town ensemble.

Combinations and permutations of words on a page "dress" your skinny or curvy fashion model. Relevant words provide Google with an image of what she is wearing and the catwalk upon which she struts. LDA refers back to what Google already knows about these "accessories" (words) and their previous association with the topic terms related to fashion.

Enter Topical Ambiguity – I just broke the "rules" for context with the catwalk metaphor by referring to modeling in two contexts on this page:

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

Google Algorithm Exposed?

Ben clearly said that LDA is an ATTEMPT to explain the SERPs. His scenario, a quote from his presentation slides, follows:

One of us needs to implement it so we can:

1) See how it applies to pages
2) See if it helps explain SERPs
One-two-three-not-it.

LDA is not LSI.

There were some tweets claiming SEOmoz was bringing back LSI or snakeoil. Ben clarified that LDA is not LSI, which deals more with keyword density. He explained that he is NOT talking about loading keywords on a page but about the relevance of the topics within the page. He said that:

"LSI doesn’t have the same bias toward simple explanations. LSI breaks down as you try to scale up the number of topics."

The LDA tool deals with context, semantic relevancy, not density – in addition to some other random factors. Example:

If SEOmoz has a page all about "SEO" and "tools," and there is another word on the page that can be explained by a word that is more related to SEO topic, then the related word would be used. Meaning, "seo tools" doesn’t have to be repeated over and over, and the related word would be interpreted by Google as being relevant.

Ben, who appears to have the brain of a search engine, noted that it "appears" LDA is what Google is heading for in the near future. He said (paraphrased):

If they are not doing it, they seem to be doing something that has the same output. They are probably already using it.

Rand deciphered:

It’s a super weird coincidence if Google is not using it.

Are On-Page Signals Stronger than Links?

Are we heading toward more emphasis of on-page topic modeling? I’m not an IR geek, but I do plan to spend more energy focusing on understanding how search engines retrieve informaton. We are dealing with a semantic Web. LDA may indicate that good old on-page optimization sends stronger signals than links.

SEOmoz’s LDA tool attempts to show how relevant content is to a chosen keyword. It computes relevance of queries.

The following shows how relevant SEOmoz’s Tools page is to Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Tools page.

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

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

*NOTE: (I inserted the logos.) You can run the same pages and get different results. The results are similar in that SEO Book always scored as more topically relevant, but the percentage varies. Is this the random Monte Carlo algorithm at work? Ben?

Mozinar Question:

"How do we execute this for SEO?"

Ben’s Answer:

"I don’t actually do SEO. I write code."

That’s up to us, the SEOs, to play and test in our Google playground.

Use the tool to decide if you can win with LDA to optimize your on-page signals.

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

If you are not performing that well in the SERPs, think about classic on-page optimization. In the example above, rather than putting another instance of "seo tools" on the page, LDA shows there are better ways to tell Google that you are about that topic. The tool provides a way to measure that.

IMPORTANT: There is a threshold at which too many related words will appear as too spammy. LDA is not something to be used to game Google.

Test the LDA Tool out for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.

***
DISCLAIMER: I’m not claiming this methodology has uncovered hidden SEO treasures. Time, testing and playing around with a new SEOmoz tool while observing the SERPs will reveal the answer. In the meantime, I’m going to dress up my pages and accessorize them with relevant terms that make them dazzle so they look good climbing the Google catwalk.

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Online Content Doesn’t Have an Expiration Date

webmaster — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:42:20 +0000

Publishing content online is simple; maybe too simple. When you click publish, share or tweet, do you instantly forget about the information you just shared? In a social media culture where the hunt for the next big trend constantly exists, putting aside published content to move on to the next topic is a natural reaction. This mode of thinking makes all of us online publishers often forget one very important thing: Online content is forever.

A notebook can get thrown in the trash, and a digital document can sit in a crowded folder and be ignored forever. Blog posts, tweets, ebooks, Facebook updates, and all other content published online, however, doesn’t go away. It continuously reappears in search results across different sites. Even if you delete content that was previously published online, odds are that it is still cached somewhere on the web or has been copied by someone and placed on another site. While this may seem a little scary to some, it is also one of the key factors that has helped level the marketing playing field.

Why Forever Is Great for Marketers

With traditional marketing like direct mail and print ads, your content was disposable. Once the next trade magazine issue came out, your message was in the trash. Because of this, the only way to keep a constant flow of messages in the marketplace was to keep spending money. This gave the power to large companies with bigger budgets. In online marketing, it is much less about marketing budgets or company size; the main success factor has become agility. In online marketing, you have to be able to create content your customers want and publish it quickly.

This gives the leverage to companies that are agile. If your business takes a month to approve a tweet, then a smaller startup can easily compete in the world of online marketing due to their ability to create content and engage with customers more frequently. Because content is forever, the effect of being able to create high-quality content regularly quickly snowballs and creates more and more leverage as each month ticks by.

3 Steps for Leveraging Forever

When you are a marketer, forever is your friend. The fact that content is forever helps you build a vault of online content that new and existing competitors won’t be able to overcome. Whether you are a marketer who is new to online marketing or a veteran who is looking to squeeze out every ounce of your marketing investment, then consider these three pieces of advice.

1. Conduct a Hard Drive Audit – Set aside some time and look at the documents, videos, and other types of content that are filling up your hard drive or that might be hiding in a marketing folder on a server somewhere. As you are looking through content, think about which items could be posted online that could help you target keywords, generate search traffic, or help answer prospect and customer questions. Odds are, you have at least a few items that can help with this but have never made their way onto the web. Work to add them to your blog or corporate website.

2. Make PDFs Friendly – Marketing departments are PDF-creating machines. The problem is, while PDFs provide some search engine opportunity value, the same content presented in a different way would have a much stronger, long-term benefit. Use content that is in PDF form when possible and move it to an HTML page where you can have control over the page title, headers, and other factors that can improve on-page SEO. You don’t need to do this with all PDFs. For example, if you have a PDF download behind a landing page for lead generation, that is fine. However, if you have a PDF of a product manual, that content would work much harder for your marketing team if it was no longer in PDF form.

3. Promote Past Content – Content that is old to you isn’t necessarily old to a prospect just learning about your company for the first time. We have explained some best practices for promoting evergreen content in the past, but it is worth revisiting the issue. If you write 50 blog articles a year, it is likely that many of them aren’t time-sensitive. Take this evergreen content and reintroduce it to social media subscribers who may have only begun following you in the months following the publication date of that blog post. Promoting existing content is a great way to improve thought leadership and leader generation without dedicating the time needed to write a new article.

How do you leverage forever?

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Four Creative Link Building Tactics – Whiteboard Friday

webmaster — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:14:41 +0000

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

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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5 Tips to Improve Channel Partner Lead Generation

webmaster — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:40:32 +0000

Online marketing is unique for each business. For large businesses that rely on channel partners to sell and distribute products, the online marketing process can be a challenge. With many channel partners across multiple locations, how can a business make sure that partners have the leads they need to help grow the business?

In a recent conversation with a channel marketing manager I was asked, “What can I do now to get my partners and resellers found?” As with many channel marketing managers, their time is very constrained, but the need to do more lead generation for their resellers is ever present. Additionally, they often talk about how their resellers do a great job once someone is introduced to them, but often their own websites are not helping them bring in new leads. After asking me that question, she said, “I wish I could just give them a few tips to get them started in Inbound Marketing and getting website traction”

5 Tips For Channel Partner Lead Generation

1. Identify Longtail Keywords - Find 10 keywords that are in the longtail for your services or products and provide them to your resellers and partners to use. Keywords need to be used in a consistent way on each webpage in the page title, the URL, the page headers and text. By doing the background research and providing a starting point, your partners or resellers can quickly optimize their pages.

2. Provide Partners with Lead Generation Offers - Create an offer such as a ebook or webinar that can be downloaded or accessed from each partner’s website. Maybe your company provides security software and you have a tool that does a quick, free sweep of their network to test for vulnerability. Another option would be to offer a free assessment that will help prospect better understand which product offering best fits their needs. By creating these downloads, you are giving your reseller network an offer they can give visitors that come to their websites.

3. Create a Landing Page Template – Create a standard landing page that every reseller can put on their main page of their website to both capture lead data, and provide an offer. 70% of visitors to a website are in the “early stage” of buying. They are not ready to purchase, but are starting to investigate. Instead of having them visit your site and then “drive on”, give them an offer in exchange for collecting some of their information, even if it is just an email address. This will allow you to stay in touch with them via email offers or turn over the lead to your sales team for qualification and follow up.

4. Develop An Email Template and Campaign – Email is an important part of the lead generation mix. Create a great email marketing campaign with an offer that each partner can send to new leads. Maybe it is a free assessment of a website, or an opportunity to attend a free consulting session. This campaign is to help move leads further down the funnel and to help increase a partners lead-to-customer percentages. Often channel managers have the ability to give marketing funds for offers, so why not provide them the email message to use as well.

5. Share Partner Successes – If one of your partners is finding an offer is converting leads well or a free assessment is leading to more business in the door, let the network know! Inbound marketing may be new, but closing a deal is well understood and anything that drives more business to one partner will help the overall brand and network as well. Share the success!

What have you done to help improve inbound marketing for your channel partners?

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Expert Advice: How to Start a Website Redesign

webmaster — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:40:23 +0000

Here at HubSpot, we get a lot of questions around website redesigns. When should they be done, how should they be done and what mistakes not to make. In this three part series, we’ll examine some of the common pitfalls you might fall into and ways to avoid them.

One thing that all of our partners agreed upon, is that before embarking on any redesigns, companies should truly understand their goals and their customers. Without these necessary prep steps, you’ll wind up designing a website in a vacuum and wasting money. Here are just a few of the key questions that you should ask yourself before you change one pixel:

What Are Your Goals?

We also heard from HubSpot Partner Kelly Ward, of Digital K, who believes that “it’s important to take a top-level view of the website. [Figure out] what are you trying to ACHIEVE with your website? Are you trying to attract new customers? Service existing customers? Portray a new image for your company?”

What Are You Currently Doing Right?

HubSpot partner Keith Moehring of PR 20/20 echoes just these sentiments. He says that “Prior to doing any type of redesign … a company needs to look at what keywords are driving traffic and to which pages, and what pages have incoming links…Another area that needs to be evaluated thoroughly is who is coming to the site and what is drawing them in.”

Are You Doing This For the Right Reasons?

Top Line Results’ Todd Hockenberry feels that sometimes website redesigns happen for the wrong reasons. First, there’s the “redesign as part of new management.” He writes “Not having a clear, strategic reason why they are redesigning is one I see regularly. Companies still look internally for that answer way too often – new manager, new logo, re-organization, don’t like the design.”

Todd also thinks that sometimes, companies build a site as a means of fixing all their business issues, without looking deeper at their true problems. He says, “We deal with a lot of small to medium sized manufacturers and there are many who think a new website will be a field of dreams.”

So, What are the “Right” Answers?

This last question is actually a trick question. There is no one right answer to these questions; every company has different motivations and goals with a redesign. However, take the time before starting to make sure that you’re investing your time and money wisely. To ensure that you are being true to your company’s needs & goals, really analyze if a redesign is necessary and what you want to accomplish.

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A New Day, A New SEOmoz

webmaster — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:14:24 +0000

Posted by randfish

It’s been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu, don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. We’re the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let’s walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It’s a good day to be PRO; we’ve just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that’s designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it’s part of PRO, you’ll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we’re now announcing a full public beta – campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There’s also some cool new functionality I’ll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you’ve been curious about what’s in PRO membership, there’s a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also – the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now – after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We’ve done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn SEO. I’ve recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we’ve made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We’ve re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we’ve kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we’re planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There’s lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We’ve also added a brand new feature – one of our most requested – exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback – your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we’re feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There’s a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner’s Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you’ve already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we’ve also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post – that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we’re expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we’re hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we’d love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well…. let’s just say you ain’t seen nothing yet

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Day 1 at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

webmaster — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:14:21 +0000

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.

Presentation Off

Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).

Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:

Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
- You pitch SEO before that.
- Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
- He showed the Mozzers how to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
- He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.

Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59

Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:

Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO

Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.

Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI – showing the value of their traffic:

Then explain search growth over time – meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.

“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."

Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:

Show competitors in SERPs.
Match it with yeyword demand.
Show how they are doing, side-by-side.

And the winner of the Presentation Off is … Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.

OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.

Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”

She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:

1. What is your website trying to do?

2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?

3. What is the biggest threat to your success?

You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)

Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:

Social Network Filters – combine
Google Image Search – Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.

Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables – 2 hands raised.

MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().

Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”

Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics

Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:

Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
Show the action items (not the data) to your company
Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.

Whew… surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no… more typing at high speeds:

Marshall Simmonds – Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO

Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:

High Priority Tactics:

Sitemaps
Education
301s
Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
Rel=canonical
Rewriting urls
How much it will make? What’s the cost/traffic potential

Low Priority Tactics:

Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
URLs
Link Flow
Video SEO
Duplicate content
CMS Overhaul
W3C compliance

Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don’t budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn’t have an end point.

Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:

Optimize all assets!

Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.

Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:

rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
Title is the most important element.
Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
- Omniture – over reports search referrers
- Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
- Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.

Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.

Tom Critchlow

Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:

Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
QDF = Query Deserves Freshness
QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links.
Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!

Keyword harvesting tools:

Google Search Suggest
Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific
Google Related Searches
Mozenda + API = WIN
- Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool.
- Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
- Look at how people tag stories on Delicious

The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)

Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)

Build an SEO friendly CMS:

Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:

Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:

Delicious tags – todo, toread (API)
Foursquare top checkins (API)
Local events calendar (API)
Yahoo Answers (API)
Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish)
No API? – Mozenda ftw!
More: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools

The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:

It’s not that hard! Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.

Thank you, Tom!

Lindsay Wassell – Constructing Effective SEO Audits

Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.

Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.

The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:

She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:

Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.

She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.

Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization

The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.

Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.

Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:

How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users …

Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:

Unclear call-to-action
Too many choices
Asking for too much info
Too much text
Not keeping your promises
Visual distractions
Lack of trust

We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.

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Free Ebook: Understanding Blog, Social Media and Search Engine Usage by Industry

webmaster — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:37:01 +0000

The four most important social media channels to marketers are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube (See the 2010 State of Inbound Marketing for data). But which one(s) are the most active for your industry? HubSpot recently analyzed 33 industries to find out. An overview of data from our new ebook, the Online Marketing Opportunity Report is displayed below:

So what does this data mean for your business? To begin with, low activity doesn’t necessarily equate to low opportunity; it may just mean that you need to adjust your strategy for that channel.

HubSpot put together a comprehensive guide to applying this type of data to your business, along with a more detailed analysis of all 33 industries. Download our free eBook to read more.

Free Ebook: Online Marketing Opportunity Report

Do you wonder if it is worth the effort to start a Twitter account or a Facebook page?

Download this free report to learn how your insudtry uses social media, blogs and search engines.

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How to Write a Whitepaper That Will Capture Leads

webmaster — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:36:41 +0000

The following is a guest post by John McTigue, Executive Vice President and Co-Owner of Kuno Creative. Kuno Creative is a Certified HubSpot Partner Agency based in Avon, OH that specializes in building brands and capturing sales leads.

Crafting a good whitepaper isn’t easy. Creating one that will capture leads is an even bigger challenge. Although there is no standard definition of what constitutes a whitepaper, most people would agree that they differ from blogs in scope, style and intent:

Scope

Whitepapers are usually in-depth reports on a specific topic, like a research paper intended for publication on the Web. Typically at least 10 pages in length with illustrations, charts and references, the average whitepaper is not designed for casual browsing and usually requires several readings to glean the full extent of its information. Readers expect a high degree of expertise backed by solid research that is fully documented by references. It can take weeks or even months to write and polish a good whitepaper.

Style

Whitepapers are usually serious in tone and professional in appearance. You can expect your readers to include people who are considering purchasing your products or services, so you want to make sure your whitepapers are written well, edited well and formatted to represent your brand on the same level as your brochures and website. It’s a good idea to enlist the services of a graphic designer to layout your pages, images, fonts and colors for best results. Have at least two experienced writers review your document for grammar, spelling and accuracy. Make sure your management team has reviewed it to avoid possible problems with content or strategy.

Intent

Blogs are intended for reaching out to the general public, to update them on your ideas and strategies. More often than not, blogs are opinion-based. Usually blogs are informal and often playful. Whitepapers are for capturing leads – it’s all about business. You are providing something truly valuable for your target audience. Good information backed by well-documented research is worth its weight in gold. When someone signs up for your whitepaper on your landing page they are connecting with you and allowing you to connect with them further, i.e. move them further down the sales funnel. They will gladly do this if your whitepaper provides useful information and insight they can’t get elsewhere.

So what constitutes a great lead-generating whitepaper?

Find a topic that feeds a need. You must know your target market, what do they want to know and what’s already out there? You can explore topics in social media and community sites that generate a lot of comments. If you have expertise in one of those topics, get to work.
Put your heart into it. Don’t just patch together a bunch of other peoples’ work. Analyze the data and add value by evaluating options and presenting them to your readers in an easy to understand way.
Make it substantial. Cover the ground. Make an outline first, and organize it well into chapters or sections. It’s a good idea to make each section a “bite-sized” chunk, maybe one page with charts or graphics that covers a certain point.
Make it authoritative. Do your homework and make sure you mention previous authoritative work on the subject. Your mission isn’t to be the only expert in the field – it’s to be the latest expert with the freshest insights.
Create a great landing page. Include a summary and topics to let people know what the whitepaper’s about. Tell them why it’s important to them, and with time and exposure, include some snippets from comments and reviews.

Here are some examples of whitepapers on inbound marketing:

Inbound Marketing Blueprint for the C-Suite (Kuno Creative)
Inbound Marketing Gameplan (PR2020)
The 7 Universal Laws Of Pull Marketing (PullnotPush)
Internet Marketing Whitepapers (HubSpot)

Tell us about some great whitepapers you have downloaded and why you liked them.

Photo Credit: alancleaver_200

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Expert Advice: Overcoming Inbound Marketing Challenges

webmaster — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:35:51 +0000

Here at HubSpot we sing the praises of Inbound Marketing from the rooftops. Yes, it is an amazing way to see growth in your SEO goals, website traffic, leads and customers. It helps you develop a deeper engagement and establish yourself as a thought leader. But, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Proper inbound marketing can take a lot of hard work.

We asked the HubSpot Partners what they think the hardest part of inbound marketing is and how they work through these challenges.

Partner Teicko Hubert of Focus to Grow believes the hardest part is the understanding “of the cultural shift that has to happen to make inbound marketing work” and that “a website is merely fiction unless you understand how inbound marketing works.” That said, Teicko believes that this change can be overcome, but, “it takes diligence and a hyped focus on refining your story telling skills and probing skills.” This is a great point, just like learning any other skill, inbound marketing takes hard work and there’s an adjustment period.

Another successful partner, Phillip Johnson of Fatiguana Endeavors, says that he feels the biggest challenge is having the time to create content. However, by “creating both long and short term strategies for content creation and broader Inbound Marketing tactics” you can start to see benefits sooner and the reward of all the time you are investing. Seeing shorter term results often gives you a boost of confidence that you are on the right path and can help direct your long term strategy.

Of course once you get started with inbound marketing, you have to keep it up. Inbound Marketing Experts’ Andy Xhignesse reminds us that inbound marketing has to be an ongoing part of your daily routine. While positive results are great, you cannot stop as soon as you they occur. Instead, see them as a sign that you’re on the right track and keep going!

Finally, our always wise partner Dale Berkebile of Brandwise, chimed in to remark that inbound marketers always need to keep their priorities in order and remember “quality over quantity.” It’s great if you have a large reach but keep in mind, you also need to engage with them. As Dale says, “500+ Facebook fans + 9000 follower[s] + no interaction = disaster.”

So what do all of these partners’ suggestions have in common? Well first, don’t give up! Inbound Marketing can take time. Second, there’s no one “thing” that you can do to guarantee success. It’s not just followers, it’s not just content creation, it’s not just having a great website. It’s what happens when all of these pieces, and more, come together to form a unified inbound marketing strategy.

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