Posted by randfish

There’s SEO challenges, and then there’s SEO mountains. In the world of search marketing, perhaps nothing seems more initially daunting than a site/brand/product/entity with little to no search volume. It’s not commonplace, but in several sectors, particularly some sites in niche hobbies, the arts, nonprofits and startups, there can be times when what you’re producing isn’t something people are asking the search engines about (yet).

My idea to build and market metal whiteboards using SEO could be challenging…

If and when that’s the case, there are other ways to get organic traffic – content marketing, blogging, social media, email, public relations, etc. – but there’s also several SEO techniques that can be cleverly applied.

The Substitute, i.e. It’s the New "Fill-in-the-Blank"

Many products, brands or websites may not have direct search volume, but they can be thought of and marketed as similar to an existing solution/brand. When that’s the case, targeting keywords that fit the bill for that substitute can present an effective proxy stream of (potentially) relevant search traffic.

For our example above, we might create content like:

• Whiteboards are SO 20th Century: Evolve to Metal
• Glass Whiteboards: Transparent? Or Too Transparent?
• Whiteboard Paint is NOT the Answer; Metal Is.

These blog posts, articles or sales pages could then rank alongside the product that ours is seeking to replace, and though they may not be a 1:1 match, the substitution could attract awareness and attention of the new player in the marketplace.

The Comparison

Many products and brands won’t have properties to truly substitute for an existing search query. But, in most cases, they will be comparable to something familiar and queried.

Imagine, for example, a new form of artistic body-modification that renders portions of one’s skin transparent for 5-6 days. It’s not really a tattoo or body painting, but more an artistic way to illustrate one’s sub-dermal anatomy. Let’s call it "transparantizing"

In this peculiar case, we might not be able to honestly call it a substitute for a tattoo (or exploratory surgery for that matter), but we could create content to compare them, such as:

• Tattoos, Henna, Body Paint & Transparantizing
• Comparing Exploratory Surgery, MRIs, X-Rays and Transparantizing

This technique can be applied to real-world situations, too. A local Seattle startup, Gist.com, provides a plug-in for Gmail and Outlook to show social information about an email contact (highly useful for salespeople, in particular). Although they’re not a substitute for something like Salesforce or contact management software, they can certainly compare their offerings to these popular (and high demand) queries.

Attract the Audience, Not the Query

For some brands, organizations and sites, comparables may be challenging or simply not enough. When it seems as though all direct paths to relevant traffic are stymied, remember the goal of demographic advertising. Rather than directly marketing to an audience that’s expressed a clear interest, demographic ads seek to reach an audience target defined by their age, gender, income and other personal traits. SEO can accomplish a similar task, but it requires some careful planning and preparation.

First, you’ll need to know as much about your target audience as possible. In our transparantizing example, let’s imagine one target group is doctors and surgeons. What types of sites do they visit? What demographic and psychographic attributes apply to them? And, most importantly, what kinds of queries do they perform on a regular basis?

If we knew that our targets were regularly querying for information about medical devices, techniques, journal articles, etc. we could create a blog with content focused on those topics, discussing precisely those types of content matters. Alongside the blog’s primary content on these relevant topics, we could show off the brand/product to a group of highly relevant, potentially interested clients.

Articulate’s E-Learning Blog

A great real-world example comes from Articulate, which creates e-learning software. Their blog features posts like 100 Powerpoint Tutorials & Free Templates, A Boatload of Free Hand-Drawn Graphics, and How to Create Color Schemes in Powerpoint to Match Your Brand. Many of us naturally do this with our content marketing – creating related "content" that appeals to our potential audience of buyers. It’s a great way to combine the power of SEO with the awareness of audience-targeted marketing. 

Build the Brand

Last, but not least, the tactic of brand building has been around for decades as a method to increase awareness of a new product. When Pepsi or Coke launch a new beverage, they rarely turn to search, but they do bombard the airwaves and the web with advertising, promotions, contests and sponsorship to help create demand in the minds of consumers. Brand building is typically less-targeted than audience-marketing, but again, search can help.

Wow… Ricky Gervais did a video for Transparentizing! That’s going to get a lot of views.

Those same contests, celebrities, adverts and viral videos can be made with SEO-savvy to help visitors searching for related content get exposure to your brand/product.

SEO is certainly not the answer to all marketing quandries, but neither is it completely useless in cases like these, where keyword search volumes may not be exciting, but secondary applications of search rankings can still attract great customers.

One of the things I’ve always loved about SEO and organic marketing, more broadly, is the power of creativity and imagination to have an impact. Don’t let road bumps like "0 search volume" stand in your way; think outside "broad match" and opportunities will present themselves.

p.s. If anyone invents metal whiteboards or a technique to temporarily turn skin invisible, all I ask is proper link attribution

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Posted by Justin Briggs

Using link data, although it can never be perfectly accurate, allows you to take a more scientific approach to your SEO strategies. How can we leverage link data for actionable insights? I recently wrote a post breaking down the Mormon SEO strategy, which is a very well thought out plan of action.. There seemed to be a lot of interest in the tools I used and the insights they provided. It’s impossible to cover all scenarios, but my hope is to show how this data can be used.

Tools Used

• Excel
• SEOmoz API / Open Site Explorer
• Free Version of Majestic SEO
• Ninja Skills (prerequisite of working at Distilled)

For most of this post, I’m going to look at the SERPS for "nashville real estate", a competitive result from my hometown. 

The Data Set

To start, I pulled a wide range of link based metrics from the Top 10.

Caveats: Your may want to remove large domains and exact match domains from your analysis. Large domains with solid brands may just add noise to your analysis. Exact match domains may be getting a substantial boost and may skew your analysis as well. I have removed both Trulia and Yahoo Real Estate from this set.

Data

• PA – Page Authority, metric from SEOmoz
• P LRD – Number of Linking Root Domains to the PAGE
• DA – Domain Authority, metric from SEOmoz
• R LRD – Number of Linking Root Domains to the DOMAIN
• Links – Raw number of links (SEOmoz data)
• Deep Links - % of root domains that link to content that isn’t home page
• mR – mozRank, SEOmoz’s metric similar to PageRank
• DmR – Domain mozRank, similar to mR, but on a DOMAIN level
• DmT – Domain mozTrust, SEOmoz metric to measure TrustRank
• EA LRD – Number of Linking Root Domains using EXACT match anchor text
• EA % – Percentage of anchors with EXACT match anchor

All of this information was acquired from SEOmoz’s data set. Items like deep links %, exact match linking root domains, and percent of anchors with exact match anchor were all obtained with some basic analysis. Now that we have our first data pull, we can dig in and talk about what these mean.

Breakdown the Top 10

If my goal is to break into the top 10, I’ll line my site’s metrics up against the trending of the top 10 and their averages. This will identify areas where I’m over- or under-performing. In addition to comparing against the average, I can look at the distribution of metrics across the top 10. I’ll throw out a few examples in this niche that jump out. The factors I look into may depend on the data pulled for a niche.

Link Root Domains

As we know, the number of linking root domains correlates well with rankings. This why in my link builder tips post I suggested getting a link, or just a few, and moving on from a domain. The majority of the sites in this niche sit around 100 to 200 unique linking domains. This graph gives you a gauge for breaking into the top 10 results. However, the top two results have pulled away from the rest with around 800 unique linking domains, so ranking number one may be difficult.

Exact Match Anchor Linking Root Domains

This metric was measured by looking at the Anchor Text Distribution tab on Open Site Explorer. I was a bit surprised by the results. The number one site has managed to receive links from 544 domains with the exact anchor text “Nashville Real Estate.” Regardless of how they managed to do so, this makes it a highly competitive term to rank number one for. However, it also shows that the majority of the Top 10 do not have a large number of domains linking with well-optimized links for this phrase. This graph, and the one before, shows opportunity exists for this keyword between result 3 and 10. This is why it’s important to note the distribution as well as the average.

Percent of Anchors with Exact Match Domains

Looking at the percentage of anchors using this exact match phrase can provide some interesting insights. First, the top ranking sites are excessively optimizing their link’s anchor text. Second, Google is allowing this significant optimization. Even the third result has nearly 30% of their links using this anchor text. Your link building strategy here could be aggressive without sticking out. Additionally, these sites are overly focused on one golden phrase. I’d have to dig deeper, but this may be indicative of several open opportunities in mid to longtail phrases. I’d likely take advantage of this short-sighted targeting strategy by first focusing on picking up the terms they’re ignoring.

Strategy

To rank well in this niche, you’re going to need a large number of links from a diverse set of domains. Google seems to be forgiving of over optimization and has allowed aggressive link building. The first ranked site appears to sufficiently answer the query, so I don’t think there is a reason to not allow it. Most of these sites do not have significant content strategies pulling links to subpages and most do not engage heavily in social media. Although an aggressive strategy would not stick out in this market, I’d caution again the aggressiveness of having almost 70% of your link profile with the same anchor text. This type of optimization is dangerous, limiting and ignores many other phrases.

Link Profiling

Dr. Pete wrote a great post on link profiling, which allows you to see the distribution of inbound links to a domain. This will give you insights on the quality of the links a site has acquired. I also use this when reporting the links I’ve built to my clients to visually demonstrate the distribution of links I’ve acquired. I’m going to briefly show an example of this profiling using Page Authority, but I repeat this with metrics such as Domain Authority, mR, DmR, and DmT. Disparities in these distributions can draw your attention to items you might not have considered.

Radar Graphs

Not a new tool, but I like the radar graphs in SEOmoz Labs. These are great for demonstrating link analysis or providing a quick audit on a phone call or email. Let’s say the #12 ranked site nashvillebuyers.com called up and quickly wanted to know what it’d take to break into the Top 5. This quickly shows they’re falling short on several significant ranking factors. This could also show that they’re beating other sites in all metrics. If this is the case, I might start looking at other factors like anchor text, anchor text distribution, link quality, and on-site targeting.

Top Content

After looking at a site’s links, it’s important to evaluate what’s the top content drawing in links. One of the best guides I’ve seen about visualizing this analysis is the post What Are My Most Linked to Subfolders? written by SEOgadget. This report can be pulled from Open Site Explorer’s Top Pages. In my Mormon SEO strategy post, I used the SEOmoz API and created a pivot table to find the most linked to content in their massive link profile. 

Keyword Tag Cloud

A tag cloud of anchor text is a quick way to visualize the distribution of keyword anchors and pull out the terms being targeted. The most interesting anchor cloud I’ve seen so far is that of the Mormon LDS church.

To get this, I pulled the max number of links from the SEOmoz API, saved the list of anchors to a text file, and uploaded them to Tagxedo. Doing this quickly highlights major targeted terms and visually demonstrates the distribution of anchor text.

Broken Links

Another quick check that can bring you big wins is checking sites for 404 pages by looking at Open Site Explorer’s Top Pages tab. (Hopefully this isn’t new to you guys, but worth mentioning.) 

Reasons to Find Broken Links

• Great way to start a relationship with a webmaster: let them know, people like to reciprocate.
• Contact the people who are linking to them and get that link.
• Generate content ideas based off that type of content that has acquired links before.
• Recreate this content and get websites to switch the link.

Link Growth / Velocity

One more check I like to make is link growth rate. Aaron Wall wrote an article a while back about link velocity and the role link growth rates has on your link profile. MajesticSEO provides these graphs up for free and they can provide some interesting feedback. They provide link discovery and cumulative  link graphs.

What we might be seeing here are a few strong pushes early on, followed by very little promotion in early 2007. At the start of 2008, the link building ramped up and remained constant. This is indicative of regular on-going link building, which is no surprise considering the optimization of these efforts. It’s also important to note that it ramped up even more during the last half of 2010. If this was your competitor’s profile, this is valuable information to have. This link growth rate makes this site even more competitive.

Now a profile like this is a bit more expected. They seem to have had a strong push at one time, but the link acquisition has faded over time. They have periods of spiky growth and have had minimal link growth in the last part of 2010.. This is a good sign if you’re looking to outrank this site.

Chopping Up The Link Export

One of the last few questions left is how and where are they getting these links. How can you chop up their link export to get actionable insights and link prospects? Let me just cover a few quick ideas.

Export CSV from Open Site Explorer, open it in Excel.

Filters & Sorts

1. Filter Sites with Exact Match AND Phrase Match Anchor
2. Filter by Branded Anchors and People’s Names
3. Sort by PA to get strongest PAGES
4. Sort by DA to get strongest DOMAINS

Questions to Ask

• What content is attracting these links?
• What types of sites are these links from?
• Are they manually building these links? (directories, articles, guest blogging)
• Do they appear to be paid?
• What’s the IP address and WHOIS information on anything fishy?
• What strategy is working here? Or is there even a strategy?
• Where are they getting the branded and name links?
• What communities are they participating in?

Perform a search against page title and URL

• How many links come from pages about same keyword?
• How many links include mentions like directory, links, resource, article, forum, etc?

Export into Google Custom Search

Yahoo use to allow you to perform search queries against a link profile’s content. However, with the death of the Yahoo! linkdomain, this is not longer possible. Luckily, you can use Open Site Explorer and GCSE to do the same thing.

Search Ideas

• Sponsorships queries
• Paid link footprints
• Blogging footprints
• Person’s name
• Brand name
• Forum footprints
• Embed footprints

There a lot of different queries you can run, these may depend on what information you’re looking to get.

Although this is not an exhaustive look at analysis techniques, I hope it helps give insights into how link data can be used to create a strategy or understand your competition’s. Feel free to find me on Twitter if you ever want to chat more about link analysis.

Learn More:

If you’d like to learn more about link building, we’re hosting two Linkbuilding Seminars in London and New Orleans this year.

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Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of chatter on forums about the age of domains and links. No, we’re not talking about the Age of Domains and Links – that time is already upon us (we call it "The Internet")! Instead, note those lowercases – we are talking about the birthdays of domains and links and whether or not age affects a site’s rankings or the power of a link. A lot of people think that, like a sagely seaman that acquires wisdom and whiskers as his years trickle away on the sea, domains and links gain value as they age. Sure, age maybe possibly could play a small part, but as Rand will show you in the following video, we’re nearly 100% sure it’s generally not something you should worry about.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we are talking about the age of site and the age of links. You might have seen, I’ve been seeing a lot lately, there’s sort of a trend of forum threads popping up, questions popping up, people sort of asking and almost dealing with this idea out in the ecosphere of SEO that an older link, an older domain, and a link that’s been around longer all necessarily provide more value. They are better for rankings, are better from a search engine perspective. They get crawled more often, these kinds of things.

I would question this. I would strongly question this. It’s not just because Matt Cutts sort of had a video where he talked about this. Someone asked him a question on this topic and he said like, "No, I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s buried 38 lines down in some patent from 2002, but that doesn’t mean it’s a ranking factor for us." I’ve heard him and other Googlers on stage at conferences be even more forceful than he was in that video in saying that, "We can’t promise that it’s not a factor, but if it is a factor, it’s super tiny. It’s a really small thing. We’re using it primarily in conjunction with other things to try and see what’s going on." So I wanted to try and address these critical questions about the age of a site and old links and the age of links.

First off, does the age of your site matter? Now, this is purely from an SEO perspective, in terms of if I have exactly the same effects going on, the same number of links pointing from the same places pointing to the same pages with exactly the same content. But one of those sites was produced in 2008, and one was made in 2000. Is that going to substantively change rankings? The answer is almost certainly not. Almost certainly not.

Now, the thing that you’re going to say and that I hear a lot of criticism about when this myth is debunked or when Google says no that’s not the case, is people have this idea like, "Well, wait. I look. I go through a set of search results. I see these top ten results. It’s ’04, ’03, 1998. These are old, old links. So, how can you tell me that oldness doesn’t matter? That domain age doesn’t matter?" The reason is I think what you are observing is correlation not causation. It tends to be the case that people who registered those early domains in a lot of those sectors, they did a lot of things right. They got great domain names. They often got exact match domain names, sometimes short domain names. They’ve built brands. They’ve had a longer time to build those brands, which means more people are aware of them, more people know about them, link to them, and reference them. They’ve been in the media and the press. They get included in directories and lists and linked to by big and important people. The amount of time that a business has been around necessarily impacts all of these reference and citation types of impacts. For that reason, you’re going to see that a lot of these earlier sites look like they perform better.

But I would actually say that if you produced a site today and could accomplish all the things that a site that is ten years old has done, you would actually outrank them. The reason is because you’ve earned those links, that reputation, and that brand faster, and therefore your acceleration rate is much greater.

When people look at something like a Twitter, they say, "Wow. Twitter is this amazing company. In the last four years, they’ve grown to 120 million users." But they don’t compare it against something like eBay which has many hundred millions of more users, but they do it in the context of the time that they’ve been around and what they’ve been able to accomplish in that time frame. So I think this is a matter of correlation and not causation. I’d be careful about ascribing pure value or thinking like, "Oh, I’ll never be able to outrank those guys because their site was made before mine." Don’t worry about that.

The second thing is, what about registration length? Google did issue this patent, the same one that I think Matt Cutts was referencing in his video, where they said, "We might look at how long a domain is registered because it tends to be the case that spammers and domainers and affiliates and people who we think might be manipulating our search results, they often will register the domain for the shortest possible amount of time." There was even, for a while, this idea on domain tasting where you could get a domain for 30 days or something and then give it back. Therefore people who are registering for a year or two years, we might frown upon them compared to the people who registered for five years or ten years. So, there was this rush in the SEO community like, "Oh shoot! Let me go and register my domain for a really long time."

Again, I’m going to call mostly myth on this one. Yes, it could be the case that in conjunction with lots of other signals they go, "Wow, we see this signal that looks like spam and this signal that looks like it’s manipulation. It looks like they’re getting these shoddy links. Their domain is only registered for a year. They’re on dot cc domain or a dot info domain." They can look at metrics like that, and if they pattern match those against spam, maybe it would hurt you, but I really wouldn’t worry about this. If registering for five years or ten years is tough on your budget and you want to save that money for something else, go for it. I wouldn’t sweat it. If you have the budget though, I probably would register for a longer period of time. Not necessarily for the SEO reasons, but for the reason that you might forget about it next year, and it is really a pain to have to go back and register if you’ve forgotten or you’re on a trip when it expires and you didn’t check your e-mail. It’s a nightmare. Or they get your e-mail wrong or something. That’s problematic. So for that reason, longer domain registration might help.

Third question, big one. Do old links or links from old pages or old sites boost rankings more than new links? There are two ideas inherent in here. One is that here are pages from different time frames. One is from 2000, 2004, 2008, today. One idea is that oh, this link is more powerful because it’s on a domain or on a page that’s been around for a very long time. The second idea is oh, it is not because it’s on a page that has been around a long time, it’s because the link itself has been there a long time and that as links age they grow in power. I don’t know, like some sort of wizened Jedi over the years. The force grows stronger within him or her.

I wouldn’t actually dispute both of those ideas. At least, I would dispute the idea that those are the reasons why they get more powerful. Yes, it is probably the case, again like we talked about, that a lot of the time if a link has been around a long time on a page that’s been around a very long time, it’s an important page and an important site. A lot of the Web decays. We were looking at decay on the Web in our Linkscape index, and a full 80% of the URLs that we requested and got data for, link data, we found 200 response codes, we found content on those pages, within about a year, between 12 and 18 months, that content’s gone. If you think about the fact that there is this huge billions of page index for the World Wide Web but only about 20% year-over-year is really surviving. Yeah, you can kind of understand. Hey, those are the important pages. They keep getting links. They keep getting references. They’re clearly still in business. People still think they are important enough to point to. Those might be the reasons that those older links are passing more value. Not just because they’re old or because they’ve been there a long time.

As a corollary to this question, a lot of people worry about and ask about, "Oh, no, what if my link disappears? What if I take down a page and put it back up, or one of my link partners has that page 404 for a few days, or repoints it somewhere and my link is not on the new version and then it reappears. Will I lose that aging process?" Like a fine wine it will suddenly be like somebody popped the cork and put it back in and now it’s exposed to the oxygen and won’t taste as good? No. No, no, no. I can’t tell you how much I would not sweat this. Even if you are sure that I am wrong about this stuff, believe me that this is not going on. It is not the case that if your link was created in 2001 or was on a page from 2001 and then in 2004 for about a year it disappeared, it probably hurt you during that year that it disappeared. When it came back in 2005, for the last six years, it’s not like oh, that’s so much worse than if it had only been there that one year. You could apply this to days or weeks or months as well. So I would not be stressing about these kinds of things.

What I would be worrying about in terms of links is where does the link come from? Is it a great site? If it is a great site, it is relevant to your audience, it has a lot of traffic, it is sending you good traffic, it has good anchor text, it’s pointing to the right pages, and the domain that it comes from is a strong one, the page that it comes from is well linked to, great. Don’t stress about putting this age stuff in here. I would bet that if we did a ranking correlation, we would probably see exactly the pattern that a lot of SEOs see, which is old domains appear to rank better than newer ones. But I would disagree that if we were able to put that in the ranking model, which we’ll try this year at the ranking factors, put in the ranking model that you would see any measure of causation coming out of that. I think this is something where it is perception only.

All right. With that, I just want to tell you about one more thing. Next Friday is a very exciting day for us. It is Friday January 21st at 10:00 Pacific, that’s 1:00 p.m. Eastern time or 6:00 p.m. out in London Greenwich Mean Time, we’re going to have our first ever live Whiteboard Friday. That means that I’ll be here in front of this and you can watch me live. You can Tweet at me and I’ll be answering Tweets directly off our account. That should be tons of fun. I hope you’ll join us live. Just go to the blog right around or just before 10:00 a.m. Pacific time. You can join in. We will also be recording it, so you can watch it afterwards if you happen to miss it or you are busy at that time.

Thanks so much. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition, a live edition, of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Mark Your Calendars!

Live Whiteboard Friday next Friday at 10AM PST with live chat!

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Posted by willcritchlow

Want to know more about link building? I’ve got something you might be interested in. For the first time ever, we are running one-day seminars dedicated purely to link building:

• London – 18th March 2011: (tickets cost £399 +VAT – or £299 +VAT with SEOmoz PRO membership) – book now
• New Orleans – 25th March 2011:  (tickets cost $600 – or $450 with SEOmoz PRO membership) – book now

At both venues, you will be invited to evening networking drinks. If you want to get exclusive one-on-one time with the expert speakers, we’re holding a fancy dinner the night before for very limited numbers. It costs £175 / $200 per head – book early and request your place on the booking form.

Many of you have attended a Pro seminar such as the one run by SEOmoz in Seattle (see last year’s invitation) or the one run by us in London (see last year’s sneak preview). Pro training consistently sells out and the feedback has been phenomenal:

Just finished ProSEO 2010 and yet again Distilled and SEOMoz knock it right out of the park – if you are attending any conference in 2011, you’ve just found the right people to book with. Richard Hannan, Essential Travel

An event packed full of experts giving away actionable tips and the results of quality research. Cheaper than events of much lower quality too, bargain. Will O’Hara, Zen Web Solutions

Great, focused seminar that other event management teams could learn a lot from. Richard Underwood, Telegraph Media Group

[I am getting gradually less shy about shouting about the feedback (98% satisfaction rating!) as increasingly it's others in our organisation deserving credit for this - shout out to Lynsey Little (@lynslittle) for her phenomenal work on London 2010 - she's handling London and NOLA this time around.]

The feedback we receive at the end of each seminar make for fascinating reading. Predictably, great speakers get great feedback no matter what they are talking about. Slightly less predictably, any session about link building gets high scores. Let me repeat that. It turns out that our attendees keep telling us they want to know about link building.

We carried on for a little while doing what we were doing. Then it struck us(*). What about running a seminar dedicated to link building?

OK, so you can say we were a little slow to catch on, but at least we got there, right?

The schedule

You can expect us to cover:

• Linkbuilding and social media: hitting the sweet spot
  • Social platforms that recreate the old "linkbait on digg" effect
  • How social forces can influence pages like links and how to earn tweets / likes / shares
  • How to get links from real life relationships
• Myths and case studies of outreach success
  • Psychology and influence
  • Content hooks to get links
• Analysis: without data, you are working blind
  • Gathering and sorting link data
  • Understanding link metrics
  • Measuring the competitiveness of SERPs to understand the challenge you face
• Pitfalls, mistakes and traps for the unwary
• How to scale link building
  • How to "ask for links" scalably and effectively
  • Using tools
  • How to spend money effectively
• Expert "give it up" secrets
  • Rand has one about nofollow links….

(*) hat-tip Tom – we were sitting at the back of a link building session by Wil Reynolds in Seattle when he turned to me and said "you know what would win the internet?"

We push our speakers hard to bring their A games – everything is designed to be actionable, specific and tips-oriented. We don’t want hand-wavy generalities – we want real stuff, that you didn’t already know, backed by evidence, that you can take away and actually use.

There are going to be some more speaker announcements in the coming days, but we already have lined up many of the top-rated speakers from previous events as well as some new faces:

• Rand Fishkin is speaking at both events (he’s from some company called SEOmoz – you might have heard of him)
• Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive - after following Wil online forever, I finally met him last year in Seattle where he gave one of the best presentations I’ve seen on linkbuilding. We’ve snagged him for London and New Orleans.
• Tom and I – people might get us confused, but we’re easy to tell apart on stage [insert your own joke here]. See for yourself in both countries.
• Jane Copland from Ayima - as pictured below – I’ve learnt a lot from Jane and I can’t wait to see more of what she has to say – also in both countries
• Martin MacDonald from Seatwave is speaking in London. His presentation at London Pro was one of the highest-rated – expect some more magic to be revealed based on real data and real-life experimentation
• Kris Roadruck from click2rank is speaking in New Orleans. He’s shared some awesome tips with me behind the scenes. I’m forcing him into the spotlight. Expect great things – I’ve heard he does well with pressure.
• More TBC….. Watch this space

New Orleans – book now

The New Orleans seminar will be held at The Pan American Conference and Media Center. The conference center is located in downtown NOLA, and is only a short walk from the beautiful French Quarter. I’m personally really looking forward to going to New Orleans after hearing Rand rave about it. I’m assured the party is going to be something special. Book now

London – book now

The London seminar will be held at the Congress Centre, the same venue that we held Pro 2010. The venue is located in London’s West End, surrounded by many hotels and great restaurants. The linkbuilding training day will be jam-packed but will be followed by networking drinks at a location nearby to the Congress Centre. Book now

We will also be announcing more details soon around our plans for a memorial lecture dedicated to Jaamit Durrani and evening fundraiser for his family in conjunction with the guys from OMD.

FAQ

I might come back and add more here, but here are a few:

• Video –  yes – we will be recording both events – watch this space for the announcements of how to get your hands on those videos (and I believe there’ll be news about the long-awaited 2010 recordings coming soon as well)
• Pro seminars - don’t worry we aren’t going to stop the popular general sessions just because we’re getting all specialised. There are plans to have events in Boston (May), Seattle(Aug / Sept) and London (Oct)
• Staying up-to-date – if you want to make sure you hear all the details of all events, drop your email address here:

Just in case all of this wasn’t clear. It’s all about linkbuilding, you can book now and it’s in London and New Orleans:

If you still have any questions, you can email events@distilled.co.uk (or drop them in the comments and I’ll do my best to pick them up there).

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Posted by Dr. Pete

There’s a long-standing debate in SEO about the maximum number of links that you should place on any given page. If you use the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, you may have seen a warning that looks something like this:

Digging deeper into the "Too Many On-Page Links" warning, you’ll see the message:

You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page.

A number of people have asked where we came up with 100 as the magic number and whether this is a hard limit or just a suggestion. I’m going to talk a bit about the history, whether that history still applies, and what the potential consequences are of breaking the 100-link barrier.

Where Did We Get 100?

The 100-link limit actually came from sources within Google and has been restated for years, as recently as a March 2009 post by Matt Cutts, in which he quotes the Google guidelines as saying:

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

The early crawlers capped the amount of data they would process for any given page, due to bandwidth limitations. Ultimately, 100 links was mostly a good rule of thumb for what would fit in a page that met those processing limits.

Could You Be Penalized?

Before we dig in too deep, I want to make it clear that the 100-link limit has never been a penalty situation. In an August 2007 interview, Rand quotes Matt Cutts as saying:

The "keep the number of links to under 100" is in the technical guideline section, not the quality guidelines section. That means we’re not going to remove a page if you have 101 or 102 links on the page. Think of this more as a rule of thumb.

At the time, it’s likely that Google started ignoring links after a certain point, but at worst this kept those post-100 links from passing PageRank. The page itself wasn’t going to be de-indexed or penalized.

Is 100 Still The Limit?

Since Matt’s 2009 comment, the Google guidelines page he quotes seems to have dropped the phrase "fewer than 100." Observations from across the SEO community and multiple Google Webmaster Help threads confirm this change. In April 2010, Google engineer John Mu endorsed the following answer:

100 links to a page is a just a suggestion … There are pages out there with more than 100 links, and it isn’t an issue. If your page is sufficiently authoritative, Google is going to be interested in the pages that are being recommended by that page.

Like many Google "limits," this is probably not a concrete number, and most likely varies with site authority. It’s also likely that the number has increased over time, as Google overcomes processing limitations (especially post-Caffeine).

So, Does It Still Matter?

The short answer is "yes." There’s an inescapable reality in SEO that the more links a page has, the less internal PageRank each of those links passes. To quote Matt again from his interview with Rand:

At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway.

To put it simply, more links equals less PR for each link. The actual math of internal PageRank flow gets complicated fast, but let’s look at a couple of very simple examples.

Example 1: 3 Level-2 Pages

Let’s say we have a very basic site with a home-page and three 2nd-tier pages linked from it. I’m going to grossly oversimplify the PR model, but let’s say those 3 pages each inherit 1/3 of the PR of the home-page. Let’s also assume that Google doesn’t allow a page to pass 100% of its own PR – we’ll cap the amount at 85% of the original page’s PR (we’re talking about actual PR in this case, not Toolbar PR). The result would look something like this:

Here, each of the pages inherits roughly 28% (0.85/3) of the original PR of the home-page. Again, I’m oversimplifying a much more complex reality to make a point.

Example 2: 150 Level-2 Pages

Now, let’s expand those 2nd-tier pages and say that the home-page links to 150 internal pages. The diagram and PR values would look something like this:

Split 150 ways, the original 85% of the PR the home-page can pass ends up being less than 0.6% (0.85/150) per page. My graphic may have gotten a little carried away, but it’s easy to see how quickly internal PR can become diluted in these situations.

What’s The Right Number?

As with so many complex SEO issues (and I’m considering this purely from an SEO standpoint), there’s no one answer. There’s a balance between building a site structure that’s too deep, creating pages that are many links removed from high-authority pages, and one that’s too "flat," creating a situation like the one above. While many SEOs argue in favor of flat architecture, the basic problem is that it treats every link as being equal. Do you really have 150 (or more) pages that all deserve equal treatment from the home-page and that should all carry equal PR? Probably not, and so we try to take a balanced, hierarchical approach, focusing internal PR on the most important pages first. Ultimately, while it may be outdated, the 100-link guideline is still probably a decent rule of thumb for most sites.

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Posted by jennita

As the lines of SEO and Social Media continue to be blurred, it’s becoming very clear that getting a page to rank highly in the search engines takes a combination of the two disciplines. So what does the Social Media marketer need to know about SEO in order to make their social campaigns help with search rankings? This post gives those marketers who focus more on Social Media and less on SEO a checklist of ways to optimize for search before (and after) promoting content on the social sites.

Normally in the SEO world, links are like money in that the larger the bill (more authority), the more powerful it is.  So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.

Obviously every organization is different, but many times the person running the Twitter and Facebook accounts, is likely a marketer, but not always an SEO. This checklist will guide the Social Media Marketer in your organization with some SEO tips and best practices to keep in mind as they start their next social campaign (or even they’re just pushing your latest blog post). [Plus I've listed lots of great links for additional reading. Learning FTW]

Do Keyword Research

Any SEO will tell you that keyword research is always one of the first steps when optimizing a site for search. Well, it’s no different in Social Media. Since your social campaign can now help influence the search engines it’s just as important to do your keyword research before getting started in the social world.

The best place to start is with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can start by inputting a couple keywords you think searchers will be looking for to find your content. Then the tool will show you estimated (e.s.t.i.m.a.t.e.d.) monthly traffic numbers for those keywords plus others that it thinks are similar.

Now this may be something that you want to work with your SEO on but do a little research on the topic at hand and see which keywords really make the most sense to use. One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily only want keywords with the highest traffic volume, you want to find keywords based on their difficulty for your site to rank for them.

The keywords you choose will come into play as you craft your tweets and Facebook updates, plus when you look at the Title tag and meta description (discussed more below). We ran a test to determine which would get a page to rank faster, lots of tweets, or lots of direct inbound links to a page. As of right now (about a month later) the Tweeted version ranks #1 for "ending hunger sierra leone" while the regular linked to version is lost in the shuffle. Although we still have more analysis to do, and more tests to run, this is a pretty big indication that tweets can influence rankings (possibly) more than links!

Additional Reading:

• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 5: Keyword Research from Rand Fishkin
• Choosing the Right Keyphrases from Sam Crocker
• Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy from Laura Lippay

Set Up Social Segments for Tracking

Whee! This is a fun one… ok it’s fun if you’re a big ol’ data geek (which I’m assuming most of you are). Before you even get started on your campaign it’s important to have your tracking all set up. You probably already have a specific way you’re tracking URLs (more on that below) but what about setting up an easy way to see all "Social" traffic at one time.

Check out this post from Rand about how to Segment Social Traffic in Google Analytics it will walk you through the steps of setting this up.

The image above is looking at our new Team page and looks at Social traffic vs. all other kinds of traffic. It’s interesting to see that the spike in traffic happened about the same days for social media and other channels. Just think of the possibilities of having this set up for your campaigns!

Remember, URL Shorteners Matter

When determining which URL shortener to use remember that you want a shortener that will do a 301 redirect from the short URL to yours. That way you can keep as much of that link juice flowing to your own site as possible. Also, be sure to use one that gives you some analytics about clicks and such, like bit.ly.

We use a personalized shortener seomz.me through the bitly.pro service, which is essentially like using bit.ly but with our own shortened domain. It’s great we can get data about how many clicks a certain URL gets, what part of the world the clickers are from and the time of day links are clicked. This shouldn’t make up for your regular tracking but it’s an additional way to see how well your campaign is doing.

Additional Reading:

• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? from Danny Sullivan

Make Sure Content is Easily Linkable

As a master in getting your content shared on the social networks, have you also thought about ways to build direct links to your content as well? I know for me personally, we saw a spike in social sharing once we (finally) added sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Stumbleupon. But what about adding widgets and embeds to help build links to your page/site.

Some content is easy to share in this manner such as infographics, graphs, etc. Take a look at what OkCupid does on their blog. When you reach the bottom of the page, you get this hover over that not only allows you to easily share the content on the social networks, but it gives you an easy way to copy and paste the link.

When you’re working on quick and easy ways to make sure your content is shareable within the social networks, also think about how to build links to the page the traditional way. Your SEO will thank you.

Canonicalize The Page (what the what?)

Yea this is a big ugly word SEOs use to make sure that the search engines only see one URL for a specific page. For social sharing this is something to think about when you’re setting up the tracking for your social shares. Whether you use Google Analytics tracking, or get tweets from an RSS feed, you’re going to have URL tracking variables appended to the URL.

Example:

Let’s say I plan on doing a Twitter campaign around the 2010 Industry Survey. The direct URL looks like this:

http://www.seomoz.org/seo-industry-survey

But the tracking URL that I actually want people to use so I can track it better in Google Analytics is this:

http://www.seomoz.org/seo-industry-survey?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=industry-survey

While the search engines are getting better at deciphering all this, you definitely want to make sure that they can figure out which page is the real or "canonical" page. There are a few ways to do this:

Rel=Canonical Tag

Using the rel=canonical tag you’d point this at the URL without the tracking coded added to the end. Using the example above, if your tagged URL is:

http://www.seomoz.org/seo-industry-survey?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=industry-survey

Then the rel=canonical looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.seomoz.org/seo-industry-survey" />

301 Redirect

Many SEOs will claim that this is the "proper" way to do it, and most likely is. Unfortunately it’s not always the easiest to implement especially if you’re in charge of Social Media and don’t have quick access to the dev team.

Additional Reading:

• 301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical – Which One Should You Use? from Paddy Moogan
• Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps from Rand Fishkin
• Complete Guide to Rel Canonical – How To and Why (Not) from Lindsay Wassell
• Canonicalization

Check Page Load Time

Can your site handle the load if the campaign goes viral? Obviously you’re going to make sure that the site won’t buckle under the pressure of all the awesome social traffic you’re sending it’s way, but what if it slows it down? You could have an infographic that takes a long time to load, or unnecessary JavaScript slowing you down.

Last year Google announced that they’re now using speed as a ranking factor (although a small one). Since it does come in to play though, and speeds can be affected if the traffic spikes, it’s smart to be thinking about this. Whenever possible, work with your dev team to load test the page or entire site before launching a new campaign.

Title Tag – Use Those Keywords!

Remember earlier in the checklist you did a little research to see which keywords would be most beneficial to use? Now it’s time to put them into play! It’s too easy to use fancy shmancy titles in your social content because it’s a bit catchier than a typical "optimized" title. But there are a few things to remember:

1. The Title tag is thought to be the highest on-page ranking factor and having your keywords toward the beginning of the title is best.
2. If your social efforts can help get a page ranking in Google, that title tag is going to show up in the results and

Additional Reading:

• Title Tag Best Practices
• Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing from Danny Sullivan
• Do Keywords in Post Titles Really Matter? from Brian Clark (an oldie but goodie)

Meta Description

The meta description isn’t going to help with getting a page’s rankings but in the social world it’s often times the text that is automatically pulled into a social site. The best example is Facebook. When you add a link to your Facebook wall, it automatically pulls the title tag, meta description and let’s you choose an image. Think of the meta description as a way to entice users to click on your link whether the user is searching on Google or checking out a page you shared on Facebook.

Additional Reading:

• Meta Description Best Practices

Measure & Improve

Yes! This is the best step actually. Determine how well your tweets are doing, then improve on them. As SEOs we’re constantly talking about increasing our click-through-rate in the search results and on our pages. But what about the click-through-rate of our tweets? I highly recommend reading through Rand’s post on Calculating and Improving Your Twitter Click-through-Rate to give you lots of ideas on how to make improvements.

Whew! That’s a lot to think about. Some of this you may already be doing, but if you’re not, I encourage you to give these a try. See how you can not only improve your social media sharing, but your search engine rankings! Also, don’t forget to work closely with your SEO to teach them the world of Social as well.

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Posted by randfish

There’s no doubt that mobile and, by extension, local search is hot. Technology pundits have been declaring every year since 2005 "The Year of Mobile" – that magical moment when everyone suddenly starts using their mobile device for more than just playing games, texting, calling friends, checking email, downloading/using apps and occasionally browsing the web and… I don’t know… browses the web more?

If I sound a bit cynical on the topic of mobile it’s not out of a disbelief in the power of mobile devices or the acceleration of their influence on our technological connectedness. It’s because I think we’re, to a large extent, already there. The smartphone has won our hearts and minds, and this year, it will finally be more popular than the feature phone:

Nearly half of us already have iPhones, Blackberries, Androids or similar in our pockets when we’re on the proverbial "go." But search – the process, the intent, the results –  just isn’t that different on mobile devices vs. laptops and desktops.

Yes, mobile searchers are more likely  to perform local searches than other varieties, but I actually believe this trend may be overblown. A substantive portion of searches performed from a laptop/desktop have local intent as well. As the mobile experience gets ever closer to mimicing that of the laptop/desktop, I suspect we’ll be searching on our mobiles in a remarkably similar fashion to how we search everywhere else. In fact, the top mobile searches of 2010 are similar (and surprisingly non-local) to the top general searches of the year.

Increased speed, functionality, screen size, resolution, readability, battery life, multimedia capacity, etc. don’t sound like features that make the mobile experience unique; they strike me as moving toward feature parity.

Research from Doubleclick, comparing search on mobile devices w/ full browsers vs. computers strongly suggests that we’re moving towards search parity, too. Queries are similar, clicks are similar, click-through-rate is similar, even conversion rate is getting close (though mobile is still a much more research-based experience, with a tough-to-measure influence of offline conversions).

This doesn’t mean you can or should ignore mobile/local as a powerful organic marketing channel, but it does mean that you don’t need to be building separate mobile sites or separate mobile experiences. Unless your site/content is seriously challenging for mobile users, even those with fast, impressive devices, you should worry more about other marketing avenues.

The big trends I see in mobile search are:

• A lot more queries – mobile search is growing faster than traditional search and that bodes well for search marketers. 
• A single set of SERPs – I searched for a good 20 minutes on my laptop and Android phone without finding a query where the web results are in a different order (both are location-aware to "Seattle, WA")
• A chance to make your mobile-focus known – Yelp does a great job with their overlay on mobile devices encouraging searchers to download their app (though some have complained it gets annoying having to say "no" every time if you don’t want it).
• Little need for a separate mobile site – Mobile copies of websites seem to me to be more likely to cause duplicate content issues, technical challenges, waste engineering resources and draw away attention from real mobile opportunities than to earn slightly higher rankings in mobile searches. Until/unless things change dramatically, I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this practice (unless your regular site is absolutely unusable on a mobile device).
• Definite need for a separate mobile ad strategy – Unlike SEO, the paid search results can and do differ dramatically on mobile devices. CPC is generally lower, as are conversion rates, though the latter may be on an upward trend (especially if I’m right about device convergence)
• Apps are still beloved – I don’t know if the long term future of mobile will continue to focus on apps, but for now, it’s a huge part of what differentiates the device. It’s certainly a great way to "contain" users in your brand and provide a more tailored experience, and for those who can make it work effectively, the effect can be great.
• Geography matters – mobile and traditional search are both getting more and more biased by geography. My opinion is that Google currently sucks at this (I have yet to find a search I like better with location-biasing than without, maps/places not withstanding), but they certainly won’t be giving up. As a result, if you can tailor your content and your marketing to effectively serve and be seen as local, you can seriously benefit.

Looking forward to your thoughts about mobile search and the future of mobile SEO. I continually get the sense that I’m an anomaly in how I view the mobile web and its impact on search, so I’m always interested to hear what others think on the topic.

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Quick disclaimer – this post contains advice on getting SEO done whether it be within your company or for a client as opposed to hands-on SEO tips.

Just before the start of 2011 I published a post on my personal blog titled – "Why Knowing Everything About SEO Doesn’t Mean $#!^".  I genuinely didn’t expect the type of response the post got. I thought it may annoy a bunch of people, in particular SEO Consultants!  However the reaction has been great and as a result, I wanted to write a follow on for you guys which contains more of an actionable list of items as opposed to me just having a rant.

Also in this post I wanted to take a different angle.  My previous post talked more about how knowing everything about SEO doesn’t matter if you don’t actually make sure the SEO gets done.  In this post I want to address some of the excuses that SEO Consultants use when tasks don’t get done, specifically, why it is always your fault if these tasks don’t get done.

I could probably generalise this a bit and say that things not getting done is a common problem amongst consultants in many industries.  Quite often we’re paid to consult and give expert advice, not necessarily do stuff.  In my opinion though when it comes to SEO, if the SEO you recommend doesn’t get done – it’s your fault.

Yes it is.  It isn’t the fault of -

• The client
• The developers
• The designers
• Your boss
• Your dog eating it

When I first heard this at a training session I went to a few months after I joined Distilled, I was ready to argue.  Something like this was going around my head -

"But if the client doesn’t do what I tell them, thats their fault"

"But if the developers don’t have a clue what a title tag is and can’t change it, thats their fault"

It was my fault, I shouldn’t be pointing the finger and blaming someone else.

Why is it my fault?

Because the client is paying me to make a difference to their business and give them an ROI.  They’re not paying me to tell them stuff and leave them to it.  Whilst many consultants in other industries do work like this, I don’t think SEO Consultants should.  SEO is still evolving and is still a relatively new concept to a lot of people and they need that extra bit of help to get it done.  The best SEO consulting in the world doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t get done.

To try and explain this further, I’ve got some examples below of scenarios which are quite common in the world of SEO consulting, these also apply just as much to in-house SEOs.  Each one of these is a case of where you think you have done your job, but in reality, you haven’t.

1) You Deliver a Report and Think Your Job is Done

I’ve made this mistake.  I’ve spent hours upon hours producing a report for a client.  At the time, I didn’t realise it was a report, I thought it was a strategy.  Here are a few examples of the types of reports -

• Technical site audits
• Competitor analysis
• Link building strategies

Within these reports was loads of great information, SEO tips and recommendations for the client.  I was totally confident that all of the stuff I recommended would give the clients website long term SEO benefit.  Sometimes these would be 30 pages long!  Wow – tons of info!

Did the client read it?  Nope.

They didn’t want a 30 page report from me, all they wanted to know was what they had to do.  What would have been better, would be to deliver them a small, actionable list of items that if done, will do x, y and z for their business.  It can be as simple as -

1. Submit your website to local business directories in the attached spreadsheet
2. Add a call to action to your website to get people to leave reviews on your Google Places account
3. Create an XML sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster Tools

All of these things are tasks that can go onto the clients to-do list.  The simplicity makes it much more likely that they’d get done.  This is much better than writing a long paragraph explaining how having more reviews on their Google Places account can help their rankings and how they should add a call to action to get them.

I also deliver a document which elaborates on each of the actions, this is still necessary in order to give some context to what you’re saying.  This can include things such as links to help files on Google on how to do stuff like XML sitemaps etc.  But the to-do list is the focus and what becomes the deliverable, it is then your job to get this list of jobs done.

Action -

• Don’t deliver a report document, deliver a strategy along with an actionable list of tasks – then make sure they get done

Leading onto my next reason why it is your fault, this style of delivering advice would work for most clients but not all of them.  It depends on the type of client they are and how well you know them.

2) You Don’t Get Close Enough to the Client

Again, I’ll hold my hand up to this one.  I’ve never been a fan of using the phone and probably never will be, but I’ve got better in the last few months.  The point of what I’m saying here is that you can’t rely on email alone to keep up-to-date with your clients and expect to know what is going on in their business.  Only face to face conversations and chats on the phone can do this for you.

If you work in-house, hey you don’t get away with this one!

Working in-house, you should still be trying to get close to the people who you need to help you get stuff done.  This could be developers, designers or writers, you need to know how they like to work so that you can get them to do stuff for you.  If the Senior Developer in your company isn’t a morning person, then don’t go and ask them to rewrite 3000 URLs for you at 9am!  They’ll probably look at you like this -

Whoever it is that matters in your company or client, you need to be getting close to them.  Find out who it is that matters and who makes the decisions further up the ladder.  A great way of doing this is by working from a client’s office for a day or even a few hours.  Getting to see how they work and sitting in on meetings can be very valuable in working out how best to get stuff done.

The thing that amazed me on this one was that just being around (even if you’re doing other client work) has a lot of value to the client.  It can help staff in knowing you are there and can answer questions instantly rather than over email.  Also just being in meetings where SEO is discussed can help get SEO shifted up the agenda a little bit and you have the perfect opportunity to argue your point.  You can also be there when developers start on SEO tasks so you can answer questions straight away and make sure changes are implemented properly.

Actions –

• Talk to your client either on the phone or in person at least once a week
• Work from your client’s office once every few weeks

3) The Client Doesn’t Like You

Yep this is your fault too

I think this is a rare one, but it can happen.  Afterall the client has come to you for help with their SEO so they should be quite welcoming and like having you on board.  However there are instances where there may be some resistance to your presence -

• There is already an in-house Marketing / SEO person who feels their position is threatened
• Developers or designers are worried their already full workload is about to get bigger because of you

There are a couple of ways of overcoming resistance from these people.

In-house SEO or Marketing People – Make them look good 

If there is an in-house person already, then it is totally understandable that they may feel threatened by you.  So try and reassure them that you’re not looking to get rid of them and enforce the fact that for an SEO campaign to be successful, you need their help more than anyone.  Keep them involved right from the start and work with them as much as you can, this is a classic example of where working at a clients office can reward you.

Another tip here – make them look good in front of their boss.  Get them to work on something which you can then show to their boss which can get them a pat on the back.  This can really help their morale too.  Asking for their help on a task can also make them like you.

Developers, Writers etc – Demonstrate the results of the work they did

In terms of other members of the team such as developers, designers or writers, the approach is similar.  With developers, don’t drop a huge list of jobs on their desk in one go unless they ask for it.  They are busy people so it can be best just to give them a few small jobs initially and let them see the results, when they can see the value of what they are doing and see that "hey this SEO stuff really works" then it is easier to give them bigger jobs to do.

When it comes to writers, it can be very easy to demonstrate the value of their work.  Just show them Analytics stats on the traffic that their content pulls in, tweets about their content or the links that it generated.  These stats can be a great motivator to get them on-board with your efforts.

Action -

• Make your client look good in front of their boss to get them on-side with you
• Tell people when they do work that results in an increase in traffic or links etc.  CC in their boss on an email too.

4) You Didn’t Own the Problems

This is a huge one for any project.  It is nice and somewhat easy to take ownership of solutions.  We all love coming up with a great new idea for a client then managing that idea through to completion.  But what happens when something goes wrong?  Do you take ownership of that too?  There aren’t many SEO projects that don’t hit problems at some point, so taking ownership of the problems and making sure they get solved is important.

The last thing you should be doing is seeing a problem and just assuming that someone else will take care of it.

When a problem arises, make sure that the solution is on someones to-do list.  This should ensure that the problem gets solved.

Action -

• Don’t wait for someone else to take charge of problems, put it on your own to-do list or make sure it’s on someone elses

5) You Didn’t Work Closely Enough With Other Agencies

It’s quite common for multiple agencies to be working for one of your clients.  You could have the following -

• SEO
• PPC
• PR
• Developers
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Management

Sometimes you can make recommendations that may lead to tasks for another agency to implement.  The common one above has been to developers.  But lets take another example.  Perhaps you are working with another PR agency who are being employed by your client.

As I’m sure many of you are aware, PR work can result in some fantastic high quality links.  But not all PR agencies are aware of SEO and the value of links.  So they may be getting lots of online brand mentions of your URL but not thinking to follow this up with a call to see if it can be made a live link.  This is where you need to be proactive in working with them to ensure that the client is getting as much SEO benefit as possible from all agencies they work with.

Working well with other agencies and getting to know them is just as important as getting to know the client.  Again, you should be making an effort to get close to them and see how they work.  A good idea here is to setup regular "all agency" calls where you can keep each other updated on your work and get status updates on things that you have asked for.  Work closely with them so that you don’t end up like this guy:

Action -

• Have a weekly status update with the agencies that you work with to check on tasks you’ve given them

Conclusion

All of this isn’t easy, I’m by no means perfect at it.  So it takes time to change the way you work and get yourself into the mindset of delivering change to a client rather than a report.  But once you get it, you’ll notice a huge difference in the way you approach problems and try to solve them.  In particular with SEO where the clients are relying on you as the expert, you need to make sure you’re delivering change.  Otherwise no SEO is going to get done and ultimiately they’ll blame you. 

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Posted by brianspatterson

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.

We recently completed an interesting reputation management project and I thought it’d be helpful to post our strategy and results to the SEOmoz community. My hope is that you’ll read this and get some ideas, or even better, you’ll point out some areas that we overlooked or things we can do to improve our approach.

The Client’s Problem

Our client approached us with a problem that we are now seeing fairly often for many companies. As you began to type our client’s brand name into Google Search, Google Suggest displayed our client’s brand name + the word ‘scam’ as the second option, directly below their brand name. Talk about damaging your reputation!

We signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can’t say specifically who the client is, but below is a screenshot from another large company, Direct Buy, whom we found experiencing a very similar issue.

Our client believed they were losing a lot of business due to this issue, particularly in the case of people who were ready to buy, but then went to do a Google Search to learn a bit more about the company before they plunked down their credit card. There is a great quote from Dave Naylor on this exact problem, "If Google Suggest’s second result is ‘scam’, then people WILL click on it".  These customers likely clicked the ‘scam’ recommendation and were scared off from purchasing from our client.

Our client is not a fraudulent organization in any way, and they offer real services and products to their customers, but the way they offer service is also complicated and in a volatile industry where no company is without its detractors. Even though they deliver their product as stated, and 99% of their clients love it, there seemed to be a small percentage that just weren’t happy. Some of these unhappy customers took their gripes to the web. Additionally, there were also a high number of obvious cases where competitors were posting negative information about the company in order to damage their brand. We would not perform reputation management for any company that was a scam or participated in fraudulent or misleading activities, and after fully researching the business, we were 100% comfortable with helping them with their problem.

Because of all of this negative content about our client, when someone indeed clicked the ‘[Insert Brand Name] Scam’ suggestion from Google Suggest, they were finding the first 2 pages of results filled with very negative ‘flames’ about the company. Some of this negative content was on personal blogs and others on complaint sites and forums. There were even a few positive reviews on blogs that were inundated with numerous scam accusations in the comment section, thus making a positive article turn very negative and harmful to the brand.

Our Research

Before diving right into what we did to change this, I want to talk a little bit about some research we did on this issue. We wanted to understand, as best as we could, how this problem came about. We hypothesized that very few people actually typed in ‘brand name scam’ initially, but maybe at some point it was just enough to get it to be a suggestion. Once it became a suggestion in Google Suggest, searcher’s curiosity was piqued and so they clicked on it at a high rate. Google likely interpreted the large amount of clicks to mean that the phrase is a highly relevant suggestion, and as such moved it up to the top of the list of suggested terms.

Google’s official statement on how Suggest works, from this blog post, is:

"As you type, Google’s algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users’ search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past." 

We think there is quite a bit more to it than this. We recently read of a case study where a brand new domain had acquired a ‘scam suggestion’ from Google Suggest. It was evident that nobody had searched for this domain, let alone searched for the domain with the word ‘scam’. What the domain owner found was that two scraper sites had scraped content from his site, and those two scraper sites had the word ‘scam’ buried in the URL. Based on this incident, we think it is very possible that content and associated words in Google’s index may also influence the suggestions.

This SEOmoz Q&A by Dr. Pete is also about this very topic, and Dr. Pete believes it is possible that Google Suggest is biased to serve up the ‘scam’ suggestion, among others.

We kicked around the idea of working to influence Google Suggest to force out the ‘scam’ suggestion, and may revisit it down the road, but we decided that the fastest way to take action would be to push the negative content out of the SERPs with positive content that the client had complete control over. This way, when someone searched the scam phrase, they’d have to dig deep into the SERPs to find anything negative about the brand.

I know that you may be thinking that pushing bad results out of the SERPs feels a little dirty. I felt this way at first, however, after fully researching various approaches and processes we now believe firmly that it is indeed a Google sanctioned method. Our belief is based on this blog post from the Official Google Blog on how to get rid of negative brand rankings in the SERPs. In it, it states:

Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

Our Approach

We pitched the client, and subsequently implemented, a pretty ambitious plan. Our stated goal was to own 90% of the first two pages of Google results in 6 weeks. To control at least 18 positions, we knew we needed to focus on more than just 20 pieces of content. We decided that we would define 50 pieces of content, and as time went on, we’d determine which pieces of content Google was signaling that it liked (by slowly moving it up) and which it didn’t. The content we focused on fell into two natural categories, Pre-Existing Content and New Content. The content for each of these categories was as follows:

Pre-Existing Content

1. Subdomains on the client’s website – The client had created two of these before we were brought in. They were subdomains setup that specifically addressed the false accusations.
    
2. News articles – A benefit of the client being a big company is that they’ve already had plenty of mainstream press. We identified positive articles from Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and other Industry publications to promote for the scam phrase. We found that, even if the article didn’t contain the word ‘scam’, anchor text alone, linking to these strong domains, could get them to rank for the scam phrase.
    
3. Wikis – It seems that most industries and niches have their own wiki’s. Our client had a page in a niche wiki, so we simply added the word ‘scam’ into the wiki in a natural way. Doing this, plus a few links, helped it rank for the scam phrase.
    
4. Blog Posts – There were a number of positive blog posts about the company already online. The problem was, as I mentioned previously, that the comment sections of many of them were overrun with very negative comments (we could tell most of the comments were anonymous and contained inaccurate and fake information, likely from competitors). So, we chose to only promote blog posts that had disabled comments. Even if a blog post had no comments, we didn’t use it if comments were open because they could always turn negative.
    
5. Youtube – The client had created a few Youtube videos disputing the mis-information being spread about their business. Since YouTube allows for full content moderation, we found videos to be a great source of positive content that can be controlled.

New Content

1. Content on the client’s website – When the client originally tried to tackle this problem themselves, they had created a few posts on their blog that were optimized for the brand name + scam keyword. Since an official brand site is the most likely site to rank for any query containing the brand name, this was a smart move.
    
2. Posts on sites we own – We have a fairly large number of blogs that we run as part of our business. Some of these blogs focus on the same industry as the client, so we simply created posts optimized for the scam keyword. Since these domains are aged and trusted, we knew it wasn’t going to be too difficult to get them to rank.
    
3. Article Directories – Squidoo, HubPages, eZineArticles, Buzzle, InfoMarketers, Go Articles, and many more – We have nice, old accounts on many sites like these, so we added new articles optimized for our term to them.
    
4. Mini Blogs – We setup a number of mini-blogs on WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and a few other WordPress MU sites we identified that we felt we’d be able to create a blog on that could rank.
    
5. New Sites We Created -We bought the .com, .net, and .org versions of the exact match domains for the search phrase (including the word ‘scam’, eg. brandnamescam.com). We also bought hyphenated versions of the domain as well. We then setup mini-sites on different c-class IP addresses.

As you can see from the lists, our targets included a diverse set of content. The key was that there had to be some sort of control over the page. Either comments had to be turned off (to keep a positive article from becoming negative by a bunch of negative comments) or we needed to have control over the page/comment moderation to ensure we could control the message.

The general content on these pages included customer testimonials, positive stories, general information about the company, satisfaction guarantees, debunked mis-information, and other stories that either didn’t pertain to the scam issue at all, or they showed positive aspects about the company. Is this a perfect strategy?  No, I don’t think so. But we believed that having 2 pages or SERPs with little information about an actual ‘scam’ is probably enough for most searchers to abandon the topic.

Link Building

After we had our content targets identified and/or created, we started the link building process. One thing I absolutely loved about getting some of these articles ranked was that it took almost no work to get something on page 1. Some of the positive pre-existing articles that we wanted to get on page 1 were on sites like the New York Post, so it basically took 2 lower-quality links with the exact anchor text ‘brand name scam’ to get it on page 1. It made me (briefly) dream about how easy a job it must be to do SEO for a site like The Wall Street Journal; you can practically rank #1 for any low-competition search term you want!

Our primary link building strategy was built around using article directories. We wrote hundreds of unique, quality articles (no spinning or machine generation) and submitted them to article directories, web 2.0 sites, blogs, and other sites that accepted our content. We varied our anchor text, and spread out the links across sites, and over time, so that the link profile was fairly natural.

Interlinking

We also wanted to interlink our sites in a way where they would all benefit, while avoiding obvious signals of ‘link farms’ or 2 or 3 way link exchanges. What we came up with is represented in the graph below. We’ve replaced the actual sites with S1, S2, etc, but this is the exact interlinking pattern we used. Sites that needed more help received more links, while some of the stronger sites only needed one or two links pointed at them.

Social Engineering

I also wanted to talk about another tactic we used to take on some of the more stubborn sites that just wouldn’t seem to move out of the SERPs. In our case, these stubborn listings were two personal blogs. We heavily researched these blogs to understand the psyche of the authors. We then determined two separate strategies to pursue that would help us with our goal. In short, for one blog we made an offer to buy it outright. We didn’t explain our background or why we wanted it (that is irrelevant to the buy/sell process), we just simply made an offer and began dialogue with the owner. In the second case, we talked to the webmaster and during discussions realized that the owner was not interested in the traffic received from the article, so we were able to work out a deal to help move the content out of the SERPs. We treaded very lightly with these tactics for two reasons: (1) We wanted our work to be legal and ethical, and (2) we needed to be very careful that these site owners didn’t just create a new blog post talking about how our client was trying to ‘buy their silence’.

Execution & Results

The results from our project were near-perfect. We obtained nine of the top ten results on page one, and all ten results on page two.  We think that if we had more than just six weeks to complete this, we would have been able to get all 20 of the top 20, but 19 out of 20 wasn’t bad and our client was ecstatic.

I’d love to know your thoughts on how we approached this and what you would do differently. Based on the success we’ve had, we are looking to expand our offerings in this area. I personally loved the challenge of this and the interesting aspects of the problem.

About the author: Brian Patterson is a Partner at MangoCo, a Search Engine Optimization Company in Virginia. You can follow Brian on the the Twitter @brianspatterson.

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Posted by great scott!

The avalanche-like flow of special guest Whiteboard Fridays continues this week with another installment featuring our beloved London SEO expert, Richard Baxter (anchor text, y’all). Last week Richard helped us all learn how to get our fresh content indexed licketty-split, and this week he’s back to help us learn how to identify which areas of our sites are working hardest for us.

Whether you have multiple types of content on your site (maybe a blog, tools, articles, etc.), or you have limited content types across different topics (blog posts about cats, kittens, evil cats, ninja kittens, evil ninja kitten cats, etc.), wouldn’t it be nice to know which content types or topics bring you the most and best traffic?  Never fear, Richard’s here to explain his handy-dandy system to do just that!  By the end of this video you’ll know exactly which stats to pull from your analytics to create a so-shiny-it’s-practically-chromed spreadsheet that will let you peer deep into the inky black heart of your site and know the stars, the slackers, and the shiftless hobos among your content.

Wow! It’s like the future is now! And, since thinking of the future always makes me think of ‘Flash’, and thinking of ‘Flash’ reminds me that those of you without Adobe Flash can’t watch the video, I’ll try to summarize Richard’s bard-like musings on content segmentation and performance analysis.

In order to track and analyze the performance of your individual content, you’ll want to segment out your analytics data by content type. This is really, really easy to do if you have good, clean site structure (which you have, right? RIGHT?!). You can just pull Richard’s data points (below) for the different sections or subfolders of your site. If you were lazy and thought the best way to organize your site was to throw all of the pages into a virtual bucket, dump them out, name them by throwing your keyboard at a stump, and call it a day, you’ll have to get a little more involved with how you filter your segments. No matter what though, you might consider segments like all blog posts (perhaps a ‘CONTAINS /blog’ filter), all tools, all content written by Belverd Needles, III (/authors/belverd), etc. 

Once you have your segment filters in place, you just need to pull the data that Richard suggests and you’ll be able to see exactly how Belverd’s content compares to that of his bloggitty arch-nemesis, Marmaduke Huffsworth, Esq. (/authors/marmaduke). What data you say? This data:

1. Number of Pages per Segment  Richard advocates crawling your site using something like Link Sleuth to get this number; you’ll use it for all sorts of fun calculations. Yes, calculations can be fun. If you don’t believe me, just ask these racially diverse, embroidered youths.

2. Number of Keywords Sending Traffic  You can pull this from your analytics. Don’t worry so much about the words themselves here, you just want to know how many different keyword terms are delivering one or more visits to each segment.

3. Number of Pages Getting Entries from Search Engines  How many pages within the segment received one or more visits from a search engine (pick an engine, any engine, or all of them, whatever matters to you…so Google, basically).

4. Total Visits from Google Search Engines  Like it says on the tin, this is just the total number of visits to the segment from search traffic.

5. Percentage of Total Visits that Performed a Conversion Action  This will require that you have some conversion actions setup in your analytics, but it’s a key data point if you want to figure out your strongest content.

So what can all of this stuff tell you? LOTS! By tracking these numbers, you’ll be able to quickly identify which content is working hardest for you. You’ll be able to know whether Marmaduke or Belverd is better at drawing high-converting traffic. You’ll know which subjects and content types are most deserving of your precious time and the investment of your hard-bilked pennies. You’ll know who put the bop in the bop shoo bop, who moved your cheese, and why birds suddenly appear every time I’m near (it’s because my pockets are full of birdseed). You’ll be 12.7-29.4% awesomier than you were before, and you’ll smell delightful ALL THE TIME!

Now aren’t you glad Richard stopped by and shared his magic secrets with you? Thanks, Richard!

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