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Below is the live blog coverage of the sessions given today at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco conference. If you are aware of other live blog coverage, feel free to link to them in the comments. Content Marketing Optimization — SES San Francisco, BruceClay.com Deep Dive Into Analytics: When Bounce Rate No Longer Floats Your [...]

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Hunch: Traffic Down, Registrations Way Up & We’re Smarter Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says its recommendation engine [...]

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Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says its recommendation engine keeps getting smarter. Barely more than two months ago, Hunch began requiring visitors to register/login to use the site. In doing so, all Hunch visitors were required to answer the site’s [...]

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Some of you know that I spend a lot of time behind the scenes here on Pro Q&A. One of the challenges of Q&A is that we often have to tackle complex problems in a very short amount of time – we might have 10-15 minutes to solve an issue like "Why isn't my page showing up on Google?" with no access to internal data, server-side code, etc.

Of course, I'd never suggest you try to solve your own SEO problems in just 10 minutes, but it's amazing what you can do when you're forced to really make your time count. I'd like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a "missing" page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including:

• Finding out why a page isn't getting indexed
• Discovering why a page isn't ranking
• Determining if a page has been penalized
• Spotting duplicate content problems

I'll break the 10 minutes down, minute by minute (give or take). The mini-clock on each item shows you the elapsed time, for real-time drama.

 0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexed

Always start at the beginning – is your page really missing? Although it sometimes gets a bad rap for accuracy (mainly, the total page counts), Google's site: command is still the best tool for the job. It's great for deep dives, since you can combine it with keyword searches, "keyword" searches (exact match), and other operators (intitle:, inurl:, etc.). Of course, the most basic format is just:

For this particular job, always use the root domain. You never know when Google is indexing multiple sub-domains (or the wrong sub-domain), and that information could come in handy later. Of course, for now you just want to see that Google knows you exist.

 0:30-1:00 – Confirm the page is not indexed

Assuming Google knows your site exists, it's time to check the specific page in question. You can enter a full path behind the site: command or use a combination of site: and inurl:

If the page doesn't seem to be on Google's radar, narrow down the problem by testing out just "/folder" and see if anything on the same level is being indexed. If the page isn't being indexed at all, you can skip the next step.

 1:00-1:30 – Confirm the page is not ranking

If the page is being indexed but you can't seem to find it in the SERPs, pull out a snippet of the TITLE tag and do an exact-match search (in quotes) on Google. If you still can't find it, combine a site:example.com with your page TITLE or a portion of it. If the page is indexed but not ranking, you can probably skip the next couple of steps (jump to the 4:00 mark).

 1:30-2:00 – Check for bad Robots.txt

For now, let's assume your site is being partially indexed, but the page in question is missing from the index. Although bad Robots.txt files are, thankfully, getting rarer, it's still worth taking a quick peek to make sure you're not accidentally blocking search bots. Luckily, the file is almost always at:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

What you're looking for is source code that looks something like this:

It could either be a directive blocking all user agents, or just one, like Googlebot. Likewise, check for any directives that disallow the specific folder or page in question.

 2:00-2:30 – Check for META Noindex

Another accidental blocking problem can occur with a bad META Noindex directive. In the header of the HTML source code (between <head> and </head>), you're looking for something like this:

Although it might seem odd for someone to block a page they clearly want indexed, bad META tags and Rel=Canonical (see below) can easily be created by a bad CMS set-up.

 2:30-3:00 – Check for bad Rel=Canonical

This one's a bit trickier. The Rel=Canonical tag is, by itself, often a good thing, helping to effectively canonicalize pages and remove duplicate content. The tag itself looks like this:

The problem comes when you canonicalize too narrowly. Let's say for example, that every page on your site had a canonical tag with the URL "www.example.com" – Google would take that as an instruction to collapse your entire search index down to just ONE page.

Why would you do this? You probably wouldn't, on purpose, but it's easy for a bad CMS or plug-in to go wrong. Even if it's not sitewide, it's easy to canonicalize too narrowly and knock out important pages. This is a problem that seems to be on the rise.

 3:00-4:00 – Check for bad header/redirects

In some cases, a page may be returning a bad header, error code (404, for example) or poorly structured redirect (301/302) that's preventing proper indexation. You'll need a header checker for this – there are plenty of free ones online (try HTTP Web-Sniffer). You're looking for a "200 OK" status code. If you receive a string of redirects, a 404, or any error code (4xx or 5xx series), you could have a problem. If you get a redirect (301 or 302), you're sending the "missing" page to another page. Turns out, it's not really missing at all.

 4:00-5:00 – Check for cross-site duplication

There are basically two potential buckets of duplicate content – duplicate pages within your site and duplicates between sites. The latter may happen due to sharing content with your own properties, legally repurposing contents (like an affiliate marketer might do), or flat-out scraping. The problem is that, once Google detects these duplicates, it's probably going to pick one and ignore the rest.

If you suspect that content from your "missing" page has been either taken from another site or taken by another site, grab a unique-sounding sentence, and Google it with quotes (to do an exact match). If another site pops up, your page may have been flagged as a duplicate.

 5:00-7:00 – Check for internal duplication

Internal duplication usually happens when Google crawls multiple URL variations for the same page, such as CGI parameters in the URL. If Google reaches the same page by two URL paths, it sees two separate pages, and one of them is probably going to get ignored. Sometimes, that's fine, but other times, Google ignores the wrong one.

For internal duplication, use a focused site: query with some unique title keywords from the page (again, in quotes), either stand-alone or using intitle:. URL-driven duplicates naturally have duplicate titles and META data, so the page title is one of the easiest places to find it. If you see either the same page pop up multiple times with different URLs, or one or two pages followed by this:

...then it's entirely possible that your missing page was filtered out due to internal duplication.

 7:00-8:00 – Review anchor text quality

These last two are a bit tougher and more subjective, but I want to give a few quick tips for where to start if you suspect a page-specific penalty or devaluation. One pretty easy to spot problem is when you have a pattern of suspicious anchor text – usually, an uncommon keyword combination that dominates your inbound links. This could come from a very aggressive (and often low-quality) link-building campaign or from something like a widget that's dominating your link profile.

Open Site Explorer allows you to pretty easily look at your anchor text in broad strokes. Just enter your URL, click on Anchor Text Distributions (the 4th tab), and select Phrases:

What you're looking for is a pattern of unnatural repetition. Some repetition is fine – you're naturally going to have anchor text to your domain name keywords and your exact brand name, for example. Let's say, though, that 70% of our links pointing back to SEOmoz had the anchor text "Danny Dover Is Awesome." That would be unnatural. If Google thinks this is a sign of manipulative link building, you may see that target page penalized.

 8:00-10:00 – Review link profile quality

Link profile quality can be very subjective, and it's not a task that you can do justice to in two minutes, but if you do have a penalty in play, it's sometimes easy to spot some shady links quickly. Again, I'm going to use Open Site Explorer, and I'm going to select the following options: Followed + 301, External Pages Only, All Pages on The Root Domain:

You can export the links to Excel if you want to (great for deep analysis), but for now, just spot-check. If there's something fishy on the first couple of pages, odds are pretty good that the weaker links are a mess. Click through to a few pages, looking out for issues such as:

• Suspicious anchor text (irrelevant, spammy, etc.)
• Sites with wildly irrelevant topics
• Links embedded in an obviously paid or exchanged block
• Links that are part of a multi-link page footer
• Advertising links that are followed (and shouldn't be)

Also, look for any over-reliance on one kind of low-quality link (blog comments, article marketing, etc.). Although a full link-profile analysis can take hours, it's often surprisingly easy to spot spammy link-building in just a few minutes. If you can spot it that fast, chances are pretty good that Google can, too.

(10:00) – Time's Up

Ten minutes may not seem like much (it may have taken you that long just to read this post), but once you put a process in place, you can learn a lot about a site in just a few minutes. Of course, finding a problem and solving it are two entirely different things, but I hope this at least gives you the beginning of a process to try out yourself and refine for your own SEO issues.

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AllThingsD is reporting that Yahoo is negotiating with mom-oriented social network CafeMom for a potential $100 million acquisition — the price Yahoo recently paid for Associated Content. Yahoo has of course tried to buy other companies unsuccessfully in the past (most recently Foursquare, according to rumor) so it’s not clear it will happen. But this deal [...]

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The Yahoo-Microsoft search transition is picking up momentum. Yahoo announced a number of things today relevant to the change over. They concern the organic search transition, SearchMonkey and Site Explorer. Yahoo announced that later this week the organic transition will commence for PC and mobile results in North America: This is an important step toward our [...]

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Facebook pages can be quite a dynamic location for your brand and now there is a growing push towards monetizing pages from within Facebook. By utilizing shopping cart software built exclusively for Facebook, retailers can now sell products right on their Facebook pages – no need for users to ever exit Facebook.com. These e-commerce platforms are [...]

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Webmasters build links for two reasons: to drive traffic and to influence search engine placement. Neither option is as cut and dry as I’ve stated here but when it gets down to it, that’s why webmasters deliberately build links. If you’re building links to support ongoing SEO efforts, there are a handful of key tips to keep [...]

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The Google AdWords blog announced a new bidding method available to advertisers named enhanced CPC. Enhanced CPC uses your conversion data, the one you may willing provide to Google AdWords, to automatically adjust your Max CPC prices. The system predicts the likelihood of an ad converting based on the historical conversion tracking data in your [...]

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As Danny earlier pointed out, comScore has devised a new metric called “Explicit Core Search” to separate intended search results from slideshow “gaming” (“contextual search”), which had arguably distorted search volumes at Yahoo and to some degree Bing in recent months. Here’s how comScore explains the new metric: When comScore reports our July 2010 qSearch data this [...]

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A simple look at search market share in Europe shows that Europe is a Google continent. Though the search giant’s headquarters are physically based in Silicon Valley, a huge part of their community is based in Europe. Only Yandex in Russia and Seznam in Czech are able to compete with Google, but only on a [...]

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Posted by randfish

For a long time, if you asked me about spamming the search engines, whether with hardcore black hat tactics or merely gray hat link acquisition, I'd say that in the long run, neither was the right move. Building a great site and a great brand through hard work, white hat links, solid content and marketing strategies has always been my path of choice. It still is today, but my faith is definitely wavering.

Why?

In the last 12 months, I've seen (or, at least, felt) less progress from Google's webspam team than in any previous year I can remember. Popular paid link services that Google's search quality folks are clearly aware of have worked for months on end (some have done so for years). Crummy, low quality directories and link exchanges have made a comeback since the big shutdowns in 2007-8. Even off-topic link exchanges, which experienced their own blowback in 2006-2007 have started working again. Horrifyingly bad sites are ranking atop the results using little more than exact match domain names and a few poor quality links. There's even a return of the link farms of the early 2000s, with operators creating (or buying old domains and converting them into) junky, one-page sites to boost their own link popularity.

On nearly every commercially lucrative search results I pull up these days, I see bad links pushing bad sites into the top rankings at Google.

Examples of Web Spam in the Rankings

I made a promise to Aaron that I wouldn't "out" spam, and although I still don't believe it's the wrong thing to do morally (it hurts everyone's search/web experience, why should SEOs band together to protect it?), I do want to keep that promise. So, while I can't point you to any particular links or sites, here's a good set of queries where plenty of link manipulation is keeping a few, some or many of the top (5-10) ranking sites in those positions:

• SEO Software
• Starcraft 2 Strategies
• Birthday Party Supplies
• Currency Trading Online
• Tennis Racquet Reviews
• Leather Crafting Supplies
• Nanny Services
• Home Business Ideas
• French Doors
• Vietnam Tours
• Antioxidant Supplements
• Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Just run a few OSE reports on some sites that rank well here and you'll see what I mean. There are numerous players in these listings who don't have a single natural or editorially endorsed link. And you don't need to limit yourself to these queries either.

3 Steps to Find Lots of Link Manipulation

Step #1: Search for "SEO Friendly Directory" and visit a few of the sections included in the resulting sites that come up.

Step #2: Search for the primary keywords the directory-listed sites are targeting in their title tags or the anchor text they've gotten from the directories.

Step #3: Check out the top 5-10 listings in the rankings and you'll find an abundance of sites with few to no "natural" links whatsoever

Why is Google Letting So Much Spam/Manipulation Go Unpenalized?

I don't know. But, I do have some guesses:

• Scalability of Spam Fighting Tactics - it could be that the ability for Google's team to combat web spam has diminished due to the increasing size, complexity and demand in search. Perhaps fighting spam is a much tougher problem in the 100s of billions of pages than it was in the 10s.
• They're Working on Something Big - for many years, Google would let lots of spam they clearly knew about pass... for a while. Then, they'd release an algorithmic update to defeat a huge layer of spam or seriously cripple certain types of link manipulation. If that's the case today, this would be one of the longest times between updates we've seen (MayDay had a small impact, but it wasn't link-manipulation targeted from everything I've seen).
• Too Much Baby Thrown Out with the Bathwater - perhaps, as link manipulation and spam have grown in popularity, Google's found that they can't penalize a technique or sites employing it without dramatically reducing the usefulness of their index (because so many "good," "relevant" sites/pages do some dirty stuff, too). If this is the case, they'll need to work on much more subtle, targeted detection and elimination systems, and these might be substantially harder to employ.
• WebSpam Team Brain Drain - The spam fighting team put together by Matt Cutts from 2001-2006 was Google's cream of the crop. He personally hand-selected engineers from search quality (and other departments) to combat the black hat menaces of Google's early growth days. SEOs could frequently interact with many of these crazy smart folks, from Brian White to Aaron D'Souza to Evan Roseman and many more. That interaction today is largely limited to the webmaster tools team, which may be an appropriate PR move, but it's hard to know whether the new team is up to the task. We do have one new, semi-publicly contributing webspam team member, Moultano, on Hacker News (you can see all the threads he/she has participated in on the spam topic with this query).
  
  Matt himself is finally taking a well deserved break, but even at home he's much less public on the web, much less active on webspam topics on his blog, visits fewer conferences and now invests in startups, too (which surely takes up time). I don't mean to criticize Matt in any way - if I were him, I'd have left Google long ago (and he's clearly put in more than his dues), but the possibility remains that the team he built is no longer intact, or no longer of the quality it was in the early years.
• Live and Let Live - It could be that although Google's public messaging about webspam and link manipulation hasn't changed, internally their attitude has. Perhaps they've found that sites/pages that buy links or run low quality link farms aren't much worse than those who don't and having relevant results, even if they've used black/gray hat tactics, isn't highly detrimental to search quality. Certainly in some of the examples above, that's the case, while in others it's less true. I recall that years ago, the MSN Search team noted that they'd much rather fight poor quality results in the index than fight high quality results who happened to buy links. Maybe Google's come around to the same philosophy.
• They're Counting on New Inputs to Help - Part of Google's initiative in acquiring social gaming companies, building social platforms and making data deals with folks like Twitter could be to help combat spam. They may have hopes that leveraging these new, less polluted (or, at least, more easily trackable) forms of recommendation/citation can be a big win for webspam and search quality.

Why Rant About Spam?

"Blah. Blah Blah. So what if Google's not doing as much to stop spam as they have in years past?" I hear you ask.

My concern is primarily around the experience of searchers and what it might mean if results become polluted not just by good or relatively good sites that happen to buy or manipulate links, but by really bad crap - the sort that makes searchers want to find a new way of getting information on the web (Facebook Q+A? Twitter? Yelp?). Search today is an amazing marketplace of web builders, marketers, suppliers and customers. If the last of these - the customer - slowly becomes disenchanted with Google, the world of search marketing and the amazing utility of search in general may come to an end.

If you use search engines or work in search marketing, that should be the last thing you want.

That said, if you believe that most of the "spam" will eventually be beaten out by either legitimate results or by better sites that also spam/manipulate links, then there's much less to worry about (I'm not fully in either camp and can see both sides).

So, What Should Legimitate Marketers Do?

Please DO NOT go out and spam the results, buy links, submit to crap directories and open up link farms. Even with this current trend, I believe that would be terrible advice. Plenty of sites do get caught and filtered, and I'd rather know that my site was safe and every piece of content I added and link I built would help bring more traffic than constantly worry about the small but real risk of being penalized or banned.

One thing Google has done is continue to make the experience of penalization a horrific one. It's hard to know if you really have a penalty, nearly impossible to figure out what triggered it and onerous, almost Kafka-esque, to attempt to get back into their good graces. If you can live with that risk, as professional black hats do with their churn-and-burn strategies, then it's less of a concern. But if you're building a real business, Google is still driving 70%+ of the searches on the web in the US (and 90%+ in many other geographies), and it would be foolish to take such a terrific risk.

As to the question of reporting the spam of your competitors - that's up to you. However, Google has certainly made it a less likely, less rewarding activity. Nearly every day, we answer PRO Q+A related to the question of link manipulators outranking legitimate marketers and sites, and I can recall only once in the hundreds of questions I've answered in the last few years when a spam report actually led to action (to be fair, I don't follow up consistently on every one, but many of our PRO members will send a regular ping with updates).

What we can do is to re-double our efforts to build great sites with amazing value for people. No matter what the "search" experience of the future is like, those sites and pages that provide a remarkable experience are sure to surface near the top and receive the added benefit of word-of-mouth praise, viral spread and citation in whatever forms it may evolve to, both online and off.

Some Caveats to My Experience

There are millions of queries that are remarkably spam free and Google has done a consistently exception job fighting spam over the years. However, the recent past has me concerned that they are no longer as interested, diligent or capable of combatting even the most basic spam techniques.

It's also certainly the case that I'm regularly exposed to many queries and topics that SEOs, both black hat and white, focus on, and thus might see more spam than the average searcher (though anecdotally I'd guess they're seeing more, too).

What Do You Think?

Have you been seeing more results in the rankings that are performing well despite having virtually no "natural" links? Have you seen Google take action on spam reports? Why do you think the recent past has many fewer examples of big spam-cleaning updates?

I'm looking forward to some great discussion - and this week I'll be at SES San Francisco (on 5 different panels!) - feel free to grab me and chat privately there, too!

p.s. With regards to Bing, the only other major US search engine now that they're powering Yahoo! (or on the verge), my opinion is that they have been making substantive strides. They're still behind Google in many areas (and ahead in a few), but at the current rate, we might actually see Bing surpass Google's spam detection and filtering in the next 18-24 months, though they will probably still be playing catch up in long tail relevancy/quality.

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Posted by randfish

The team at SEOmoz has been hard at work this week, smoothing out a lot of the initial bumps we've seen with our beta launch of the new web app. We anticipated the app would be popular, but I don't think any of us were prepared for just how many keywords needed rank checking/grading and pages needed crawling/error-checking. Our queue to fetch rankings/crawl URLs had a backup of multiple tens of thousands of requests all week, and the dev team's been slogging away on parallelization, separation of queing stages and other fixes.

Our next big release is scheduled for August 25 (possibly the 26th depending on how repairs go) and we're all crazy excited (and more than a little nervous, sleep deprived and caffeinated). Feel free to start marking your calendars; I know we have :-)

But, today, I'm here to talk about (and ask about ) the future of the web app. We've got a nearly endless list of features & functionality we're hoping to add to the web app in the weeks and months to come, and we need your help in priotizing what  YOU care about. To start, I'll share two lists - the first is our "quick hit" list of items we're planning to address in the next 2-3 weeks (some will even be in time for our "big" launch on August 25th). The second is some larger concepts we've been noodling around with that may take a few months to get in. With both, we're hoping you'll give your $0.02 and help us prioritize which items to concentrate on.

Quick Hits List

#1 - Printable Reports (DOC & PDF)

We've heard from a lot of users already that they'd like the ability to export the crawl diagnostic reports, on-page summaries and report cards and ranking data into DOC or PDF files to be integrated into internal or client reporting. Luckily, this is a feature that's early on our roadmap, possibly as soon as September.

#2 - On-Page Optimization Interface Tweaks

The on-page analysis section has already garnered a lot of kind words and hopefully helped many of you improve your targeting for some easy rankings wins. However, there's a few tweaks that folks have suggested to help make it more usable, including removing the "fix" level of difficulty label on elements that are already completed and offering a way to re-order the recommendations to show those that are incomplete at the top.

We're also working on ways, in the longer term, to help make this page shorter and the information more quickly digestable. Look for some interface experiments coming soon.

#3 - Adding Issues to Crawl Diagnostics

We currently track 20 unique crawl issues (split between errors, warnings and notices). Some other items we've considered tracking include:

• Use of meta noarchive (notice)
• Pages with display: none in their CSS (notice)
• Pages lacking analytics tracking code (warning)
• Pages that return any response code outside those we already track - 200, 301/2, 40x, 50x (error)
• Pages that redirect through more than two chains (warning)
• Pages that serve a meta refresh (notice)
• Pages that redirect with javascript (warning)

If you have additional items you'd like to see in the crawl diagnostics, please let us know!

#4 -"Ignorable" Crawl Issues

Some of our members have noted that they'd like to be able to "ignore" an issue and have it exist only in an "archived" issues section. We think this is a great idea, as there can be times when we catch a 404, duplicate content, robots blocking, etc. and it's not a problem for your site but an intentional move. When this happens, it can be frustrating to see the continued error/warning message, so an archiving system might be ideal.

We're still working on the concept of how to implement, but an "ingore all issues of this type" and a specific "ignore this issue for this URL" are currently on the roster.

#5 - Bulk Keyword Import System

Today, it can be a bit frustrating to add more than 5-10 keywords and labels at a time. We'd like to build a system that lets you upload a CSV or paste in rows with lable data included in a consistent format to make bulk insertion and labeling easier.

Big Ideas for the Future

Although we've amassed literally hundreds of ideas for upgrading and adding to the web app's featureset, we're really excited about a few key ones that have many mini-features inside. These include:

A) Integration with Google Analytics

One of the projects we're most excited about is integrating with Google Analytics (and later, other packages like Webtrends and Omniture). You can see some of our early ideas below in wireframe format (these ARE NOT finished designs by any means, just illustrations I made in Flash).

We're keen on the idea of having some stacked are graphs to help you see when traffic from different sources vary, and help to measure indexation via the chart below. Splitting out social traffic by using a set of referrers (ReadWriteWeb does a good breakdown of sources) to filter also struck us as being a great feature.

From there, we're also bullish on including data about specific keywords alongside rankings, keyword difficulty scores and estimates from Google AdWords:

With this data, we think we can calculate some cool metrics around the potential opportunity of a given keyword, though this will, obviously, require some testing and refinement.

B) Crawl Depth Analysis

We've long wanted a way to visualize a site's internal link structure and know how depth of pages from the homepage might actually be influencing crawling, rankings and traffic. With the custom crawl & crawl diagnostics system, we believe we can architect this into the web app's dataset (though it's unfortunately non-trivial to do so). You can see a very early wireframe below:

This is one of our more ambitious projects, but we'd love your thoughts about whether it would be valuable/useful for your campaigns.

C) XML Sitemaps Builder

Building an XML Sitemap can be a pain, even with some of the specialized software out there (though we at SEOmoz are big fans of John Mueller's GSiteCrawler). Since the web app is already crawling your site's pages, it only makes sense that we could construct an XML sitemap, plug into Google Webmaster Tools' API and help you verify the sitemap and make custom tweaks based on what you want to include or exclude.

D) Keyword Research System

A relatively obvious next step would be the addition of a keyword research tool. We'd like integrate the functionality of the keyword difficulty tool's analysis along with data from Google's AdWords API. This might help you choose which keywords are most likely to produce value for your site and deserve some content/targeting in SEO.

E) Historical Link Analysis

One feature we hear demand for all the time is historical link information. We've actually got the data already stored from previous indices, but in testing retrieval, we've found that numbers can really bounce around due to the massive amount of noise in the "not-so-awesome" parts of the web (spammy sites, scrapers, etc). Thus, we're looking into ways to scrub the data a bit before building this system (possibly by using our metrics to have the option of showing only mozRank 2-3+ pages that link, which tend to be relatively high quality). This work may take us into November or later, but we've got our fingers crossed that it can be in the web app by year's end.

The wireframes above are just some initial concepts. We'd also really like to be able to show you pages/sites that were linking to you in a previous index but aren't any longer or those that are newly linking, too.

F) Social Media / Link Monitoring System

Finally, we've got a project to turn some of the early work from Blogscape and our Social Media Monitoring prototype into a more robust, fully functional system. Our goal here is to provide a list of all the pages, tweets, blog posts and links that your site acquires in a more real-time type environment. So many of us are constantly doing Google Blog searches and Twitter searches and looking at our referrers via analytics that we thought it would be great to combine all that data in a single repository so you can keep up to date on what the web is saying about you (and, more relevantly, how important each of those sources are).

We're still at the nascent beginnings of this work, but hope to have some wireframes to show in the not-too-far-out future - possibly in the next feedback request post.

Just for fun, I thought I'd include a poll regarding these "big" ideas and see which you're most excited about:

Which of the "Big" Ideas for the Web App are You Most Excited About?online surveys

With our next big launch just 9 days away (yikes!), we're all working hard to make the web app and the many other pieces that are releasing better, faster and more stable. However, we'd love your opinions and will certainly use that feedback to improve, if not next week then in the future.

Also - as we move forward, we've decided to be more open about our product development and roadmap (as part of our commitment to being TAGFEE), so you can expect a post every few weeks or so detailing some of our ideas and asking for your thoughts on what to build next and how to improve.

p.s. If you haven't tried the web app beta yet, give it a spin - it's PRO-only, and some sections are a little slow, but by building a campaign now, you'll have more historical data and trends to compare over time as the app improves.

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you.  Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building.  This is for two reasons -

1. You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
2. You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience

We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection.  I often like to talk about improving your link building conversion rate, if you can do this then you are making your life a lot easier.  This post is designed to help improve your link building conversion rate by reaching out to the right people.

Here is a quick visual to show you the basic process of what you are doing:

This is the process I like to work to when getting links from specific targets.  It is very simple but from experience, many people struggle with finding the right people to get links from.   Here are some specific ways you can find these people.  I'll probably cover the other areas in more detail in a subsequent post.

Getting Inspiration

I like to start the process by brainstorming a few ideas of what type of people are interested in my topic, luckily I've got some great colleagues to bounce ideas off and help with this process.  If you tend to struggle with this process, Spezify is quite a nice tool for visualizing a topic and seeing what is happening online related to that topic.  This can often give you some links to places you may not have previously thought of to reach out to.

Find Influential Tweeters

Although strictly speaking, Twitter is not good for building links,  finding people on Twitter who have a large number of followers and have a lot of influence can be very useful in spreading the word for you.  These people usually have their own websites outside of Twitter too that may be of help to you for traditional link building.

So how do you find people on Twitter who are influential?

WeFollow is a nice little tool for this, a quick test of "SEO" as a keyword proves to be pretty accurate to me:

You now have a list of influential people from within your industry.  What next?

• Follow them
• Make a note of what they like to tweet about
• Check their personal websites for more info
• Look at what type of stuff they retweet
• Retweet their stuff
• Interact with them constructively
• Ask for their opinion on something

By doing all of these things, you are building a relationship with this person and finding out what it takes to get their attention.  You are also learning about what interests them and what type of content you need to create to get them to tweet about it.  You are also opening a channel of communication with them which you can use to push your own content when the time is right.  Once you have built up a rapport with this person, you are in a good position to send them a link to your content and ask for their opinion on it.

Find Local People

This is something that I've found to work very well when doing outreach.  If you're fortunate enough to live quite close to someone who you can get a link from, mention it when you contact them.  This works very well if you are a small local business who is trying to get some attention and help from local people.  It can be a little difficult to find these type of people but here are a couple of ideas -

Search Twitter Local

You can find people who are tweeting about your topic within a certain number of miles of your location.  Just head over to Twitter Advanced Search and look for this section:

Local Directories

Dmoz has section dedicated to listing websites because they are based in a certain area.  For example, if I'd just launched a website which was for my music DJ service in Stratford-upon-Avon, I may want to contact a few people on this page to let them know about it.

There are literally tons of local directories where you can find people to contact, here is a UK list and here is a US list.  These lists were originally designed as places for you to get links from, but there is nothing to stop you getting creative and getting links from the places on these directories too!

Foursquare

Whilst you are following influential people on Twitter, you may notice that they are using Foursquare to check-in to various places.  If these places just happen to be in your local area, then there is the possibility of contacting them and seeing if they want to meet for a coffee.  This is probably more useful for finding business contacts and networking as it is for link building but it is worth mentioning as a method of finding people who are local to you.  Even if you don't meet someone, you can still get an indicator of what area they are in and use this as a hook in your opening email or phone call.

Survey your Customers

I'm a big fan of getting your customers to help you with link building.  The idea in relation to this post is to find out from your customers who they follow in your industry and what sites they visit for information.

This is incredibly easy to setup and can provide you with real, actionable data.  If your website has a big Twitter following, you can even ask the question in a Tweet or send out an email to previous customers.  You only need to ask a couple of questions along the lines of -

• Are you active on Twitter?  If so, who do you follow for information about your topic here?
• Do you frequently visit blogs and websites on your topic here, if so which are your favorite?
• Are you a member of any forums on your topic here, if so which ones?

You can get all of the replies together and see which sites or tweeters or mentioned the most.  Then you have a quality, targeted list of people to go after to get links.

Forums

Noooo!  Forums are no good for link building I hear you shout.  For the record, they can be good for link building, but thats a discussion for another day :)  What we are interested in is what makes a forum active and who the key leaders and influencers are.  There are ways you can use this information to your advantage and get links from places outside of the forum.

First of all how to find the forums which are active.  We just use a couple of simple Google search tools:

All I've done is searched for my keyword which is link building, clicked on discussions on the left hand side, then selected from the past 24 hours.  Nice and simple and I've now ended up with 50k + results.

Now where this helps us for link building is being able to find which people on these forums are moderators and ones which are active contributors.  This is the equivalent of finding people who are influential on Twitter which I described above.  Most forums will have this easily accessible although you may need to register.  You are looking for a list of "Top Posters" or "Top Contributors".

Once you have found these people, see if their profiles or footers contain links to their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or personal blog.  Then you can see if they may be interested in your website, hopefully they are which makes them a primary candidate to get a link from!

The one big advantage of this approach is that if they talk about you on their blog, its perfectly reasonable for you to ask them to mention it on the forum which means even more exposure (and links) for you.

Facebook

I love this one!  Using the Facebook Ads system, you can carry out research into the likes and interests of the gazillions (ok millions) of Facebook users.  So within a few minutes you can have a list of people who you know are interested in a certain topic.  From here, you have a couple of options -

• You could then start a PPC campaign on Facebook which aims to grab their details in exchange for some kind of incentive, for example you could try and target users who have their own blogs.  You can ask them to submit a story, blog about a topic, upload a picture, loads of stuff to try and capture this type of user
• Join the group with the other members and interact with them and the admins of the group.  This is a similar approach as you'd take in forums to try and work out who may be in a position to help you push your content on the group and external sites

Advanced Search Operators

We are getting more into "traditional" SEO here as opposed to market research but this is another favourite of mine but with a bit of a twist.  Firstly though I'd advise you to go take a look at the SEOmoz Guide on Advanced Search Operators.

Another great place to start is the SEOmoz Link Acquisition Assistant (PRO Only).  This tool does a lot of the hard work for you and can find lots of places to get links from as well as making you think a bit more about how you can tweak the operators to your own needs.

Here are a few of my personal favourites when it comes to advanced queries.

This will restrict results to only UK Universities which mention blogs.  If you are in the US, just swap out .ac.uk and put in .edu:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk +blogs

Same as above but this will only show results with blogs in the URL:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk inurl:blogs

This one is designed to help you find blogs which are active, therefore giving you a better chance of getting a link.  This query only shows me results which have published posts in July 2010.  This isn't perfect as all blogs work differently but you will still get some good results.

keyword here inurl:2010/07

My best advice here is to just go and experiment and keep tweaking queries until they give you the results you need.  By doing this you are filtering out all the websites which are not right for you and therefore improving your efficiency and link building conversion rate.  Here is a useful reference guide for a ton of Google advanced operators.

The Twist...

Don't do what everyone else does and start at page 1 of the search results.  These guys get link requests all day long!

Start at page 10 of results.  These guys are less likely to get link requests if they are not always at the top of Google, so you could have a better chance of getting their attention and getting the link you want.  The websites may be of a lower quality but as long as you use your due diligence and analysis, you will still get some good quality sites and valuable links.

Bonus Random Tip

I'm often asked about finding people who can guest blog for you on a particular subject.  This advanced search query may help a little to find these people.

keyword here inurl:author

Because of the way that some blogs work, they often put "author" in the URL of pages which contain all the posts by a writer as well as contact details.  Here is an example using Danny's page at SEOmoz.

As always I welcome your feedback and additional ideas in the comments below.  I'll do my best to reply to any questions.

This also seems like a good time to shamelessly plug the Distilled & SEOmoz Pro SEO Seminar in London.  I attended this event last year, before I joined Distilled.  Of the conferences I went to, it was one of the best in terms of actionable tips and quality of the talks.  I'd highly advise you to take a look if you are looking for some advanced SEO strategies.

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Posted by Danny Dover

Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host's CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!

 In this week's Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage. Also, I shaved my beard and now look like a 12-year-old boy. (I don't recommend that as a pitch tactic.)

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for Whiteboard Friday, I'm going to tell you about something that I think
is extremely important, and you should, too. Pitching SEO. By pitching
SEO, I mean presenting the idea of SEO to either potential clients or to
potential employers. So when I am giving this pitch, I have a few key
points I make, and then I'm going to go through a couple of rebuttals that
people usually make back to me.

The first key point that I make, and I always, always do this because it is
very important, is to acknowledge the snake oil salesman. SEO is an
industry where there are a lot of people who just kind of suck. They do a
very poor job of service and it makes the entire industry look bad. So,
you need to acknowledge those people exist so that the person who is
hearing the pitch takes into consideration what you are saying. You're
acknowledging that, yes, they are correct. But there is also this
alternative that they might now know about. My favorite way of doing this
is you just acknowledge it and then explain why, what proof you have to
show that is not how you do your service, be it past clients or
testimonials or actual data you can show from your results. I prefer the
latter if possible.

Number two. Strategies are easy but tactics are hard. A lot of times when
I am explaining SEO, I will come into contact with someone who is like,
"Oh, yeah, I get it. You've got to build links and content." They're
absolutely right. That's correct. That's what you have to do. But what
they are talking about are strategies. Bigger ideas. Building content,
that is just a broad idea. The actual content you write and the way you do
it and the way it is formatted, those are tactics.

In SEO, I think that the strategies are easy. They are easy to comprehend.
They're big and they make intuitive sense. But the tactics are hard. My
favorite example of this is URL rewrites. The idea is yes, we're going to
make all the URLs go from here to here. It turns out that doing that can
be very, very troublesome, and you run into lots and lots of side cases
just like anything you do with programming. So, I always try to
acknowledge that yes, the strategies are easy, but you are going to
probably want a specialist so that you make sure you nail all your tactics.

Number three. PPC and SEO equals the top of the conversion funnel. To be
completely honest, there are other things at the top of the conversion
funnel as well. There's email. There's direct traffic. There are lots of
other things. The two that I focus on are PPC and SEO. PPC is pay per
click, which is the ads you pay for in search engines and elsewhere and SEO
being search engine optimization, of course.

These are both tops of the funnel. So, you can either chose to pay on an
ongoing basis for PPC and get some traffic that way, or you can do it
through SEO and if you adhere to best practices, it can be free for you.
Just learn how to do it once, continue with the best practices, and it
costs you no money. The nice thing about this is that, while 90% of
budgets go to PPC, only 10% of clicks go there. The reverse of that is
only 10% of budgets approximately go to SEO, but 90% of clicks from users
are going to organic results and search engines. Huge opportunity here and
if you do it right, it won't cost you a dime.

The next one, rebuttals. When I am giving this pitch, there are a couple
of responses I get from people that I think are very genuine and they make
a lot of sense. These are the rebuttals they give, and then how I help
deconstruct that a little bit.

The first one being SEO takes too long. They are absolutely right. SEO
does take a long time. The way I break down SEO in my head is into
popularity, which is links, and relevancy, which is onsite, although there
is an element of links in that too. I'll write a little bit more about
this in the blog post below. The idea being that SEO takes too long.
That's true, but not for on page. If you want to just do on page
optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly.
Just do on page to start with. Another trick like that is just installing
a site map if they don't have one. I've seen that this is easy to do. You
can have an automated generator do it. Submit it to the engines, and within
a week or so you'll see results on that assuming they've never had one
before and other variables are not acting awry.

Number two, it will happen organically. This is one of my favorites.
People will say, "Oh yeah, we're building links anyway. There's variety in
our content. We have professional writers. So it's just going to happen
organically." That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating
life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it's not happened
organically. Same thing with SEO. You can try to do all these things, but
unless you have some focus, some actual goals, and some plans, it's just
not going to happen. Search engine optimization, you're not optimizing
anything. You're just letting it happen. So by putting in just a little
bit extra effort, you can get a lot more results. That's usually what I
use there.

The last one is, "I'm too busy." That's something I can totally
understand. Learning SEO is a complicated process. But, it turns out you
can have other people do this for you. If you are trading it for money,
you can just pay someone to do a little bit on it, SEO for you, do an SEO
audit, and give you some recommendations. Or you can trade, you can do
some bartering or something else. You can just make it happen. So, yes,
being busy is an excuse, but not with the potential there is to make a lot
of money with SEO and a lot of conversion on that.

That's all the time I've got today. I appreciate all of you paying
attention, or some of you. Not that guy. I appreciate it, and I'll talk
to you next week. Bye.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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

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Posted by randfish

If you've been using SEOmoz's tools for a while, you've likely run across the same challenge we have -- the data rocks, but you have to run a separate tool and report for each aspect of your SEO. That's why, for the past year, we've been building a new platform to house all of the features and functionality of the SEOmoz toolset, and includes the ability to track metrics over time. We call it the SEOmoz "Web App."

It's hard for me to resist making this post nothing but a huge collection of screenshots...

Starting TODAY (right now, in fact!), every PRO member has BETA access to the new web app.

We encourage you to create your first campaign(s), start tracking some rankings, crawling some pages and getting those optimization recommendations. The web app is our first application to automatically track data for any site(s) you care about on an ongoing, consistent basis, and make recommendations based on what we find. Thus, the real value comes after a week or two of tracking, and it gets more valuable, useful and reference worthy over time. One of our big goals was to make this app give back some beautiful screenshots and reports showing your progress in reducing the crawl problems, improving optimization and gaining in the rankings over time.

How it Works

The challenge with doing SEO on sites bigger than a few dozen pages is that no human has time to visit every page on a regular basis and check to make sure nothing is wrong, no opportunities are missed, no errors are present, and no search rankings are being unintentionally forfeited through poor optimization. The web app is designed to solve this by:

#1 - Crawling all the pages on your site every week and identifying potential issues in three categories:

• Errors - like 404s, 500s, missing titles, duplicate content, etc.
• Warnings - such as 302s, overly dynamic URL strings, long title elements, meta refreshes, etc.
• Notices - not problems, per se, but issues you might want to be aware of like 301s, rel=canonical tags, meta robots blocking, etc.

While we love what Google's Webmaster Tools does on this front, we felt there were a lot more issues we wanted to see.

#2 - Tracking Rankings on the keywords you choose and automatically grading the pages that rank in the top 50 for their on-page optimization. It's a simple concept, but a powerful one. Why? Because, we often found that:

• URLs ranking on page 2, 3 or 4 for a keyword phrase could move up dramatically in rankings and traffic with just a bit of keyword tweaking
• Sometimes, SEOs & marketers might not even realize they had a page that was competitive for a keyword, and showing off that potential automatically could make a huge difference
• Tracking rankings can help identify potential causes of rising/falling traffic and give a key baseline for performance, particularly as we add in data like traffic via web analytics, keyword difficulty scores and estimated search volume.

Basic rank tracking is great, but we think there's a lot more you can do with the data when it's integrated with other KPIs and metrics

Tracking competitors simultaneously is helpful for those SEOs who want to keep special tabs on select sites

#3 - On-Page Grading & Recommendations serve as a great companion to rank tracking, enabling easy identification of low hanging fruit (poorly optimized pages that still rank in the top 50 results are often huge opportunities for improved rankings and traffic). We built this feature because:

• It's frustrating to figure out the best practices for on-page optimziation, but our correlation and ranking models work have made some valuable strides that deserve to be shared.
• No one can visit hundreds or thousands of pages and find all the keywords that are suboptimally targeted. The web app (particularly in concert with tip #1 below) can and it will message these with easy-to-parse grades and simple recommendations.
• You can feel confident that the on-page recommendations are consitently updating with best practices. As we learn more through testing/research or as algorithms change (we re-do our ranking models every few months), that information will quickly make its way into the on-page report cards.

An "A"! That's good news. Still missing a few recommendations that might be worth checking out, though.

 

Aha! Using the keyword in the alt attribute might be a good addition (both for normal web rankings and for image SEO)

 

#4 - Link Analysis for your site and those of key competitors. This tab is still in progress, but in the future, we plan to integrate all of the link analysis abilities of Open Site Explorer and add historical tracking, competitive SERPs analysis and more.

Much more functionality coming soon

#5 - One Comprehensive System to Rule It All. More so than any single feature, we wanted to begin the process of replicating all the functionality of SEOmoz's PRO tools into a single, integrated platform. You should be able to do all your SEO from one place - the web app. The functionality released today is just a tiny part of what's to come.

Now I can see and access all the sites I care about from one place in my PRO account.

Here's a video of me whiteboarding a bit more about the new web app:

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How Does this Affect My PRO Account?

If you're already PRO, think of this as a big, new feature that's ready to start tracking data for you today. None of the old tools, functionality, guides,  Q+A, tips, webinars, etc. are going away. We're just adding the web app as a key part of the SEOmoz PRO package.

We are, however, making a few shifts that I think you'll really like.

Previously, PRO membership tiers had limits for how many Linkscape reports they could run. We've scaled up our servers to the point where we can handle pretty hefty quantities of requests, so as of today, we're removing your Linkscape advanced report limits - all PRO members can now run unlimited numbers of Linkscape reports. Q+A remains the same, as does access to all the other tools + content.

Here's the new PRO membership plans:

You may notice we've changed our pricing; however, these prices are for new members only.  Existing PRO members will continue to pay what they have in the past, but receive the expanded benefits and privileges we're launching today. It's our way of saying thanks for joining us in the early days.  PRO members - you'll get an email soon detailing the improvements/upgrades to your membership.

If you're not yet PRO, we're keeping the PRO price of $79/month available until August 25th (14 days from now). After that, the price will go up to $99/month. If you sign up now (at $79/month), you'll be grandfathered in and won't be subject to future price increases.

And, as always, as PRO membership gets better, you'll get immediate access to new features & upgrades and we'll never raise your price.

5 Quick Tips to Get Started

The web app is certainly designed to be largely self-explanatory and I'm sure many of you have already jumped in and given it a spin. But, for those seeking a few tricks, here's some that we've found in the last few weeks of using it for projects (some in concert with our consulting friends at Distilled).

#1 - Import some of your top referring keywords from your analytics

When I started the SEOmoz campaign, I grabbed our top few hundred keywords that referred traffic and imported them through the manage keywords input box (which kindly accepts CSV, TSV and carriage-return separated inputs).

By exporting my list of top keywords from Google Analytics and pasting them into the web app, I've got easy tracking on tons of keywords I care about, and a chance to find some missed opportunities.

 

#2 - Find pages that rank in the top 10-30 with low grades (Cs, Ds and Fs)

When my rankings and on-page reports came back, I found tons of pages that got Cs or Ds ranking in position 5-50, ripe for improvement.

Those Cs, Ds and Fs are gonna turn into As and send us a lot more traffic!

The best part is the automation - it's a simple process, but an incredibly tedious one if performed manually. The web app's a lifesaver on that front. Those Cs, Ds and Fs, if improved to As and Bs, will likely bring up rankings, particularly on the less competitive terms and phrases and those where I may have the links I need to rank, but never took the time to do on-page optimization. Editing a few page titles and adding some keywords to content never felt so rewarding.

#3 - Use the "grade any page" easter egg feature

The web app's on-page optimization system will soon be replacing our tired and somewhat rickety term target tool. In the meantime, you can run "one-off" reports through an easter egg feature. Just create the keyword you care about and you can edit the URL field manually to grade any page for any term/phrase:

Notice the highlighted portion in blue in the screenshot - easter egg FTW!

#4 - Apply labels to your keyword groups to separately track relevant data/metrics

Nearly every section of the app allows for filtering based on keyword group, error type, etc. By building smart keyword groups (via the "manage keywords" page) to align with the types of terms/phrases I care about, I can separately build reports showing performance in rankings and on-page optimization for those labels.

#5 - Point out crawl diagnostic issues to a friend or potential client

If your friend has a website with some crawl issues, I'm sure they'd appreciate having that pointed out - you can even export the crawl results to CSV and email it over. Likewise, if you've got clients or managers you're trying to convince to do some SEO fixes, the diagnostic visualization can be very handy to show off the problem.

Sending over this report might just bring your buddy a bit more search traffic (or help you win a new client)!

What's Next?

Oh, believe me - we're just getting warmed up. :-)

Our engineering team is committed to regular updates every few weeks, starting with something big a couple weeks from today. Those updates will add features, fix bugs and help grow this web app into the platform professional SEOs deserve - a system that lets you perform all of the essential tasks of SEO from one place - from building, submitting and managing XML Sitemaps to tracking your ROI from organic keywords through integration with your analytics package to tracking search results in verticals like video, maps/local, news, images, et al. to mapping your crawl data from Webmaster Tools against your indexation of pages receiving search traffic (we've had some good chats with the WM Tools team about integrating their API in cool ways) and much, much more.

We'll be publishing a post this weekend inviting you to vote for features you'd most like to see. That feedback will be used to help prioritize our work, so suggest now, vote on the weekend and you'll see what you want in the app even sooner!

We Need Your Feedback

The web app is the basis for our future plans around providing great SEO software, and we need your help to make it amazing. On every page of the web app, you'll find a feedback tab on the left-hand side of the page. Please click it often and tell us what you found frustrating, what more you want to see, and even what you liked and want more of. Our team reads every one and build priorities based on the most-requested features.

We also know there's going to be bugs at launch. Some early ones we're aware of include:

• Slowness - many of the web app pages take 10-15 seconds or more to load depending on the quantity of keywords, issues or other data involved. We're working to cache much of this in databases for much faster retrieval in the next few weeks.
• Crawl & Rankings Retrieval - your first data will take 5-20 minutes to populate. We do an initial "speed crawl" of 250 pages, but to be respectful of server load issues, we're pretty cautious with our requests. That first hour inside the app after creation may feel a bit empty, but just wait, it gets much better :-)
• On-Page Grades - edge cases, including keywords that are out of order or have odd broad matching aren't perfect yet. We'll be working to fix this and make this experience as seemless as possible.
• Root Domains - currently, campaigns can only be created with single subdomains (e.g. www.seomoz.org, not *.seomoz.org). We're working to make root domains an option as well, so you can track all the pages at mydomain.com, www.mydomain.com, blog.mydomain.com, etc. in one campaign.
• Adding more than 10 Keywords Simultaneously - to help with load as we begin public testing, we'll only collect rankings for the first 10-20 keywords entered immediately (within 10-15 minutes). If you add 50 or 500 keywords at once, we're limiting rankings and on-page checks until your next update date for now.

This isn't just another tool - it's a new approach for SEOmoz - creating an application that uses crawl data, APIs and integrated research to improve your productivity and simplify SEO.

But, we need to be realistic - in this first iteration, we're not just in beta, we're at the nascent stages of the app's potential. What we're launching today is pretty remarkable, and I feel confident that for nearly everyone reading this post, it can help you earn a considerable amount more traffic from the search engines. That said, the future is what we feel best about, particularly since we hope to have your help in the improvement process.

This is very much a BETA launch, but we think you'll enjoy playing around with the app and get a lot of value in return. So, what are you waiting for? Go build a campaign!

p.s. If you'd like to learn more, check out our FREE WEBINAR on the Web App coming up this Friday, August 13th at 10am Pacific - Register here. And you can still sign up for the SEOmoz Tools Training at our Seattle Seminar later this month (we've just added more seats).

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Posted by jennita

This week I pretty much have two things on my mind: beta launch and conferences. Since Rand will be covering the beta launch later today (wheeeeee) I thought I'd focus on the conferences. Along with preparing for our own PRO Seminar later this month, we've been discussing the various conferences we'll be attending and speaking at over the next few months. Personally I'm getting excited for SES San Francisco next week. With the change of venue and being a part of Connected Marketing Week it's going to be a great event. It also got me thinking about how attendees and speakers can use going to the conference as a link building exercise.

Anyone can easily acquire a few links by sponsoring the event, but I wanted to come up with some creative ways to gain links without actually paying anything. Ok, well without paying for anything more than the cost of attending the event. Let's get started!

1. Speak at the event

Speaking on a panel is one of the easiest ways to get a link directly from a conference. Unfortunately it's also probably the most difficult for most people. Not everyone gets excited about standing up in front of a room full of fellow internet marketers and speaking. But if you're the type who loves what you do, has great advice, experience and/or examples on a specific topic and doesn't mind speaking in public, then it's time to get rolling! There are tons of conferences (seminars, trainings, etc.) from big to small, international to local that you could speak at. Find the one that's right for you and reap the rewards from the links.

Ok, so where do the links come from? First, you'll normally get a link from the actual conference itself where they list their speakers. You'll also get links from people who write about the session you speak on. For example, Lisa Barone always links to the speaker's website in her liveblogging coverage. Here's one of many examples.

Simply by speaking at the event puts your name and company out there to the masses and gives them a reason to write about you. But perhaps speaking isn't your calling, let's see where else you can gain a link or two.

2. Liveblog or Livetweet

There are a number of benefits of live blogging, such as adding great content to your site and hopefully increasing your SEO value. But don't forget that many conferences will link to liveblog coverage of their event. Booyah! Now... don't get me wrong, live blogging is NOT easy. It can be a gruesome task where you spend the entire day typing, making sure you catch as much of the sessions as absolutely possible and still find time to eat and use the restroom. I personally attempted it once, but we can all see how well that went over (hint: I haven't done it again). Hats off to all those amazing livebloggers out there who do it time and time again at all the major conferences!

 
Some of the amazing livebloggers you'll see at conferences: Lisa Barone, Richard Baxter, Barry Schwartz, Virginia Nussey

If you're new to liveblogging or tweeting you might want to start small like with a local meetup. With a smaller venue, liveblogging isn't such a daunting task if you only have one or two sessions and speakers to cover. Plus not as many people are covering the small events, so the competition isn't fierce.

Another alternative to liveblogging is livetweeting. While you'll probably only get links to your Twitter account via retweets and Twitter roundup posts, you will probably get more followers who could in turn link to you at some point. Ok, so this may not be a direct link, but the idea of a future link is good enough for me.
In both liveblogging and tweeting, you have to be able to type and type quickly. If that isn't your thing, and you just like to attend the conference, take notes and learn in your own way, there's another tip that will earn you a few links. Bring bloggers food, drinks, a power cord, whatever! If you see that a liveblogger tweets about being thirsty, bring him/her a bottle of water. How much do you want to bet that you'll get a link in that post (or maybe from Twitter) from that blogger? I'd say that's a high likelihood.

In general if you bring someone of the Linkerati something nice, you might get a link out of it. Last year I roomed with Keri Morgret at SES San Jose and she brought triple chocolate muffins to the room!! Now if that doesn't deserve a link from SEOmoz, I don't know what does. Just sayin.

3. Take Photos and/or Video

This is a super fun way to not only get some sweet links but think about how many people you'll meet. It's the easiest way to network at a conference because pretty much all SEOs want their photo taken. :) But the key is, after you take the photos, be sure to publish them! Write a post and link to the people in the pictures or post them on your Facebook page and get more "likes" to your page.

Dana Lookadoo is probably THE BEST at taking great photos throughout the conference and then publishing them right away. She's received several links from the SEOmoz blog for taking photos we used and then linked back to her. In fact, all the photos of the livebloggers from above Dana, took at various conferences (thanks for the great photos again!). 

4. Get involved!

Whether the conference is large like an SMX or just a small meetup, everyone loves volunteers to help. This is also a great tip to getting a free pass to an event. Sure you have to put in a little work and help out, but in the end you'll learn a lot and will probably get a link or a thank you on Twitter. Earlier this year I helped Michelle Robbins at SMX West and got a great thank you from her after the fact via Twitter.

Just think of the possibilities here. If you can donate a little of your time, you can easily get a link or two out of it.

5. Do something crazy

Seriously, not even kidding here. If you do something out there, something a little different than the norm that people can get excited about, then they're going to write about it! Off the top of my head I can think of three different instances at conferences where people did things just a bit crazy, and the story went completely viral! I'm talking shaving your head, winning a pony and bigwatah. I won't go into all the details about these events but let's quickly look at a few Google searches.

A search for "bigwatah" shows 4 posts talking about the event that happened at SMX East in 2008 plus tons of photos. Then a search for "evan fishkin shave head" (tee hee hee) shows at least 10 posts and 3 videos of Matt Cutts shaving Evan Fishkin's head at Pubcon 2009.

That's just the tip of the iceburg. I'm pretty sure much crazier things have and could happen. As long as you don't hurt anyone in the process, I say get a little crazy!

Whew! That's a lot of linkbuilding that can happen in just a couple days time. As you head out to a conference this summer or fall, think about ways to not only gain knowledge but also to create a few backlinks. Remember that many of the people who will link to you who are at a conference are probably SEOs themselves. Which means they probably (not always, but probably) have a fairly decent authority site to send you some juicy links (dang. did I just say "juicy links" I hate when people say that). I'd love to hear some of your ideas or ways you've been able to build a link or two while attending a conference.

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Posted by randfish

I've had the chance to talk to lots of folks who are just starting out building new web businesses, many of them for the first time and a few with some experience under their belt. What worries me is that a lot of these new businesses are reversing the SEO order of operations; making it 100X more difficult to succeed than need be.

How Do You Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies?

Seriously. I don't mean a recipe; I mean close your eyes and think about the standard methodology and order of operations you follow. If you're like me, it looks something like this:

1. Determine what kind of cookies you're making - crispy, chewy, big, small - and what quantity.
2. Line up your ingredients - flour, eggs, sugar, baking soda/powder, butter, salt, vanilla extract, chocolate chips
3. Mix together ingredients in some relevant order
4. Form dough balls
5. Bake for appropriate time period
6. Remove from oven; eat

Now let's imagine SEO as a part of your recipe - you're trying to bake a great web business, and SEO is an essential ingredient. Let's say for the purposes of our analogy it's the chocolate chips.

Here's how many websites bake their SEO-chocolate chip cookies:

1. Mix together some of the ingredients (maybe the butter, sugar, eggs and flour)
2. Form dough balls
3. Bake for appropriate time period*
4. Remove from oven
5. Realize there's a few missing ingredients - vanilla extract (social media strategy), salt (viral content) and, oh yeah, the chocolate chips (SEO)
6. Sprinkle these on the cookies

Now instead of this:

Courtesy of SavorySweetLife's excellent post

You've got this:

Not quite as appealing.

A website that's pre-built its content, pre-conceived of its information architecture, pre-envisioned its marketing & communications strategy and already created its underlying code, CMS and functionality without considering SEO impact will always be at a severe disadvantage. And when it comes to links, that disadvantage is even stronger.

We all worry about a poorly built site and whether it will be accessible to spiders, but I see so many SEOs who approach a business or a site that's got many of the basics right and think, "OK, I just need to get some links." If instead, we flipped this thinking on its head and said "wait, this website hasn't established a strategy for link acquisition? Then we need to go back to the drawing board," the results might be dramatically better.

For every aspect of search engine optimization, there's a critical need to make it part of the business strategy, particularly as the field gets more competitive. If you've put together a remarkable company, solving a tough problem with a great website, you could still lose in search (and social) to the relatively amateurish competitor who asked and answered these critical SEO strategy questions before building their business/site:

• What does my site do for web content creators (Linkerati) that rewards them in such a way that they'll naturally share my brand and link to my site?
• What content is in demand (or soon will be) that aren't sites aren't addressing well (and how do I effectively keyword target that demand)?
• What functionality/organization will make my site more attractive to search engines?
• How do I build ongoing SEO refinement and growth into my business processes?

The site that answered those questions during the brainstorming phase is the one who can overtake the existing market leaders and win the rankings. Those who keep trying to sprinkle chocolate chips onto already-baked cookies will have a painful time trying to keep up.

* Notice my conspicuous lack of a pun about "half-baked" sites. I plan to use this karma on some horrifyingly bad joke in the future.

p.s. Credit for the analogy goes to the same person who bakes me most of my chocolate chip cookies. She's pretty awesome.

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Posted by Melissa at Distilled

So you want to get links, but don’t know how to start creating linkable content? Let me walk you through my process for creating awesome linkbait.

1. Identify your target niche.

Start by looking at your competitors' links.

They are probably more edible than these links:

This is a basic step for SEO, so really it's something you should have on file already. Look back over your competitors' links. Have they done anything that was particularly link-worthy? Look at deeper pages. What sort of things are people linking to in these pages? This should start to give you some idea of what sort of niches are interested in what you do.

2. Identify your angle.

When you look at your competitors' links, you'll see which bloggers and websites linked to them.

What did they link to and in what context? What else are they linking to? And what's going to make them link to your stuff? That is, what can you add?

Well, have you ever asked? Obviously, you won't get an answer from all of your target bloggers and websites, but the ones you get a positive answer from will already be interested in your content before you begin creating it. And people with a vested interest in your content will only be a good thing.

3. Create your content.

There's not much I can say here. Just create something that answers the above questions. If infographics do well, do that. Photo essays? Well, get your camera out - or get a freelancer to do it if you're not confident in your own photography skills.

If they want creepy monkeys, well, maybe they’re not worth targeting...

4. Promote your content.

Start with the bloggers you've already talked to. As I said above, they helped out with your content, so they have a vested interest. Be sure to point out which bit of their suggestion was used in the content. That way, they can brag about how awesome they are. And let's face it: the best way to get people to link to you is to massage their egos.

After you've got a few links from the people you've talked to, then you can go to other bloggers and websites, saying that buzz is building for this content. When you can show that people are interested in your content, it creates a desire within other people to join in. No one wants to miss the boat, after all.

In my own experience, I find less explicit requests are better, that is, saying "I think you and your readers would like this", rather than simply asking for a link, is more effective. I find that it's better to suggest you're doing someone a favor instead of asking them to do one for you.

So I've done all that. What next?

Let's say you're targeting 'tents'. You've already done some linkbait based on what has been successful for your competitors. But there are loads of people who use tents besides hardcore camping bloggers, so how would you go about targeting them?

Well, camping has undergone a bit of a resurgence in loads of markets thanks to the recession, so maybe you can target women who aren't super into camping. What to these women link to online? Well, loads of things, but there is a bit community of knitters online, and coincidentally, one of your employees loves knitting (isn't that handy?) Why not create patterns for knitted tent sculptures or other camping-related stuff? Whatever it is, just make sure it's interesting enough to get attention and useful enough to be worth sharing.

But don't forget: at this point, you don't know that knitters are going to link to content like that.  

But if they like knitted cake, they probably will like knitted flashlights.

You don't want to waste your time creating and promoting content that won't work. Check that the knitting bloggers link to outside sources. Make sure knitting websites include content from outside sources. Make sure the niche you are targeting will not only like what you do, but will LINK to what you do.

At the end of the day, that's what this is all about.

Image credits:

Vienna sausages - Changlc on Wikimedia Commons
Creepy monkey - kevsunblush on Flickr
Knitted cake - freeform by prudence on Flickr

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