Posted by countrystarr

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.

Getting your website listed in the DMOZ directory in anything less than geologic time frames is next to impossible.  Most SEOs submit their sites and then forget about ever getting listed.  However, there is a way to guarantee that your site will be included in the DMOZ directory quickly: become a DMOZ editor for the category in which you have applied to have your website listed.

Applying to become a DMOZ editor is easy.  Getting accepted is a little bit harder, but definitely doable.  The first step is to find the category that best describes your website.  At the bottom of that category you will see a link that says "Volunteer to edit this category."  This will take you to the next page which gives you tips and advice on applying to become an editor.  Read this page!  At the bottom of the page click on the button that says "Proceed" to go to the actual application.

DMOZ will only approve you to edit one category at a time.  After you become an editor, you can apply to edit other categories.  Whether or not you get accepted to edit other categories depends on your body of work up until that time as an editor.  That is why it is a good idea, even after you are approved as an editor, to carefully follow the editorial guidelines on websites you approve to be in the directory.  If you have multiple websites waiting to be approved by DMOZ editors, I recommend applying to edit in the category for which your most important site is waiting.  Do a good job editing in that category and it will be easy for you to be approved to edit other categories.

It is best to start with a smaller category.  Usually less than 100 listings in a category will give you an excellent chance of being accepted.

The actual application is where you need to be careful and do a little homework.  Here you will be asked to provide the usual (your name, username, password, email address, etc.).

Further down the application page you will find four boxes to input information.  Doing a good job filling out these four boxes is critical to your application.  As you fill them out, make sure your punctuation, grammar, and spelling are all correct.  I’ll list each box one by one and my suggestions for the best way to fill them out.

• What is your internet experience?  Enter a laundry list here (CSS, HTML, Drupal, PHP/mySQL, etc.).  You don’t need to elaborate much.  I would not put that you are an SEO.  You want to show DMOZ that you actually care about the integrity of the directory.  If whoever reviews your application thinks that you are trying to become an editor just to manipulate search results, they may not approve you.

• Why are you interested in becoming an editor for the ODP?  You want to be careful here.  You need to be honest in your application; however, there may be such a thing here as too much honesty.  For example, you would not want to put something like "I’m applying because I want to get my website www.xyz.com listed in the directory."  Instead, talk about how important it is to the internet community that only websites with high quality content be listed in the directory.  Even though algorithms are getting better all the time, there is still no substitute for human review by a trusted reviewer to identify quality websites, etc.

• Explain your interest in the subject category.  Think of all the relevant experience you have had in the category and then paint that experience in the best light possible.  For example, if the category is Kobe Bryant (taxonomy: Sports: Basketball: Professional: NBA: Players: B: Bryant, Kobe) you would explain how you follow Kobe’s statistics and are familiar with his career and then list some relevant details/examples (his drafting from high school to the Lakers, his NBA championships, Olympic appearances, etc.).

• Sties with which you are associated.  It is important to be honest here.  Some application reviewers can be very thorough and will often find out if you try to mislead them.  There is no conflict of interest for you to edit categories in which you may also have eligible sites.  You can even approve your own sites, just as long as you follow the editorial guidelines.

The total time to get this far is probably 1 or 2 hours carefully reading the submission and editorial guidelines, and then about 30  minutes to fill out the four boxes.  I recommend copying and pasting all of your responses into a Word document.  There is a good chance that you will be rejected on your first application.  If you are denied the first time, your initial applications is not saved anywhere and you will have to create a new application from scratch.  By saving all of your responses it will be easier to re-do a new application later and cut and paste those responses back in the application (provided it wasn’t those responses that kept you from getting accepted in the first place).

The last part of the application is also very important.  Here, you need to suggest three sites that are not listed in the directory, but that you would include in the directory if you were an editor for the category for which you are applying to edit.  This is where you have to do a little homework.  Here are the steps I recommend to finding good sites:

1. Do Google/Yahoo searches for relevant sites.  Make sure the sites are not affiliate sites or are not  duplicate content sites.  Also, strictly re-seller sites with little original content will not work.  I recommend making a list of 5 or 10 candidate sites and then working down from there.  Make sure the sites have original quality content.

2. Find the best three and then check the DMOZ directory to make sure they are not already listed.  It can be a challenge to find good sites that are not already listed.  Always check, because rest assured, your application reviewer will and he/she will deny your application if you have suggested a site that is already listed.  Type in the URL without http:// or www prefixes (e.g., google.com) in the DMOZ search box to check if the website is already in the directory.

3. After you have found three candidate sites that meet the editorial guidelines and are not already in the directory, write a simple title and description.  Do not use words such as "quality" or "best" in the description.  The DMOZ editorial guidelines give examples of the best way to write titles and descriptions.  Make sure and follow those guidelines carefully or your application will be denied.

This part of the application can take about an hour or more.  The hardest part is finding good quality original websites that are not already listed.  I would not use your own website as an example of one of the three.  While I do not know for sure if this would be cause for denial of your application, I just think it is bad form.

Submit your application and follow the instructions (you have to reply to an email to complete your application).

The DMOZ editors who review applications typically have very fast turnaround times.  When I first applied to be an editor (and on subsequent re-applications) and when I have applied for new categories the reviewers usually get back to me within 24 hours with their decision.  Plan on your application being denied the first couple of times.  Most of the time, the person who reviews your application will give you good feedback as to why your application was denied.  It is easy to make the changes and then re-apply.

When I first applied, it took me three times to finally get accepted to edit my first category.  Once I became an editor, my eyes were opened!  I went into the category and there were 69 submissions waiting to be reviewed, including my previous submission (the category only had 49 listed websites).  It was obvious that an editor had not looked at that category in a long time.  Especially in commercial product categories, there is little incentive for editors to approve other websites.  If an editor is editing a commercial product category and that editor also has a website listed in that category, it is unlikely that he/she will be excited about approving their potential competitors.  That is why some categories NEVER get new sites listed and updated in them.

In that list of unreviewed websites you will probably see your past submissions, as well as those you suggested to be included when you made your application. 

I recommend that you go through the list of applicants and find some good websites to list in your category, even if they might potentially be your competitors.  This will show the DMOZ muckety mucks that you did not abuse your editorial discretion and it will make it easier for you to get approved for other categories in the future.  Then, of course, go in and list yours as well.  When you do this, the websites becomes listed and immediately active in the directory.

The total time to become a DMOZ editor, from beginning to end, is probably 3 or 4 hours.  To apply for new categories is usually 1 hour or less since you already tackled the learning curve.

Is it worth it?  Who knows…. I guess it all depends on what a link from DMOZ is worth!  That is a question for another post.

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Posted by randfish

Last week I gave the keynote presentation at SMX Munich, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW. In that presentation, I shared a great deal of data from our web index as well as some SEO tips based on our experience replicating many search engine activities (crawling, indexing, building a link graph, de-duplication, canonicalization, etc.). In this blog post, I’d like to first announce that Linkscape’s new index, with crawl data from late March to early April (& upon which these data points are calculated), is now live - check it out here - and second, to share the charts, graphs and tips from my presentation.

The Linkscape Index

First off, some basic points about Linkscape’s index:

• The crawl is intended to imitate what major search engines crawl and keep in their index. Talking to lots of folks from the engines who do this work, we’ve heard that while tens or hundreds of billions of pages are crawled, there are only "~5-10 billion pages worth keeping in a main index."
• Linkscape is a crawler-built index, meaning it uses a seed set and crawls outward via links to discover new URLs.
• The index currently biases towards pages with external links, meaning we don’t crawl as deeply as the major engines do, but we try to crawl. very broadly (to reach as many well-connected pages and unique domains as possible).
• The crawlers and data sources we currently employ all respect robots.txt.

The Web’s Structure

As we crawl, we see some well-known structural pieces making up the web:

Linkscape, as well as numerous academic sources (and, almost certainly, the major search engines), collect and store data about three types of structural components – pages, subdomains and root domains. Link & content metrics, along with crawl parameters and query-independent ranking factors, are stored about each of these.

Linkscape also sees a view of the web that most IR students will be familiar with:

As others have noted in the past, the web’s link structure tends to look a bit like a bowtie, with a large number of tightly linked, well connected pages in the center and outliers on the borders with few incoming/outbound links. Linkscape does a relatively good job with the center and the linked-to edge (with few/no outbounds), but struggles more on pages with no incoming links (as these are difficult to discover and often not worthwhile keeping in an index).

Index Statistics

We’ve found these data points fascinating and I’m excited to be able to share many of them for the first time. While Linkscape is not as comprehensive as Yahoo!/Google, it’s far closer to a representation than a sample size. Our latest index update currently contains:

• 44,410,893,857 (44 Billion) pages
• 230,211,915 (230 Million) subdomains
• 54,712,427 (54 Million) root domains
• 474,779,069,489 (474 Billion) links

For this index, the following data pieces apply:

* Note that for the link distribution chart, this refers to "external, juice-passing links" which excludes links from the same subdomain to itself as well as links on pages with the meta nofollow or those that employ rel=nofollow.

* Note that for the root domains linking chart, this refers only to pages/sites receiving links from unique root domains. For example, with www.seomoz.org, we’d only receive one "linking root domain" from searchengineland.com, even though that site links to ours on many unique pages. Likewise, with links we receive from About.com and their numerous subdomains – in total, it’s only one counted "unique root domain."

* Not surprisingly, most links on the web are incestuous to some degree, and thus come from internal links (those on the same subdomain as the target), same IP address (where multiple sites from the same owner are hosted), same root domain and the same c-block of IP addresses. If we can see these relationships with Linkscape, it follows that the search engines have an easy time of it as well – and these links are almost certainly not passing the same kind of value that external links from unique root domains, IP-addresses and C-blocks would.

Some interesting data points on the above:

• 2.7% of all links on the web are nofollowed
• 73% of those are internal (so nofollow is actually far more popular as a link sculpting tool than a spam prevention device)
• 3 billion out of our 475 billion links (~0.6%) were found in noscript tags – while the engines recommend against this and talk about it as a spam tactic, we suspect that many of these are, in fact, legitimate uses and probably do get counted (due to their value in content discovery).
• 165,638,731 links (0.034%) aren’t visible on the page (they’re hidden off screen using CSS or other tactics). Again, given the numbers, we wonder whether all of these are spam and whether they’re all discounted by the engines.
• This is our first index supporting the canonical URL tag, and so far we’ve seen just north of 16 million pages employing the parameter. While this is still a drop in the bucket on a global web scale, we’ll be watching closely for how much support it generates over the months to come.

Search Engine & Linkscape Metrics

Like the search engines, we calculate a number of metrics on the pages, subdomains and root domains in our index to help uncover spam and sort by popularity & trustworthiness. The following are distributions of the metrics we currently employ:

* mozRank is our calculation of raw link popularity. Like Google’s PageRank, Yahoo!’s WebRank and Live’s StaticRank, it’s a recursive algorithm that counts links as votes and treats links from more popular pages as more important. We’ve found that while it’s useful for discovering which pages to crawl and index, it’s a poor measure of true importance and has significant noise.

* Domain mozRank is calculated in the same fashion as page-level mozRank, but on the domain-level link graph. Thus, it only takes into account unique links that exist from one root domain to another and is agnostic as to whether a site has 1, 100 or 1,000 links to another. We’ve found this metric exceptionally valuable for identifying the popularity and importance of a root domain – on the subdomain link graph, it’s more susceptible to manipulation and spam.

* mozTrust, which we also calculate on both the domain and page level link graphs, has proven highly effective as a spam identifier (particularly in combination with mozRank – the difference between the two is an excellent predictor of manipulative linking). mozTrust relies on the same intuition as Yahoo!’s TrustRank, running a recursive algorithm that passes juice down from trusted seed URLs/domains.

Measuring Correlation

Possibly the most interesting data I shared from an SEO application standpoint was around our research into the correlation of individual metrics to search engine rankings. Our own Ben Hendrickson has been doing significant data gathering and analysis, trying to answer the question,

How well does any single metric predict higher rankings?

His early results are enlightening:

In this chart, Ben’s showing that no metric is particularly good at predicting rankings by itself, but if you had to use something, the number of root domains linking to a URL and that URL’s mozRank are both just above the 95% confidence interval. Note that such classic SEO metrics as Yahoo! link counts and Alexa.com counts (which are included in many toolbars and appear in many SEO reports) are very nearly worthless.

The results are much better (though still not excellent) when we instead ask what metrics correlate with ranking 10 positions higher (essentially, what’s the difference between page 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, etc). Here, Ben shows that while only a single metric is above the 95% confidence interval (domains linking to a URL), there are several that are 20%+ better than random guessing.

Perhaps the most surprising result of this (for me, at least) was the data showing that Google’s link counts actually do have a correlation with rankings, suggesting that they’re not completely random (even though they might feel that way given their small sample size).

Out of all the metrics, it’s little surprise that # of linking root domains is a favorite (we use it, for example, to sort our Top 500 list). It’s one of the most difficult metrics to manipulate effectively and has high correlation with trust, importance and search engine rankings.

Top Tips for SEOs

Based on the work we do crawling and building an index, and the struggles we’ve encountered (and seen the engines similarly encounter), we’ve crafted a few short tips. While some of these are obvious and well known, they still pay to keep in mind as high-level recommendations we feel confident the search engines would support:

1. Don’t rely on the search engine to canonicalize anything for you.
2. Focus on link acquisition from a diverse number of root domains, not necessarily high PageRank pages, or those with high link counts.
3. Make smart, usable, short URLs. They’re far easier to process and have a much better correlation with useful, unique content an engine would want to keep in its index.
4. If you want to earn lots of links, building a distributed content widget/badge/link that users embed in their sites/pages is an incredibly effective strategy. Just look at how many of the top pages on the web achieved that position employing this strategy.
5. Don’t rely on PageRank or raw link counts as accurate assessments of ranking potential. According to our data, they’re not high signal or high rankings correlation metrics.
6. The social web is rising, as are those employing it effectively (again, check out the top sites list for evidence).
7. Don’t be afraid to use nofollow internally as it’s clearly not an outlier on the web. However, do be cautious with its use – you can seriously screw things up if you make mistakes on that front.
8. Keep content on a single subdomain and root domain wherever possible. The metrics of that domain will go a long way to make that content visible and ranking-worthy.
9. Avoid doing "strange" things from a technical and link acquisition perspective. The former makes you harder to crawl, process and index while the latter makes you stand out as possible spam/manipulation.

We hope you enjoy this data – please feel free to share – and enjoy using the new Linkscape index. Again, I’d like to give my congratulations and thanks to both Ben & Nick, who’ve done a tremendous job with Linkscape. If you have questions, please leave them in the comments and they should be able to provide answers and direction.

p.s. For those keeping track, this index update was almost exactly a month from our last one, and our goal is to maintain approximately 3-4 week intervals between updates for the foreseeable future. We’re also doing a lot to improve the quality and focus of our index to capture more good stuff and deep stuff on mid-size and large domains (and less spam). We’d appreciate it if those of you who are producing lots of spam would help us out by ceasing to earn links from trustworthy, respectable sites and pages – thanks!

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Are you looking for some fresh design, marketing and even story or headline ideas for your blog? Today’s task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge that might just help with this.

This is an off line activity – all you need to complete it is a pack of sticky notes, a notebook, pen, a magazine (or a newspaper) and an hour of time.

Your Task for Today

It’s simple really – take some time out to analyze/review a magazine with the view of learning something about how you might improve your own blog.

Which magazine do you need? Really almost any one would do – however if there’s a magazine covering the topic that your blog is on then it’s probably worth choosing it.

hint: many public libraries have back copies of magazines so you can do this for free and with lots of magazines at once there.

I do this process on a regular basis and find that it helps me in a number of ways:

• Marketing ideas – the way the magazine markets and pitches itself to readers can teach a lot – particularly what they do on the front cover which is all about convincing people to buy the magazine.
• Design ideas – some magazines do layout better than others and the web is definitely a different medium than print – but you can still learn a lot about design from reading a good magazine. Good magazines will give you an indication of what types of design/colors/layout are in vogue at the moment.
• Post Ideas – whether I choose a magazine on my blog’s topic or not – I almost always come away from this with a story for a new post. Sometimes the inspiration comes from a completely unrelated topic but an article that has a headline/title that could be applied to my niche.
• Learning about my Niche – if you choose a magazine on your topic it’ll keep you across the latest news and developments in it.
• Writing Tips – a good article on almost any topic can teach you a lot about effective communication.
• Monetization Lessons – mainstream media have been monetizing content for a long time – while the web is different some principles still apply.
• Reader Engagement – while a very different medium magazines are increasingly trying to get more interactive with readers by running competitions, setting up online areas, using reader contributions etc – I often find myself with sparks of inspiration from watching how magazines reach out to readers.
• Potential Guest Writers – magazines that do use contributions from readers will often publish the website of those that submit articles. I’ve followed up these links many times and have often approached these writers to write guest contributions for my blogs. They don’t always do it but it’s a great way to bring a fresh voice into your blog. Read more about how I do this at How to Find Fresh Expert Guest Bloggers for your Blog.

Why Analyze ‘Old Media’

I can here a few blogging evangelists asking what the point of this exercise is. Isn’t blogging ‘new’ media and why would we look to ‘old’ media like magazines to learn how to do it?

While I agree that blogging is a very different medium to magazine publishing – I don’t think that we need to throw everything that’s been learned by mainstream media out – to me that’s arrogant.

Sure we should be innovating and working with the strengths of the medium of blogging – but there are also lessons to be learned by looking at what others are doing in different mediums also. A lot has been learned over decades of magazine publishing that we as bloggers could take on board and build upon.

The Process that I Use

When I conduct this magazine review exercise I generally do it like this:

Set aside at least an hour and head to a place where you won’t be disturbed (I tend to go to a cafe)

Take with you the magazine (or more than one), a notebook, pen and a pack of sticky notes

Starting with the front cover – quickly skim through the magazine – put a sticky note on any page that catches your attention. Don’t pause to read anything yet – just take a quick flick through it to see what leaps out at you.

Once you’ve had a quick look through the magazine – make a note at what grabbed you on this first pass through. Was it a headline, picture, color, opening line of an article or something else? Attention grabbers are so important in creating an engaging blog so it’s worth noting what got your attention.

Now take a second slower read of the magazine. Start at the front cover and work your way through. As you read – ask yourself some of the following questions:

• Who is the target audience of this publication?
• What techniques are used on the front page to draw people into the magazine?
• What makes you pause to read an article? Why do you skip over other articles?
• What type of headlines are they using? How effective are they?
• How are pictures used?
• What colors are in at the moment?
• How are articles formatted (use of sub headings, bold, lists etc)?
• How does the magazine sell itself (looking forward to future issues, subscription pages etc)
• What can you learn from ad placement and design in the magazine?
• What level is this magazine pitched at? (beginners, advanced etc)
• What is the magazine doing well at – what are they not doing well at? How would you improve it?
• What are the limitations of the medium of magazines that you don’t have with a blog and how could you sell your blog on these things?

As you read through the magazine also make note of story ideas, design techniques, headline structures and other techniques that you might want to try on your blog.

I’m not saying you should copy everything you see happening in the magazine – but rather that you use it as an opportunity to learn and think about your own blog. Some of what you see will naturally lend itself to your blog – other things will not.

The value of this is in stepping away from your own blog for a little while and getting some fresh ideas and perspectives.

I’m keen to hear how you go with this exercise – feel free to share your experiences of it in comments below.

One more Tip

If you choose a magazine on a similar topic to your blog – it can sometimes be worth keeping an eye out for opportunities to directly improve your blog from it. One method I’ve mentioned above is finding guest bloggers for your blog – the other is:

Pitching yourself as a contributor to the magazine – I’ve done this a number of times with mixed success – but if the magazine strongly relates to your blog – why not contact the editor to suggest that you do something together? For example you might offer to write an article or even a regular column. I’ve seen a number of bloggers do this with some success. Alternatively you might want to pitch yourself or your blog as a potential subject for an interview or article in their magazine.

Enjoy this exercise? – this is just one of thirty one exercises in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog project. Sign up for it here today.

Discuss this article in our Forum here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Use a Magazine to Improve Your Blog [Day 24: 31DBBB]

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If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare today (and want to hear a couple of Aussies talking blogging) check out this quick podcast of an interview that I did this week with Clayton Bjelan on the morning show local Melbourne radio station – Light FM.

In it I talk a little about my story of going Pro and give a few quick tips on building a successful blog.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Quick Podcast Interview on Blogging

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Today’s task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge is another writing oriented one – it’s to write a post that contains some kind of a ‘Call to Action’.

While this type of post might not be one that you’ll use all of the time it is a handy style of post to have in your tool belt of blogging techniques as in the life of most blogs there are times that you want your readers to go beyond just ‘reading’ and to take some kind of action.

The types of actions this might include could be many and include:

• Implementing something that you’ve written about
• Subscribing to your RSS feed or an email newsletter
• Buying an Affiliate Product
• Writing a Comment
• Voting in a Poll
• Making a Donation to a Charity
• Voting for you on a social bookmarking site
• Buying a product that you’ve developed
• Visiting another site
• Hiring you for some service that you offer
• To read something else you’ve written on your blog
• Visiting your business site

The list could go on… and on….

Some of the ‘actions’ that you’ll want to call people to do are things that will benefit your blog and others are things that are just about applying the types of things you’re writing about (and of course some will benefit both you and your reader).

The ‘Problem’ of Passive Readers

While the above list might seem like a list of fairly simple things to get readers to do the reality is that most blog readers are fairly passive. Looking at my own blogs I’d estimate that less than 1% actually make comments and that the vast majority of those who come to my blogs leave without ‘doing’ anything.

Talking to other bloggers I get the feeling that I’m not the only one with passive readers. How about you… would you like to have a more active and interactive readership?

How do we snap readers out of passivity?

Learning how to call your readers to ‘action’ is not something that happens over night. There are some techniques that I can point you to that will help – but the best way to learn how to do it is to practice your calls to action and see what works best for you.

Hence… today’s task – to write a ‘Call to Action’ post.

Before you attempt today’s task I would highly recommend that you read my recent post – 12 Tips to SNAP Readers out of Passivity.

It contains some useful tips and techniques that will help you in today’s task. Once you’ve read it all you need to do before writing your post is to choose the action that you want your readers to take.

If you’ve not done this type of thing before choose something simple and achievable (eg. getting readers to comment or subscribing to your feed). Another option might be to write about a book that you’ve read and recommend and call people to action to buy it at Amazon with an affiliate link.

Really the action that you’ll want to call people to will depend upon the goals of your blog.

Once you’ve written your post I’d love to hear how you go with it.

• Do you have passive readers?
• What techniques did you use to call people to action?
• Did it work?
• How would you do it differently next time?
• What have you done previously that has got your readers ‘doing’ something?

Update: You can share the above at the forum post for this task: Call Your Readers to ACTION (Day 23)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Call Your Readers to ACTION [Day 23: 31DBBB]

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Posted by Lucy Langdon

I was recently working on a social media strategy for a popular city newspaper and it got me thinking about the benefits a business can get from a well-thought out crossover between its offline and online presence. I’ve tried to write this post so that it’s useful for any sized business that has some kind of offline presence, from a shop, through a publication to any kind of offline advertising or PR. If you’re spending money offline, you should consider how that investment can be taken advantage of online.

When I say ‘make the most of your offline presence’, I’m talking about a wide range of potential online benefits: increasing traffic, improving your link profile and/or increasing conversion rates. Optimising this crossover proves the old adage, ‘the sum of the parts is greater than the whole’ (oh, that old adage).

First off, let’s talk about why it’s a good idea to make the most of this crossover.

• If someone likes your brand offline, they’re probably going to like it online. Make sure your website is a pleasant user experience and has lots of opportunities for your customers to tell their friends about you.
• Unless you live just down the road from all your customers, it’s easier to communicate online that it is offline. It’s also often a lot more time-efficient.
• An online customer is much more likely to give valuable feedback on your brand than an offline one, particularly if you make it easy for them. This kind of interaction can take any number of guises: a form to fill in, commenting, voting, linking.
• Converting offline customers to online customers can, depending on your business, significantly lower the overhead on any conversions you make.
• At the risk of sounding obviously biased, online is where it’s at. These days, customers almost expect a comprehensive web presence from whoever they spend money with. Don’t fluff it up.

How to send people to your site

I remember the first time a friend of mine put his website on his business card. It was pretty exciting. These days, you’d attract more attention not having a readily-available web address for your company. You have to do something more engaging, more… (you guessed it), 2.0. So here are three tips on how to direct customers, potential or otherwise, to your site: 

1. Incentivise. Give your offline customers a proper good reason to visit your site. A competition for ‘best feedback’ is a good idea. Or, for some great buzz, organise a giveaway at a certain time on a certain day (but make sure your site lives up to expectations under the sudden influx of open-minded visitors or they might not be so open-minded next time).
2. Be provocative. If you’ve got the space in which you can be provocative, then ask a question that demands an answer from your user. This has to be done carefully; you don’t want to be the target of any passionate arguments, but it would be perfect if you could provide the space in which that argument took place.
3. Offer exclusivity. The oldest trick in the book: ‘Visit our website for a special, one time only, exclusive deal!’. You don’t have to be that blatant, but spreading the word that you might get a better deal or service if you come via the web will convert well. Again, a little tricky to implement: you don’t want to ostracise any customers you do have that don’t like or use the Internet much.
4. Community. If your customers like buying cars, they probably like talking about them. Building online communities is a whole other ball game, but there’s lot of merit in driving genuine, interesting customers to your website.

Offline Advertising

Google Call to Action
There have been a few companies that have used Google call-to-actions in their advertising campaigns. Here’s a successful example from way back in 2006. As Paul Mead writes, a Google campaign is “better in terms of recall and it fits in with the way we react to advertising these days.” The danger of course is that your campaign can be hijacked spectacularly.

Or, like with this Samsung ad in the Metro today, you can just fail. If you’re going to get customers to search for you, at least have something they can find! (Sorry the quality’s not that great- if you can’t read it, the Samsung ad tells me to ‘Search on Google for LED’).

Brand
If you’re starting a new business or thinking about changing the name of your existing one, it’s really worth thinking about what people will be googling when they want to find you. Either a memorable and unique brand name or, depending on your online clout, a keyphrase-laden name are much better than, for example, ‘Trixy’s MEGA Supersaver Store’; who’s going to remember that?

How to boost your online efforts offline.
Say you’re doing some linkbait or have just launched a new feature on your site- why not promote it offline as well? If you can get a TV, radio or print mention, you could drive a whole load of unique traffic to your site. Just be careful of making a social media fluff, like Radio 4 did recently with their self-proclaimed ‘viral video‘. The content was great, but there was some dispute over whether you can call a video viral while giving it a boost on the show.

When The Hoards Start Arriving
Golden Rule: make sure you’re ready for them. Nothing is going to put a customer off a brand more quickly than being urged to visit a site only to find it’s not up to scratch.

If you’ve been smart and used a custom URL shortener like Tom suggested last week, then you can track your customer and drive them to exactly the right page. If you haven’t got around to that yet, think about how you’ll get the right message to the right customers when they arrive at your site.

One tip is to make sure your offline prompt aligns with the online equivalent. You could use the same language or the same imagery- anything that will reassure the user that they’re in the right place. Stick a big call-to-action in there and you’re away.

You want your customers to arrive at the page you’re directing them to and feel like they’ve turned up half way through a whoop-ass party. If possible, make sure there’s already some buzzing comments and interaction going on. If you’re a well known name, consider making a regular appearance in the comments. The personal touch is another nice way to overlap your offline and online efforts; create an avatar that people will recognise and want to connect with.

How else do you use your offline presence to benefit your online presence?

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Posted by jennita

Last week, Google started showing Google profiles at the bottom of U.S. search results. This caused quite a stir among the search marketing industry and a flurry of blog posts have been written about it. As with any topic there are varying opinions on the profiles. Some feel that it is a great way to brand yourself, while others feel that Google is a bully trying to force us to hand over our personal information.

See the image below for an example of how the Google profile results displays Rand’s information:

Either way, I was completely unphased at first. I read a short article about it, thought "huh… interesting," but quickly went back to work (heck, it was my second week on the job!!). Not long after, I started noticing my Twitter stream was discussing the profiles more and more. Still, I hadn’t even thought about creating a profile yet, why bother right?

That’s when it hit me… DUH! My name is Jennifer Lopez, and nowhere, nohow was I ever going to find myself in any SERPs for any search related to Jennifer (even Jen or Jenny) Lopez. Until now! Right?! Maybe? As soon as I realized the possible potential of my profile, I stopped what I was doing and created mine. Although I didn’t fill out every little detail, I did add quite a bit of information. My focus was to make sure my name was set to Jennifer Lopez, and to list all the other names I’ve gone by in the past in the "other names" section.

About 20 minutes after I created my Google profile, I finally started showing up at the bottom of Google search results for the terms "Jen Lopez" and "Jenny Lopez." Wow… there I was! The first of MANY poor Jen (Jenny, Jennifer) Lopez’ of the world finally getting their Google debuts! [One annoying "feature" is that the profiles don't show up in the results for famous names: Jennifer Lopez, Mike (or Michael) Myers, Michael Bolton, John Stewart. I've submitted a question to Google about this, in addition to asking @googleprofiles (a valid Google twitter account) via Twitter.]

Check out the results for a search on "Jen Lopez" below:

The profile results not only show you a brief intro about the top four, it also has links to view the full result set for your query. With links to searches on MySpace (huh? who still uses MySpace?), Facebook, Classmates (again, huh?) and LinkedIn. Think of the possibilities…!

Long ago I had decided that I had to brand myself as "Jennifer Sable Lopez" for the very reason mentioned above. As of two weeks ago, I more or less dominated the SERPs for any combination of Jennifer, Jenny, Jen + Sable + Lopez. "Sable" was the key factor though. Without it, I was nowhere to be seen. Although I still don’t rank for "Jennifer Lopez," I’m quite excited that someone can now search for me sans "Sable" and find my information.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning the fact that Google is pretty much forcing us to create/update our profiles in order to show up correctly in the profile section. However, before you completely throw out the idea of creating your profile, think about the positive possibilities and the doors that this may open. Think about the other people out there with YOUR same name, who never show up in the SERPs because you completely dominate it for your name. Think of the JLo’s of the world, and the possibility that we’ll finally be found in a search!

Profile Components

If you haven’t created your profile yet, I suggest getting on the ball! The first step is to simply search for "me" in Google and the first result will take you to the first step in setting up your profile. I won’t go into full detail; Danny Sullivan wrote a great tutorial on how to set up your Google profile.

You can add quite a bit of information, here’s a quick list of items you can fill out:

• First and Last Name
• Nickname
• Other Names
• Location Information
• Work Information
• Education Information
• Short Bio
• Links
• Profile URL
• Photo
• Contact Information

One of the great things about the profile is that you can make it as complete as you’d like, or only enter the most basic information. The only information you must enter in order to show up in the SERPs is your first name and last name. It’s really up to you how detailed you want to be.

Verify Your Name

I really wanted to call out this portion because it took me quite a bit of digging before I figured out where/how to verify my name. This is one of the first things I did after setting up my profile. I have no idea if it will help with my rankings or not, but I wanted to have any kind of edge that I could get. Verifying your name is simple once you find where to do it! The only way to do this right now is through your Knol account. If you already have an account, you may already be ahead of the game, if not setting one up is quick and easy to do. Follow the steps below to get your name verified.

1. Sign in/sign up to Knol
2. Go to "My Profile" at the top of the page (Note: if you have never created a Knol before, you’ll need to click "add a Knol" – but don’t actually need to create one – in order to see the "My Profile" link) [edited to add this!]
3. Select "Edit My Preferences" next to your image (under your name)
4. Select "Name Verification"
5. From here you can select one of two ways to verify your name – either by phone or credit card. I chose to verify via phone… I’d much rather have Google call me, than know my credit card number!
6. Once you select "Verify name by phone," you’re asked to fill out your name, phone number and address. Then select "Verfiy name by phone" again.
7. Finally, you get a page that displays the information you just entered, plus a verification code. As soon as you receive the call (which was within seconds) they will ask you to enter the verification code.
8. Follow the directions from the phone call and voila! You’re verified.
   

Details, Details

I’m sure people have tons of questions regarding the new profiles, so below I’ve listed a few details that I’ve found out from my initial research. These were questions I had and found the answers to.

• Currently, this is for U.S. search results only.
• Links from the profiles do not  pass link juice simply because they’re from a Google domain. Matt Cutts responded to this question posed by Danny Sullivan.
  
• If you already use Gmail, it automatically uses your Gmail name as the profile URL (which is mildly annoying). However if you don’t have a Gmail account, apparently you have the ability to create your own URL (as long as it doesn’t already exist).

Conclusion

In general, I’m a bit annoyed that I "have" to fill out my information in order to rank, but at the same time I think this is a great tool to help get the information YOU want to show up in the results. I’d love to hear your profile stories, what you love or hate about it. Do you have any additional information to add?

By the way this is my first post for SEOmoz, I’d love to hear your feedback in general. I look forward to writing more in the future!

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Today your task in the 31 Days to Build a Better blog is to Make a Reader Famous.

The Task – Choose one (or more than one) of your current readers and do something out of the blue that acknowledges them, shows them that you see them as valuable and highlights them to your other readers.

Why This is Important

While many blog tips going around focus upon techniques to help make bloggers and their blogs more famous and well known one of the paradoxical keys to blogging success is that many bloggers who build great blogs actually go out of their way to make their readers more famous and well known.

When you create space on your blog to highlight readers in some way the impact can be quite profound (particularly when you do it regularly). Two groups of people tend to be impacted:

1. Those you make famous benefit - the first and most obvious people to benefit from your efforts are those who you highlight. Having someone go out of their way to talk about you on their blog certainly makes an impression on them. It gives them a feeling of being valuable, gives a sense of belonging to and participation in the blog and can help them to achieve their own goals if you send other readers to learn more about them on their own site/blog etc.

2. Other Readers are Impacted – one of the lessons I learned early in blogging is that when you publicly value one reader others often feel valued also. It shows you have an interest in and that you value all of your readers even when you just highlight a few.

How to Make Readers Famous

There are many ways to highlight your readers on your blog. Let me share a few that I’ve done over the years.

• Promote a comment to a Post - sometimes readers make insightful and wise observations and tips in the comments of your blog. While they will be read by a handful of people in the comment thread – why not pull it out and use it as the basis for one of your post – highlighting the wisdom in it and the person who made the comment.
• Write a Post about their Blog – visit the blogs of those leaving comments on your blog and pick one that you resonate with to post about. Write an ‘unpaid review’ of the blog – highlighting the best posts and what you like about it.
• Send Your Readers to Comment on Someone Else’s Blog – write a post that links to someone else’s great blog post and instead of asking your readers what they think about it on your own blog ask them to head over and comment on it on the other person’s blog. Shutting down the comments in your own post and saying that you’ve left a comment on their blog already can help make this more effective.
• Give Readers an Opportunity to Promote Themselves – run a project or write a post that gives readers an opportunity to promote themselves in some way. For example – one of the things I’ve done on DPS is give readers a chance to show off their photography. One time I did this was asking them ‘do you have a photoblog?‘ where I asked readers to share a link to their photoblog. Hundreds of readers left links to their blogs and many emailed me later to thank me for sending them traffic (another similar example was when i asked readers to share their best ever shot).
• Reader of the Week – I’ve seen a few blogs do this over the years – they simply choose one reader each week to highlight in a post.
• Projects/Memes/Competitions – long term readers of ProBlogger will be familiar with the ‘group writing projects’ that I run here every 6 months or so where I invite readers to all write posts on their blogs and then share the link with each other. These projects always generate a lot of traffic to other blogs. Similarly you can run competitions, Blog Carnivals, memes etc which give readers an opportunity to highlight their own online presence/blog/twitter account etc. (another example of this is my social media love-in that I ran last year inviting readers to tell us what social media accounts they had). Hundreds of people participated and those that did got a lot of followers on twitter and new contacts on other networks.
• Run a Reader Poll and Highlight Answers in a followup post – have a post one weekend where you pose a question to your readers. Then in the week that follows do a followup post where you add some of your own thoughts on the question and pull out some of the best comments left by readers. Alternatively you could survey your twitter followers on a topic relevant to your blog and then highlight their responses as a blog post.
• Invite Guest Posts – often ‘guest posting’ is talked about solely as a way to get free content for your blog. While this is nice – one of the things I love about it most is that it puts the microphone in the hand of someone else and lets someone who would normally be constrained by the comments section have a little more power and influence on the direction of your community for a moment in time. This can have a real impact upon the person doing the post – but also upon your readership as they see someone like themselves featured on your blog.

Don’t Have Readers to Make Famous?

Of course this exercise is easier for blogs that have been around for a while and that have developed a readership – those just starting out will find it tougher (there is only so many times you can make your mother, wife or best friend famous on your blog without looking a little desperate).

If you’re a new blogger or don’t have readers leaving comments yet to help you know who they are – try making another blogger famous today by writing a post that links up to them and highlights them to your readers.

Make Someone Famous

The blogosphere was built on principles of promoting others, conversation, celebrating diversity, open source knowledge etc. One of the things that first attracted me to blogging was the way that bloggers celebrated their readers and other bloggers – today attempt to recapture some of that ethos by making others famous today on your blog.

Share How You Do it

In the spirit of this post – I invite you to share how you make your readers famous in comments below. Share a link to the place you’re doing it so we can learn from you! Also stop by the forums thread for today to share your progress.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Pay Special Attention to a Reader [Day 22: 31DBBB]

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On Friday I posted about that a great free 72 page report by Yaro Starack called Membership Site Masterplan was about to be released.

Yaro’s just old me that it’s now available for you to download.

The report contains some great information on how Yaro uses membership sites to build significant community sites and a six figure income. If you’ve ever considered a membership site as a way to make money online I’d recommend you get the report for a look.

While Yaro will follow this report up with a paid membership site for further teaching (he’s previous ones have been excellent) the report itself contains good information whether you go further in the process or not – Yaro’s approach has always been to create valuable resources and this one is no exception.

Signup to download Yaro’s report here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Membership Site Masterplan Report is now Ready for Download

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Let me be a little presumptuous and blunt - not every post in the archives of your blog is up to scratch.

I know this because the statement is true of my own blogs.

No matter how hard we work on our blogging there are always things in the posts that we’ve previously written that can be improved upon. There are also posts in most of our archives that have simply under performed for some reason or another.

Today your task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge is to update an older post on your blog.

This is a little different to our previous task to update a key page/post on your blog (day 14) because in that task we were looking at important pages to your blog. In this one we’re looking for posts that you’ve written that for one reason or another are not up to scratch.

This might be because:

• you rushed the initial writing of the post and was poorly written
• your post lacked depth in some way
• that the information is now dated
• that you’ve changed your opinion on what you wrote
• a key element in the post (like the title, formatting or opening lines) was poorly done
• you were wrong with your post and it contains factual errors
• because you know more now about the topic than you did when you first wrote it

Whatever the reason – today your task is to update at least one older post.

The update might be anything from a couple of tweaks through to a complete overhaul.

If the update is significant write a new post on your blog linking back to the old one to let readers know that it’s updated. You might also want to think about promoting it on Twitter, to other key bloggers in your niche etc.

7 Ways to Update a Post and Give it New Life

Below are 7 ways that you can update a post. These come from a series I wrote a few months back on ‘crafting blog posts‘ and while it is written from the perspective of crafting a new post I think that most of it can easily be applied to updating old posts too.

1. Crafting Your Post Title – if there’s one element that lets down posts more than others it is the post title. A title can mean the difference between a post being read or not. I’ve reworked the titles on a few old posts and seen them have new leashes of life simply because the title changed.

2. Opening Lines - your post title’s goal is to get people to read your opening line – but if you don’t have a great opening line people won’t read any further.

3. Call to Action – what do you want people to do when they’ve finished reading your post? In many cases bloggers simply let posts end in a whimper without giving readers a call to do anything. Posts that call to action give readers a ‘next step’.

4. Add Depth – many blog posts that I read would be made much more successful if the blogger just had spent a few extra minutes giving examples, adding an illustration, suggesting further reading, sharing an opinion etc. This post gives 13 ways to add depth to a post.

5. Quality Control – many posts (my own included) could be improved with a little extra proof reading. Also pay attention to links that may have become dead or facts that you present that are dated or inaccurate for current readers.

6. Polishing Posts – how your post looks has a massive impact upon how they are treated by readers. A great looking post can mean the difference between a post being read and going viral and a post that sits unnoticed in your archives.

7. Conversation – for many bloggers once a post is published it goes off the radar for the blogger despite readers interacting with it and commenting upon it for days, weeks, months and even years after.

Further Reading

Updating Old Posts On Your Blog – an exploration of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ to update old posts. This explores the question of when to update an old post and when to write a new post that updates an older one.

Check out the discussion on this topic here in our forum.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Breathe Life Into an Old Post [Day 21 - 31DBBB]

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