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Posted by Danny Dover
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Today we’re talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them
unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural
links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites –
it doesn’t matter what you’re selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example — you’ve got a big
problem in that people just don’t want to naturally link to those pages.
The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to
change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the
same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product,
your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think
this can be a big, big positive.So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example.
Here’s Acme Store. They’ve got the standard manufacturer’s picture that
the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing
data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly.
Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the
description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add
to Cart" button.You haven’t added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I
don’t know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not
exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see
that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it
uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price.
But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web
is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I
have some vested interest. The search engines don’t like to count those
kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight
from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to
every other ecommerce provider.Let’s take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here
I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I’m going to
walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much
more exciting, and they’re not that much additional effort. Right? To some
degree, but that’s what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page,
everyone would be doing it and you couldn’t have the competitive advantage.Here I’ve got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I’ve sort
of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there.
But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they
essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are
searching for it, you probably don’t want to change up the title
dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might
consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure,
maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at
what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and
add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don’t have to do this. I could
just keep the standard title if that’s what it takes, and I can add
uniqueness in other places.Let’s start with the images. If you just take the one image that the
manufacturer suggests, you’re really losing out. A great example of this
story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They
make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single
angle. They’ve got the shoe. They’ve got the side of the shoe. They’ve
got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom.
They’ve done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The
great part about this isn’t just that these images are now yours and yours
alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say,
"Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do
use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page.
You’ve got tons of opportunity.I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and
different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people
the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger
version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images.
Sometimes you’ll see websites where you click a different one of these and
the URL changes. You don’t want that unless it’s in a hashtag, because it
will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at
companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A
unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well.
It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so
compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people,
who weren’t interested in the products at all and probably never bought
something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and
read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that
were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different
products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got
a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we’re
aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If
this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who
are passionate about it, you’re going to get such better content there.Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit
with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the
popularity in a specific category. I think that’s a good one. It lets
people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write
books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on
Amazon, they can see how well they’re performing in the category. Other
people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about
this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You
could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do
people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they
buy them at the end of summer? I don’t know. Let’s see. Those sales
trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this
and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they
also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product.
Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data
points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your
customer database, that are anonymous. It won’t be sharing privacy issues,
but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link
to it and make this page more unique and valuable.Number five, I love the comparisons. If you’ve ever been to a site like
CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell
phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against
each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn’t
have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are
a real unique value proposition, because now you’re not just the source for
where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can
do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are
also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they’ll
buy from you.Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be
done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You
can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There
can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don’t Like." The
comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out
like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or
not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What’s your
experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or
five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you
have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we’re an
office supply store. Let’ see if we can get everyone to rate the usability
of this, whether it’s travel worthy versus whether it’s rugged and durable
versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different
aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites
from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don’t know. We’ll see how
long it takes to develop. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this edition of
Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.
Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com
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!
| | Posted by jennita
Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.
Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.
1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?
At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.
How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they’re on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.
But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn’t only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.
This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let’s see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.
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Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn’t send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.
These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!
2. Don’t forget about mobile
My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.
Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!
I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools. 
That’s 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.
3. “UGC is content that rocks”
That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.
Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.
In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.
Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!
The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions.
The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!
4. Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people
This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.
For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.
There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.
Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there’s no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let’s motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.
Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we’re currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?
5. Public Relations, the other PR
Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!
She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you’ve optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:
- Use a social media newsroom like PRESSfeed
- Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
- Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
- Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
- Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
- Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
- Look at LinkedIn and Facebook
Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn’t spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the… what?!
One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I’m stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.
This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?
Final Takeaways and Actions
- Don’t forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
- What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can’t?
- UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
- Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
- Public Relations is social now, so get on it.
This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.
Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we’re completely sold out!
Posted by Danny Dover
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.
Video Transcription
Hi, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO.
Today, I’m going to try to tackle answering the hard SEO questions. I
don’t have them all on this list, so feel free to ask me other ones below
in the comments. These are the ones that I came up with, so I’m going to
try my best to answer these for you.Number one. I get this one a lot and it’s kind of awkward. Why don’t you
rank number one for SEO? Right? If I’m in SEO and I’m trying to sell my
services to somebody, why do I not rank number one for the service that I
claim to do? This one is kind of awkward, actually. Right? I probably
should rank number one for one. Awkward turtle, if you’ve ever seen this.
It’s awkward. Okay. The reason, and we’ve talked about this internally at
SEOmoz, the reason we think we don’t rank number one for it is that the
name SEOmoz is being combined when searching to see it, as opposed to Aaron
Wall’s website, SEO Book, has two words that search engines know about, SEO
and book. So he gets credit for both of those every time he gets a link
saying SEO Book, right? Whereas with SEOmoz, we only get credit for the
word SEOmoz.There’s some other things that go into this as well. QDF algorithm. QDF
is query deserves freshness algorithm, which means new information we’ll
sometimes write at the top. We see this with some smaller companies.
There’s a lot of geolocation stuff that goes on. We’ll rank better in the
United States than we do in the UK, things like that. Frankly, what it
comes down to is that we do not have the best website optimized for just
the term SEO. We’re trying to rank for other things. SEO tools, we’re
trying to rank for learning SEO, that kind of thing. My way to answer this
to potential clients and other people is just be completely honest with
them. Like, "Yeah, we put a lot of thought in this and smart question.
Here’s the reason that we think it was." It was just the stuff that I
covered.Number two. How can you do SEO if you don’t actually work for a search
engine? This one is similar to the one above. I do not work for Google.
I do not work for Bing. I have never read any of the code that they’ve
written to do their search engine algorithms. But I have put a lot of
thought, and more importantly, and actually the only important part is that
I have practiced this a lot. I have created a lot of websites, and I’ve
changed variables on them to figure out what helps rank better. I’ve also
relied on people who are much smarter than myself, so other SEOs in the
industry. I have kept abreast of the news. So there’s Search Engine Land,
for example. There’s lots of news things where they talk to people who do
work at Google and Bing and get their information about what they’re trying
to spread. I also learn from conferences, and I learn from other people
who are successful at SEO and are willing to share their tactics or their
strategies with me. In those ways, I have been able to learn SEO even
though I don’t work at the search engines.Number three. Is Company XYZ a Google killer? This comes up, I’d say,
once every other month. So is it Wolfram Alpha or is it Bing or is it
Facebook? Are any of these companies Google killers? The answer I usually
give is, "I don’t know, but probably not." Google’s extremely good at what
it does, being a search engine. Right? The thing that I think eventually
will kill Google will be something that looks absolutely nothing like
Google at all. It’ll be a completely different way of searching the
Internet or maybe searching something else. Right? Maybe more like Star
Trek or Star Wars, where you just talk into thin air and then an answer
comes to you on some beautiful girl on a screen that came out of nothing.
I’m hoping for that to happen soon actually. But what will kill Google? I
don’t know, but I bet it will not look like anything we’ve seen today, my
best guess.Facebook does have an edge being able to make search results that are very,
very customized to your friends. If I’m looking for what’s the best TV,
I’m going to care about what Best Buy has to say, which is how Google
currently works, right, with these leaders in the industry. But I also
care about what my friends think. Maybe a better example is clothes,
right? What is the best shirt for me to buy? Target might be able to tell
me something or Abercrombie & Fitch or somebody else, but what I really
probably care about is the other people in my social network, what they
think. Facebook has an example there, but we’ll see if they’re a Google
killer. My guess is probably not.Number four. This one’s tough. Why don’t I just buy links? A lot of
times it’s a lot easier and, quite frankly, buying links in some cases does
work. But when you’re doing that, you’re betting against the very, very
small people at the search engines who are working on algorithms to detect
paid links. So while it can work in some cases, my advice is not to do it
just because it is not a good long-term strategy. I’d much rather use that
same money and buy content or pay writers or pay people who are likely be
able to create links for themselves. This, I just feel, is a much better
long-term strategy. This is what we usually recommend at SEOmoz is not to
buy links but instead put it into other strategies that will work better
long term.Number five. Danny, will you marry me? No. But if you have a hotter
sister, let me know.Number six. How do I increase my PageRank? This one I usually break into
two areas. First, I break down PageRank. The PageRank that we normally
see in PageRank toolbar, I just don’t think it’s very helpful at all. The
exception to that is if it’s zero. If it’s zero, it means you have a
penalty or you haven’t been crawled yet. In both those cases, you need to
figure out what’s going on. (Edit: I left out the cases that the page really doesn’t have enough links to round up to PR 1 or that the page PR hasn’t been updated to reflect new links) The other part is how do I increase my
PageRank? If the person asking this question is just really relying on the
fact that PageRank is still important, the way to do it is to get more
links. If they’re going to ask a silly question, it’s okay to give them a
silly answer. The way to increase PageRank, even though in my opinion it’s
not important, is to gain more links.That’s all the time I got here. I appreciate all of you paying attention.
I will talk to you next week. Thank you very much. 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!
10-Minute Missing Page Audit
08/18/10
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.
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.
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.)
Video Transcription
Hello, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I do SEO here at SEOmoz. Today
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!
Each week I see multiple products launched targeting bloggers wanting to improve their blogs. I’ve tested many of them in my time and the reality is that most don’t deliver what they promise and I don’t promote them. However from time to time – some hit the mark and present unique and helpful information that delivers real value.
This week there were two of these such products that hit the market. Both are quite different in their focus but both are from experts in their field and will help bloggers improve two important aspects of their blogs:
1. Jon Morrow’s Apprentice Program for Guest Bloggers
Jon is someone who has built a career for himself as a copywriter and blogger using Guest Posting. He’s been a guest poster here on ProBlogger numerous times and is a regular on blogs such as CopyBlogger.
Over the last week or so he’s release a series of great videos (here and here are two) on the topic of guest blogging and this week launched a comprehensive program that literally guarantees to get you a guest post on a high profile blog (if you don’t you’ll get your money back).
Jon’s course is a mix of video, private forum, Q&A calls and one on one interaction with Jon.
Guest blogging is a technique many bloggers have used to launch their blogs to great things and Jon’s the perfect person to talk you through how to do it. Sign up Today Here.
2. Gideon Shalwick’s Rapid Video Blogging
Gideon Shalwick has also taken his blogging to the next level by being prolific at one aspect of online discipline – VIDEO. He too has released a series of great videos this week that talk you through different aspects of using video to make money online (check them out here, here and here – they are free and whether you buy the course or not offer great insights) and today launched a great product – Rapid Video Blogging.
Gideon’s course is massive and comprehensive. It includes 125 instructional videos and transcripts/audio version as well as a heap of great tools and resources including videos with great video bloggers, live interactive sessions for Q&A.
Video is an incredibly dynamic medium and mastering it is something many bloggers need to learn – check out Rapid Video Blogging for more information on just how to do that.
Which one is for You?
Both of these resources come from experts in their fields and will present different value to different bloggers. Neither are super cheap entry level products (you’re getting a heap of content with both) and so you’ll want to consider your needs carefully and view some of the free videos that the guys have produced – but if you’ve been thinking about how to take your blogging up a notch lately and want to make an investment into your learning – do give them both consideration.
They both do come with money back satisfaction guarantees and both Jon and Gideon are people I trust to honour that promise.
I’m looking forward to hearing how you enjoy these courses and seeing how they help you improve your blogs.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
2 Products Worth Considering to Improve Your Blog Today
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.
Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
Build YourBrand.com
Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc…) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com
Build an Alternative Brand Site
After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.
Create Social Media Profiles
This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc…) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.
Do Interviews/News
Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.
Do PPC
This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der…) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.
Update: You can see 4 more excellent suggestions from seo-himanshu in the comments below.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less rude)
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!
Posted by caseyhen
Earlier this year, jtkaczuk wrote a YOUmoz post about “Using Twitter as a Sitemap”. After reading it I began to think about the power of Twitter and if using Twitter more can help indexation. Many Twitter users will tweet about new post or products on their account hoping to draw attention and links from their followers. What if this process can also help with getting more pages indexed and indexed faster? I was surprised with the results of this quick little experiment that I threw together in a few months.
Experiment Setup
- Twitter Links Only – 48 hours with no internal links and 1 tweet only from the orginal account
- Site Architecture Links Only – No tweets about product or post, only internal links and sitemaps generated
- Both Twitter & Site Architecture Links – Both tweets, internal links, and sitemaps to post or product
Experiment Warning
Experiment Data Summary
- Twitter Only Launch
- GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 78 seconds of the first tweet.
- Tweets with more than 3 RTs were indexed 325% faster, along with 125% more of its products and post indexed than tweets with no RTs.
- Average indexation of the post or product was different depending on number of RTs
- 3 or more RTs had an average indexation time of 8 hours, with 86% indexed.
- 1 or no RTs had an average indexation time of 26 hours, with 69% indexed.
- Internal Links Only Launch
- GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 2.5 hours of the first internal link on the site.
- Average indexation of the post or product was 8.5 hours, with 85% indexed.
- Both Internal Links and Twitter Launch
- GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 82 seconds of being launched.
- Average indexation of the post or product was again different depending of the number of RTs the Twitter updated received.
- 3 or more RTs had an average indexation time of 4.25 hours, with 88% indexed.
- 1 or no RTs had an average indexation time of 5 hours, with 79% indexed.
Experiment Raw Data
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Experiment Conclusion
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.
Embed Video:
Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite SEO diagram. You can read more about the SEO Pyramid here.
Step 1: Requirements Gathering
Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.
Step 2: Locating Potential Resources
You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.
Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match
In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company’s written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.
Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track
Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.
Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.
