Posted by randfish

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue – the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).

NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL’s data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.

For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you’re deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I’ve taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:

NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer’s Backlink Analysis

If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It’s also likely that you’ll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don’t have that singular, pinpoint focus.

I wrote another post on a similar topic highlighting how to format titles, meta descriptions and keyword usage on pages that aim for multi-keyword targeting that may also be of help.

Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.

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Posted by RobOusbey

Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics – all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing.

The post includes real screen shots from Google Analytics (click any of them to enlarge) but the sites and data have been anonymized.

Target Your Target Terms

Remember that post about building a page with perfect keyword targeting? SEOmoz wasn’t kidding around.

A website that sells homewares had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains such as

• http://kitchenequipment.sitename.com

or

• http://livingrooms.sitename.com

whilst each sub-category was back on the main subdomain at:

• www.sitename.com/find_product2.asp?url1=living+room&url2=rugs+and+carpets

Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting.

Getting appropriate H1 tags onto each page was a quick job, improving title tag structure took a bit longer, clean & friendly URLs and internal links with appropriate anchor text were also added.

The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms. Can you guess when the changes were made?

Getting sorted in Google Local

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ranking factors for Local Search, dead simple tactics, etc, it’s important to get the basics right. A large chain of restaurants created a ‘bulk upload’ file with the correct data for each one of their locations. After uploading the file, they applied for it to be reviewed and ‘whitelisted’. Local data that’s been uploaded by the business owner and whitelisted is treated as authoritatively as locations that have been manually verified by postcard.

Despite various issues (Google’s best practice guidelines still aren’t quite the best solution in some cases) the traffic generated by visibility in Local Search has been significant and valuable. (The uploads were verified in late November when the traffic begins its steady rise.)

Architecture of Change

A current affairs magazine wanted to get more from their website. Because of falling advertising revenue, the publication was at risk of being closed down. They’d seen some growth from SEO already, but wanted to prove that the website had greater value.

Although the site had a good brand and some great content, it suffered from similar problems to many news-type websites, including badly archived content, duplicate issues and a CMS that hampered keyword targeting or promoting individual articles. Recommendations were made to improve the site’s architecture and migrate to the new structure.

The effect of the changes was immediate growth which took the organic traffic to 257% in three months. A month later, the magazine’s owner explained that the falling revenue from print advertising meant that they couldn’t continue to lose money publishing the mag, and closed it down.

Hook, Line, Sinker

An office cleaning company wanted to improve the profile of their site through SEO. Amongst other tactics, a member of staff spent a day writing a ‘linkbait’ post to publish on their blog. This generated huge amounts of traffic from social media sites (dwarfing their regular daily visitors) and was subsequently linked to from dozens of sites. This post, along with other content published on the site to attract links, helped the site grow in strength and authority, and it now ranks position 3 for ‘office cleaning’ in their country.

Paid In Full

This is SEOmoz, but I’d like to share a graph from a PPC colleague working on a site that sells scooters. They were initially bidding on very broad terms (scooter, scooters, buy a scooter, etc) but the campaign was adjusted to target more long tail terms, including descriptions, specifications, etc.

Over a period of around six weeks, the cost per click was reduced by 30% and the more targeted traffic converted increasingly well – this allowed the site owners to increase their ad budget and generated more sales than their paid search campaign ever had before.

If you’re new to SEOmoz and this post has inspired you to get involved in search marketing for your site, do browse the site for the PRO & free SEO guides and the SEO blog. If you’re a regular, do share any stories you’re particularly proud of in the comments.

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Posted by randfish

This week, despite still being seriously under the weather (see this week’s sad WB Friday), I flew down to SMX West to speak on the Link Building Strategies panel. Although I’d wanted to put more work in and deliver a better presentation, I received some very kind words afterward and requests from folks to share the deck via the blog. Before I embed the actual deck, though, I need to provide some context (as this isn’t a wholly self-explanatory presentation).

Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically. In the deck below, I walk through a number of examples of sites, primarily startups, that have done this. These include:

• Twitter – every user of Twitter has an incentive to link to their profile so more people will follow them. This is also true of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantArt, Etsy & others
• Vimeo – nearly everyone who uses Vimeo appreciates the beautiful aesthetic they’ve created. The embeddable versions of Vimeo videos look and feel more professional and high quality than nearly any other player, hence they get embedded (a lot). This embed action automatically drives links back to the video on Vimeo’s site, Vimeo’s homepage and the user’s profile, all with targeted anchor text.
• Urbanspoon – not only do they give badges to restaurants like Yelp and have started an online reservations system like OpenTable, Urbanspoon also features reviews from bloggers and foodies, who are then incentivized to promote their inclusion on the site.
• Last.fm – the widgets users embed on their site to share their favorite music automatically creates links back to the service.
• SurveyMonkey – a truly viral product (anyone who’s surveyed is automatically exposed to the site), SurveyMonkey is inherently link acquisitive through the product. In order to use the service, you need to link to SurveyMonkey’s site, where your form is hosted.
• Scribd – just look at the embed and the link below; ’nuff said.
• Miibeian.gov.cn – possibly the greatest link building strategy ever devised. The Chinese government requires that all websites in the country link to this site in order to operate legally; not too shabby, eh?

Here’s the deck:

Strategic Link Building

As you can see, I’ve put in a shameless plug for Open Site Explorer at the end. If you haven’t seen the new features launched yesterday, you’re missing out. Tons of the data is completely free, and top pages is just about the easiest way to find traffic and link opportunities ever built (not that I’m biased or anything).

Look forward to your comments about the presentation and the concept of productizing link acquisition into a site.

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Posted by RobOusbey

This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site – they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I’ll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic.

For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Competitors and Benchmarking

There are a couple of different metrics you can use track, which will demonstrate the more direct outputs of your SEO work, and expose your performance amongst competitors.

This chart tracks the Site Authority of the target domain (and some competitors) through time.

To date, trying to chart Linkscape metrics has been a bit misleading: the rapid increase in the reach of Linkscape and modifications of the tool’s algorithms have meant that month-by-month reporting of a site’s Authority wasn’t always a fair comparison. However, Nick tells me that the team are currently putting effort into tackling the challenge of tracking this data. Though you’ll have more confidence in drawing a trend chart such as this one soon, I’d still recommend collecting numbers right now to get a snapshot of where your site is amongst the competition.

Obviously, this assessment of site strength is query independent; differences in site architecture, on-page term targeting and the anchor text of external links will have a significant effect on each site’s performance and number of keywords.

In many ways, the next graph address this. The line for the target site is an ‘average ranking position’ – I’d recommend creating this by taking around twenty non-branded, representative keyphrases (eg: ten which you’re specifically targeting and ten which send a significant amount of traffic) and finding the mean of the site’s ranking for each phrase.

The competitor lines should be calculated by finding the mean ranking position of that site, for each of these keywords where the site ranks in the top 20. (We do this so that the mean isn’t artificially dragged down by keyphrases which the site isn’t trying to compete for, and where it ranks very poorly.)

Even a single month’s data points on these two graphs will provide a snapshot of your site’s position amongst the industry’s other players. Tracking the data each month will demonstrate how your standing has changed, and can directly show the impact of your SEO work – both on-site and off-site.

Industry Assessment

If you have been collecting ranking data in the past, then it can be useful to identify a term for which you’ve had a relatively static ranking over the last year or so. If your traffic from this term has declined over the same period then this provides a useful example of how market behaviour outside of your control is having an effect on the business.

If you don’t have historic ranking data, but suspect that your industry is in decline, you should compare search volume trends to organic traffic sent by some specific terms. In the example below, the site sees a decline in traffic for the single keyphrase ‘football tickets‘ but comparing this to the search volume for the term shows that the site’s performance has actually improved – they are increasing their share of that traffic.

If the industry really is declining and search volumes for all the typically valuable phrases are unlikely to return, then there can be a serious consideration about even continuing to operate in the market. If your core business was VHS rental, consider offering Blu-Ray; if you rank well for house and holiday insurance but are suffering from the decline in these markets then consider adding pet insurance  – a steady / growing market. (Check out this Google Insights data for UK insurance markets.)

Of course, these are extreme examples – and if you’re in these particular industries then you shouldn’t need a blog post to make these suggestions – but they remind us that there are some markets where a time comes to look for business from elsewhere.

Actions

As we did in the graph above, you must begin by looking at the organic traffic trend for keyphrases individually. A lot of information is lost when data is aggregated (such as in total organic traffic.) Go back and look at your highest volume keyphrases from a year or two ago, and compare these to your current highest volume keyphrases, by charting the monthly volume of traffic they sent over that period. It may quickly become clear that whilst your keyword portfolio has been dragged down by some dogs, there are some stars (or problem children) that are contributing a great deal to the overall traffic.

If you last did keyword research 12 or 18 months ago, user behaviour may have changed significantly – even for people looking for exactly the same product. Whilst the metrics mentioned above may bring you to the gloomy conclusion that search volume in your industry is substantially down, it’s possible to overlook the fact that there’s simply been a change in searcher behaviour.

Examples of such changes that have happened in different geographic regions:

• searchers are using more direct queries (‘cinema‘ & ‘film tickets‘ are steady or down, ‘film times‘ is way up)
• searchers are moving from long tail to head terms (‘internet marketing‘ & ‘website promotion‘ are declining but ‘SEO‘ and ‘SEM‘ are up)
• searchers are moving from head to long tail terms (‘currency exchange‘ is down but specific terms such as ‘dollars to pounds‘ are up)

The message here: don’t miss out on opportunities to compete on the emerging keyword groups.

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

1. If your organic traffic is down, either for particular keywords or as a whole, be clear whether this is because your site is under-performing, or because the search volume for a keyword / in an industry is descending.
2. Benchmark yourself against competitors by regularly recording the Authority and/or rankings position for relevant keyphrases of your site and theirs
3. Revisit your keyword research – a year is a long time on the internet, particularly given the current state of flux that so many industries are experiencing.

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Posted by randfish

We all work hard at the SEO process – analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use. To employ, just click and drag the bookmarklet links from this blog post into your sidebar or bookmarks folder and rename to whatever you’d like. I’ve divided the post up into sections so you can quickly grab the items you care about.

SEO Bookmarklets Sections:

• Site Indexation Queries
• Backlink Data Queries
• Specialized Search Queries
• Domain & Traffic Data Queries
• Social Media Data Queries
• How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

 
Just follow the instructions from this highly "meta" image

Site Indexation Queries

• #1 – Google site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - GG Indexed Pages
• #2 – Yahoo! Site Explorer listing of pages on the root domain 
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Indexed Pages
• #3 – Bing site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - Bing Indexed Pages

Backlink Data Queries

• #4 – Open Site Explorer (OSE) list of links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Links to URL
• #5 – OSE list of links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Links to Domain
• #6 – OSE list of linking domains to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Linking Domains to URL
• #7 – OSE linking domains to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Linking Domains to Root
• #8 – OSE anchor text distribution for current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE URL Anchor Text
• #9 – OSE anchor text distribution for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Domain Anchor Text
• #10 – Yahoo! Site Explorer (Y!SE) links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Links to URL
• #11 – Y!SE links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Links to Domain
• #12 – Google Blogsearch links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – GG Bloglinks to URL
• #13 – Bing linkfromdomain for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Bing LinkfromDomain
• #14 – Historical PageRank for current URL
  • Bookmarklet – PR History

 Specialized Search Queries

• #15 – Google: Remove personalization
  • Bookmarklet – GG -Personalized
• #16 - Google: Include duplicate results
  • Bookmarklet – GG +Dups
• #17 – Google: Show results from last 24 hours only
  • Bookmarklet – GG 24 Hours
• #18 – Google: Show results from last 7 days only
  • Bookmarklet – GG 7 Days
• #19 – Google: Show US results (useful when performing queries from overseas)
  • Bookmarklet – GG US SERPs
• #20 – Google "Text-Only" Cache of current URL
  • Bookmarklet – GG Text Cache

Domain & Traffic Data Queries

• #21 – Domaintools lookup on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Domaintoools Lookup
• #22 – Compete.com traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Compete Traffic
• #23 – Quantcast traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Quantcast Traffic
• #24 – Alexa traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Alexa Data
• #25 - Wayback Machine archives for curent URL
  • Bookmarklet – URL Wayback Archive
• #26 - Google Trends for Websites on the current domain 
  • Bookmarklet – GG Trends Data

Social Media Data Queries

• #27 – Backtweets Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet – Backtweets for URL
• #28 – Tweetmeme Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Tweetmeme for Domain
• #29 – PostRank Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - PostRank for Domain
• #30 – StumbleUpon Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet – StumbleUpon URL Data

How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

Here’s a sample code snippet for the bookmarklet above that shows links from OpenSiteExplorer.org:

javascript:location.href='http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/'+location.host+'/a!links'

To reproduce the effect with a bookmarklet that calls data from any site, you’ll need to

1. Find a web-based tool that stores the webpage it’s calling data for in the URL. For example, Google Trends for Websites uses a format like "http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site:seomoz.org"
2. Include the initial piece – javascript:location.href=’ at the start of the bookmarklet link
3. Follow that code snippet with the desired webpage that contains data. For example, if I wanted to get Google Trends for Websites, I’d use http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A – note that for special characters in the URL like the colon : you’ll need to use the hex character codes (a good list is here)
4. Next you’ll need to call the current URL. The most common way to do this is with window.location.href or location.host which pulls the URL string from the address bar.
5. You may need to strip out portions of the URL to get just the sub or root domain. In my example with Google Trends, I’d use document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”) rather than the full URL string from #4 above. This removes the www from a domain name if it exists and extracts only the domain portion instead of the complete URL.
6. To combine the javascript code snippet, you’ll need to use proper syntax – following phrases with +, wrapping in single quotes and ending with a semicolon ;
7. The finished code snippet looks like this -  javascript:location.href=’http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A’+document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”);
8. You can use a wide variety of Javascript commands to build all sorts of bookmarklets, not just those that call URLs or append data. However, you’ll need a more advanced tutorial to show you that process – sorry!

Now you’re ready to start building your own bookmarklets. We’d love to have you share any of your favorites (or any new concoctions) in the comments below. If you’ve got great ones, I’ll even try to add them into the post tomorrow and, naturally, pass on the credit

p.s. One I’d love to see is a bookmarklet that gives a pop-up of the current website’s IP address and, for extra bonus, takes you to a Bing IP: search query to show other sites hosted on that address.

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Posted by RobOusbey

Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

The launch of Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we’ve ever had before.  In that same vein, today we’re announcing our new and improved SEOmoz Free API.

Any registered (it’s free) SEOmoz member can visit our API Portal and get an API key that gives you access to:

• Data for any URL in our index including
  • Domain and Page Authority
  • mozRank
  • total link count
  • external, followed link count
• The first 500 links to any page, sub domain or domain
• Filtering on those links: 301s, Follows, External, etc.
• The first 3 domains linking to any page, sub domain or domain
• The first 3 anchor text terms or phrases in links to any page, sub domain or domain

You’re welcome to use this data for private or publicly-facing purposes. We already have a variety of partners integrating this data including:

• Buzzstream
• Brandwatch
• HubSpot’s Grader Suite
• Quirk’s Search Status toolbar

Check out some sample code and applications on the wiki.

Our idea is that getting this data into the hands of webmasters makes everyone better off: we’re excited about our new authority scores, marketers are thirsty for metrics, and users of all kinds of tools are better off with a deeper look at real data.  The free package will keep you covered up to a million links per month that you’re free to use for any purpose from consulting to building an SEO campaign management suite.

In addition to the free API (which I think is quite powerful already), we’re expanding our paid API offering. The paid API includes everything above, but also includes:

• Additional metrics:
  • number of domains that link to you
  • mozTrust
  • number of links to all pages on your domain
  • and more
• A deeper look at links, way beyond the first 500 (first 100k for each sort per page, domain or sub domain)
• Plenty of sorts on links:
  • domain authority
  • page authority
  • linking root domains
• Way more anchor text terms and phrases (up to 100k per page, domain or sub domain if you’ve got that many)

This is exactly the same API powering Open Site Explorer.  So if you think OSE missed a feature, or should include other data sources, you can build it over again and do an even better job   If you do, drop me a line and I’ll take a look. We’d love to share partner apps on our wiki, Twitter, the blog, and elsewhere.

We don’t even have an attribution requirement. Although, we have a tasty 15% discount if you do cite us as a source

To sign up, just contact us, and we’ll start the process.

EDIT: The paid API is available outside of a PRO membership.  A PRO membership buys the tools, and content, and sweet sweet badge.  The paid API is extra.  Of course, the free API is both free and full of awesome.

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Posted by randfish

For the past 15 months, we’ve been working hard to improve Linkscape, our index of the WWW. Today, we’re releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape’s index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free:

The new tool, Open Site Explorer, makes gathering, sorting and exporting link data easier than ever. It’s built with speed and accessibilty at the forefront and provides a tremendous amount of information about the links to any page or site. Since there’s a lot to cover, let’s dive right into some of the features and functionality.

#1 – Fast Access to Top Level Metrics

At the top of every results page, you’ll find the key metrics we have on your page – the importance/ranking ability of that URL (Page Authority) and root domain (Domain Authority), the number of linking root domains and the total number of links.

#2 – See Up to 10,000 Links Alongside Anchor Text & Key Metrics

You can browse through up to 10,000 links (this is restricted to 1,000 for non-PRO members normally, but will be completely free to everyone for the first 48 hours). We also offer CSV export functionality, but it won’t be available until the weekend (and then, only to PRO members – CSV takes up a LOT of bandwidth for 10K rows ).

#3 – Filtering for the Links You Want to See

As you drill down in the list of links, you can exclude nofollowed links or see only the 301s that point to a page. You also have the ability to sort by the location from which you want to see links – internal vs. external – and links that point to a given page, all pages on a subdomain or an entire root domain.

#4 – Display Root Domains that Contain Links

The second tab in Open Site Explorer (OSE for short) is the linking root domains. We realized that a lot of people want to get a quick glance of the types of sites that are sending links to a given page or domain, and thus created this unique view. In the future (probably a couple months away), you’ll also be able to click an individual domain and see a list of pages from that site that link to the target of your choice.

#5 – Review Anchor Text Term & Phrase Distribution

Anchor text is often the missing link in a "why does that guy rank there?" puzzle. We’re opening up the anchor text distribution so you can learn more about your own sites and pages and those of the competition. You can also sort by both the number of root domains that contain a link with a particular anchor text term (single word) or phrase and the raw number of links containing that anchor text.

#6 – Pie Chart Displays of Link Data 

Many SEOs worry that, particularly on small sites, they may seeing lots of numbers of links, but the sources aren’t ideal. In this view, we try to illustrate through pie charts the percentage of links that come from internal vs. external pages and are followed vs. nofollowed. This view is at the top of the "full metrics" tab.

#7 - Rejoice in Data Junkie Heaven 

Additionally in the "full metrics" tab, you’ll find a list of all the Linkscape data we’ve got including mozRank (an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank), mozTrust (akin to TrustRank) and many more. You can also see the more refined link counts and data for an individual URL, the subdomain it’s on and the hosting root domain.

#8 – Compare Pages/Sites Link Metrics to One Another

A frequently requested feature is the ability to compare one site/page against another. OSE makes this quick and easy with a comparison view drop-down. If you click the "-" symbol again, you can return to the individual report view.

#9 – Graphical Views of Metric Comparisons

In the comparison view, we show nice visual charts that you can embed in a client report or send to your boss to help illustrate just how challenging it might be to take on a particular competitor. For example, you can see above that Fred Wilson has a long way to go to reach Guy Kawasaki’s stats on his blog (granted, Guy’s posts are designed for a much broader audience and he’s been blogging for longer).

#10 – Compare Links Side by Side

At the bottom of this comparative view you’ll see links side-by-side. We noticed a lot of SEOs open two browser windows with lists of links to compare them against one another and thought "why not make that easier?!" With this feature, you can scroll through the links for two pages to get a fast sense for the quality and variety of sources that point to each.

New Metrics – Domain Authority & Page Authority

We’ve got much more information coming soon about these two metrics, but basically, we’re using our ranking models to build predictions about how well an individual page might perform in the search engines (Page Authority) or how well content on a root domain would do (Domain Authority). These aren’t like PageRank or mozRank at all – they’re much broader.

Authority scores take into account all the metrics we have about a page and hundreds of derivatives of those metrics. We’ve put the scores on a classic 0-100 scale that’s logarithmic (so moving from a 50 to a 60 is much harder than moving from a 10 to a 20). Over time, these metrics will change and evolve as we get better and better with our machine learning systems (and as the engines and the web itself changes). Watch for this week’s whiteboard friday with much more detail on this subject. For now Open Site Explorer is the only place to get Domain/Page Authority data, but we’ll be rolling it into the SEOmoz toolbar and other tools over the next few months.

Linkscape’s Index Update

Linkscape itself has also updated – growing to a whopping 65 billion URLs with 45 day minimum freshness. As Nick’s previous post on the Trillion+ URLs Linkscape has seen shows, freshness is one of the most critical metrics for those who care about accurate link data, and we’re working hard to keep our index as up-to-date as possible. Linkscape recrawls every page in the index each month, so no "old data" is stored or served. Our current metrics for this index are:

• Pages: 64,180,990,434 (65 billion)
  • 301s: 293 million
  • 302s: 672 million (Marshall Simmonds calls this "job security")
  • 404s: 360 million (but we do try to exclude known 404s in crawls, so this may be low percentage wise)
• Subdomains: 259,977,972 (260 million)
• Root Domains: 63,264,651 (63 million)
  • .com – 49.4%
  • .net – 6.4%
  • .de – 5.8%
  • .org – 5.2%
  • .ru – 2.5%
  • .cn – 2.5%
• Links: 701,881,850,733 (701 billion)
  • Nofollows: 13 billion (1.85%)
  • Internal Nofollows: 9.06 billion vs. External Nofollows: 4.11 billion
  • Meta Refreshes: 40.9 million
  • Internal Links: 638 billion vs. External Links: 63 billion (people link to their own stuff a lot more than they do to others)
  • Feed Autodiscovery (i.e. RSS/Atom feeds): 2.261 billion
  • Rel=canonical: 100 million
  • Links passed through 301s: 8.61 billion (just over 1% of all links go through a 301)
• mozRank Correlations to Google Toolbar PageRank
  • Individual page mR: 0.42 (avg. error +/- 0.56 from PR)
  • Subdomain mR: 0.45 (avg. error +/- 0.35 from PR)
  • Root domain mR: 0.45 (avg error +/- 0.37 from PR
• File Extensions
  • html: 26.5%
  • php: 21.7%
  • htm: 10.6%
  • asp: 5.7%
  • aspx: 2.9%
  • cgi: 0.89%

API Update

Finally, we’ve also updated the SEOmoz API – you can now get lists of links for any URL for FREE along with tons of other link data and metrics. Sarah & Nick have a blog post coming soon with more, but for now, check out the API page to get a developer key and the API Wiki for more details.

Answers to Common Questions About OSE

What’s the difference between OSE and Linkscape?

Open Site Explorer provides a fast, free, more basic view of link data while Linkscape provides power users the ability to refine by dozens of filters, search within link anchor text, URLs and domains. Linkscape will let you dig into significantly more metrics and details on a per link basis on things like mozRank passed, Domain mozTrust, juice per anchor text, links from particular TLDs, etc.

OSE is substantively faster than Linkscape, and not as metrics heavy. It’s designed to give the "500 foot view" vs. the deep, in-the-weeds look you can get in Linkscape. Certainly feel free to try both and use the one that suits you best.

Why is OSE on a separate domain?

Three big reasons, actually:

1. We’ve haven’t tried the microsite strategy in a long time (since the first launch of the Web 2.0 Awards), and want to test and see lots of SEO and strategic/branding (we’ll have some cool data to report in the next few weeks/months)
2. OSE is built entirely on the SEOmoz API platform – we wanted to show off just how much you can build using that service
3. SEOmoz engineers are very busy working on another exciting launch (scheduled for June) so we wanted to split resources without putting a load on folks focused on our site (PRO members may see some previews of that even earlier)

What will OSE continue to offer for free?

For the first 48 hours, registered members (anyone with a free SEOmoz account) will get the full PRO features (unlimited metrics, up to 10K links per report, full anchor text data, etc). After that, anyone can still get up to 1,000 links per search and a sampling of metrics. You can see a full breakdown in the bottom right-hand corner of the homepage.

Why Call it "Open" Site Explorer?

We’re aiming to give out more link data than anyone else on the web for free. Open Site Explorer not only gives out lots and lots of links (up to 1,000), but also metrics and link numbers for free (permanently). We also provide a free API that lets you use any of the data (including lists of links) in your applications, public or private. Our goal is to be transparent with this data – to show exactly how many pages/domains are in our index, show accuracy with freshness and canonicalize and re-crawl like a search engine. We’re trying to take the web’s link graph and make it as available as possible and use the revenue component of PRO membership to accelerate growth on index freshness, quality and size.

Please Give Us Feedback!

We’d love to hear from you. If you have suggestions, bug reports (this is a first launch, after all) or ideas for future iterations, please leave them in the comments or send them via the Open Site Explorer feedback form. We’re of course very excited for the launch of OSE and would certainly appreciate you sharing and helping us spread it around. The free period ends at 8am Pacific on Friday, January 22nd, but PRO members will continue to be able to access all the features and unlimited reports (and free reports will still provide up to 1,000 links).

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Posted by jennita

We receive many questions every day in our Q & A section. Every question is answered by a different mozzer and is handled personally. Often times we will run across a specific question being asked various times. Although the question is usually never exactly the same, the answer is often fairly similar. One question that has been popping up lately is whether it is really worth it, from an SEO standpoint to participate in Social Media.

The way I usually answer is that although most Social Media and networking sites nofollow their outbound links, they often send relevant traffic to your site. And as junseth mentioned in his YOUmoz post, one nofollowed link could very well gain you several followed links!

A couple of the questions have asked about links from specific sites, so some research was done while answering their questions. From this I found a few sites that I wouldn’t have thought to pass link juice… but low and behold they do! Not only did I find that it’s possible to get a followed link from these sites, but I dug a little deeper to show the actual MozRank passed by the link as well.

Panoramio

First, we had a member ask whether the site Panoramio could be useful for SEO. My husband is a photographer and he actually uses Panoramio on his blog. This is a cool site that let’s you take photos and place them on a Google map and you can see places around the world. There is also a WordPress plugin that allows you to add this feature to your blog. My initial inclination was that no, there wasn’t any specific use for Panoramio other than what I mentioned above… the idea that you could get followed links from other users who like your work. But then I realized that profiles on Panoramio have followed links!

Unfortunately you can’t customize the anchor text, but you do get a nice followed link to your site from a PR 7 and DmR 6.78 site. Woot!

Zillow

The next site was actually found while looking for a good example of using charts and images for link bait while poking around Zillow.com. Again I noticed that there were followed links from the profile pages! This would be a really great link for any business associated with the Real Estate industry in any way.

At first I thought the biggest issue with these links was that the anchor text is predefined to "Website" and "Blog." But then I realized that Zillow also allows you to create your own followed links in the "About" section. Mmmhmmm YES THEY DO! Zillow.com also has a PR 7 and a DmR of 6.96. Although this site may not work for everyone, those who can use it could really benefit!

YouTube

Now, I’ve heard time and time again that sites like YouTube and Facebook don’t pass link juice, but I am here to prove them wrong. This question initially came from a question by a member and it had a number of us digging around YouTube trying to figure out why certain links were followed but others weren’t.

I started to notice that there were two distinct looks to the average YouTube channel (I’m talking about your average user, not the ones PAYING for fancy pages with followed links – that’s not a paid link or anything!). My channel (which admittedly has nothing on it) had a nofollowed link to my personal blog. But a couple of my friend’s sites, had a different look & feel and their links were followed!

My friend suggested that perhaps I should edit the link and see if anything changed. As soon as I logged in and went to edit my profile, I got a popup asking me if I’d like to use the new Beta. Hrmmm sure! And VOILA! As soon as I chose the Beta version, my link was now followed! Here’s an example of a profile passing juice:

I still didn’t really believe it though. So I poked around in the code trying to see if they had the beta versions noindexed or hidden via the robots.txt or something like that. Nope, I couldn’t find anything. From here I started to dig around, I wanted to find a site that had received MozRank to their personal site FROM their YouTube channel. I mean heck, with an overall  PR 9 and DmR 9.06 who wouldn’t want a nice juicy link from YouTube?

Hubba hubba! There it is… passing nice juice! Sure the anchor text isn’t the greatest, but the actual PR on the page is a PR 6. Very nice.

Facebook

Now, you’re wondering how to get a link from Facebook since I mentioned it above. Some of you may have already read about this over at HubSpot but you can create followed links on Facebook pages using HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Check out the Jack & Bobby Facebook page (a show on the WB) as an example.

Before you get too excited I want to make it clear that spamming these sites in any way is a terrible idea. My intention for showing these sites is to prove that if you look hard enough you can make the most out of many sites on the web, these are just 4 examples. The best way to go about building links through these various sites is simple… only make a profile if it makes sense! If having a profile on Zillow or Panoramio doesn’t make sense, don’t do it. If you have a spammy profile, no one will link to you and the page will never get indexed anyway. So please use this information for good… and not evil.

I’m sure there are tons of other sites out there that pass link juice but these four really jumped out at me in the past week. I should also mention that we have worked with Zillow and Facebook in the past but I didn’t find this information through our work with them. All of these sites have excellent domain PageRank and MozRank and are probably sites you didn’t imagine getting nice links from! I’d love to hear other examples (come on now folks… don’t be stingy!) and find out if you have any additional info.

 

Jen: edited to fix incorrect use of "alt text" spelling errors and a missing link!

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Posted by Whitespark

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.

Whitespark is an Edmonton Search Engine Optimization and Web Design Company in Canada

Having recently returned from the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar Series, I wanted to recap a few of the things I learned, and create a list of actionable items that I need to start implementing in my SEO business. I’m writing this for my own reference, but figure that I might as well write it as a YouMoz post as it could be useful for those of you who couldn’t attend. Of course, what I found valuable and actionable may be different from what other attendees found valuable, so if you attended the seminar it would be great if you could share your top take-aways in the comments. The conference was packed with a ton of useful information, and this list focuses on the items that I’m currently excited about.

Take-Away #1 – Ask For A Link In Order Emails (And Other Customer Communications)

Tom Critchlow suggested asking for a link in your order emails. It’s a genius tactic, and I’m ashamed to say that I have heard this tip a few times before, but haven’t implemented it yet. That’s no good. This is so simple, so easy to do, and potentially so valuable that there is no excuse for not doing it, right now.

If you control the code on your e-commerce sites, then stop reading right this minute, fire up your code editor, and add some kind of version of this text to your outgoing order confirmation emails:

Do you have a website or blog? Link to us! Just copy and paste this code: <a href=http://www.oursite.com>Subtly Optimized Anchor Text</a>

If you don’t control the code, then stop reading right this minute and fire off an email to your dev team.

I just did this on five different e-commerce sites I manage and it took me exactly four minutes and 12 seconds. You do the math and figure out what the ROI is on that, even if it results in just a few extra links.

While you’re at it, think about other places this could be added to. Put it in the footer of your email marketing, put it on your website somewhere, maybe even put it in your email signature. You’ll be surprised what people will do when you tell them to, and "link to us" is a clear and direct call to action.

Take-Away #2 – Use The Top Pages Tool To Identify Your Competitors’ Link Bait And Learn From It

Rand pointed out that you can use the Top Pages Tool (Pro only) on your competitors’ sites to see the pages that have earned them the most links. Run this on a good set of sites in your industry to learn about what kind of link bait content will likely be successful for attracting links to your own site.

Take-Away #3 – Use The Google Adwords Keyword Tool To Identify Keywords That Have High Search Volume, But Low Competition

Ken Jurina from my home town of Edmonton, Canada showed how you can run your keywords through the Google Adwords tool and then sort the columns to identify high search volume keywords that have low competition. Optimize a page of your site for these terms for some easy pickings in the rankings!

Take-Away #4 – Use The Top Pages On Domain Tool To Find Linked To Pages On Your Domain That Should Be Redirected

This may be old news for many of you, but somehow I missed a great YouMoz post from Richard Baxter where he describes a sweet side-effect of the Top Pages Tool. You can run your domains through it and it will show you all the pages that have in-links, but that are now 404ing. Redirect them and keep that link juice flowing through your site!

You might be thinking that you can identify these cases in Google Webmaster tools, but there are a couple scenarios I can think of where you might not be able to:

1. You’re analyzing a site for a prospective client where you haven’t been given access to their Webmaster Tools.
2. When the old domain has been redirected to a new domain. Webmaster tools won’t show you the data if the entire domain has been redirected (I think), but the Top Pages tool will. This is the case that Richard points out in his post. This is awesome because now you can 301 those "lost" pages too.

Take-Away #5 – Use The Competitive Link Finder!!!

Nick just posted about this hot new SEOmoz tool, so maybe you’re already aware of it, but I saw this for the first time at the Pro Training Seminar and it is crazy awesome. Looking for some links? This tool makes it so easy! They have officially called it the Competitive Link Finder, but I like to think of it as the "Link Intersect Tool". You punch in your domain, and your competitors’ domains (works best with 3 or more competitors), and the tool magically shows you the pages that link to multiple competitors. If they link to a couple of your competitors, then chances are good that you can be included in that list too with a carefully crafted email.

Take-Away #6 – Optimize Your Google Local Listings With these Tips

David Mihm is a great speaker and his talk was full of great info. Here are some of my highlights from it:

• It’s better to claim your listings manually, even for multiple listings. Google trusts these more as bulk uploads are susceptible to spam.
• Use Keywords in the Business Title, but don’t overdue it. (I can say from experience that this is a huge LBC ranking factor.)
• Adding custom categories can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum # allowed. (I have also found this to be a big factor in my own Local rankings.)
• "Citations" are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations. Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK, Australia, and Continental Europe.
• You can also identify citation sources by checking the "Web Pages" tab of your competitors.
• You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:
  • yourcity, st blog
  • yourcity, st directory
  • yourindustry, st blog
  • yourindustry, st directory
  • yourindustry yourcity, st blog
  • yourindustry yourstate directory

Take-Away #7 – Use the Google Adwords Content Network To Find Sites To Buy Links From Directly

Tom Critchlow mentioned this tip in his talk. Building links can be hard work. If you have more cash than time and want to just buy some links, this is a great tip for identifying potential link sellers. If they are trying to make money on their sites with Adsense ads, then chances are good that you could contact them about "purchasing some advertising". If you’re willing to walk a grey line, well, then this could be an interesting tip for you.

Take-Away #8 – Enjoy Some Serious Link Love By Becoming A "Green" Business

Also from Tom’s talk, "going green" can be a great way to get some authoritative links! There are a ton of sites out there that will list your business if it’s "green". Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green, etc. If you’re not green now, then figure out what you can do to be more earth friendly in your business, get a badge and info up on your site about it, and then contact all these sites that list green businesses.

This tip got me thinking about other angles for this. I can imagine plenty of link opportunities for a shoe store that sells "vegan shoes". I can imagine a pet supply company that donates a portion of its profits to animal shelters. I can probably think of something along these lines for almost any business.

Take Away #9 – Use Seth Besmertnik’s Market Opportunity Calculator To Help With Your SEO Sales Pitch

Seth Besmertnik’s talk was super funny, and super valuable. One of my favourites of the seminar for sure. He showed us how to demonstrate the value of SEO, and how to keep an SEO project on track.

You can download his presentation and a number of useful spreadsheets here: How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO. One that I particularly like is the Market Opportunity Calculator. All you have to do is this…

• Input the list of keywords in Column  B
• Input Current Rank in Column C
• Input Global Monthly Search Volume in Column D
• Input Conversion Rate in Column R
• Input Average Value per Conversion in Column S

… and the Excel template will produce stats on what your current market share is for those terms, and what your potential market share could be if you had top positions. It also gives you a great looking pie chart that should make the serious ca$h value of SEO very clear to your potential clients.

Take Away #10 – Start Working On Your Conversion Rate Optimization Immediately

Is it just me, or do many of you also suck at Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)? After seeing Ben Jesson’s presentation on CRO, I felt like I had just received a serious wake-up call to remember why I’m optimizing websites in the first place. I’ve been so caught up with increasing my clients’ ranking and traffic, that I have not been giving nearly enough attention to making sure that the visitors we do get become customers. Sure, I have dabbled in this a little bit by removing extraneous text from my forms, moving the important stuff above the fold, and dropping in a few starburst graphics to get attention, but damn, I have a lot to learn. Fortunately, Ben’s presentation was full of great advice and direction.

There are many things you can and should be doing to better understand your customer’s needs so that you can properly address them on your website. If I had to pick out a few pieces of wisdom from the presentation for you, it would be these:

• Implement tools on your website to learn from your customers. Find out what their objections are to buying your product, signing up for your service, subscribing to your e-newsletter, or whatever conversion goals you have, and then make sure you address those objections clearly on your site.
• Get some unbiased feedback on your website (not from your friends or family.) Ben’s tip: ask someone at a café if they wouldn’t mind giving you some feedback on your site. Tell them you’ve just had it redesigned and you’re just not sure about it. Offer to buy them a coffee. One of the best quotes from the seminar was when Ben said something like "The sign of a good usability test is when you’re holding back the tears because they told you the truth about the problems with your site."
• Here is a list of good tools for learning about your customers
  • GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
  • Tell-a-Friend-King
  • Kampyle
  • iPerceptions 4Q
  • Distilled Reputation Monitor
  • CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
  • SurveyMonkey
  • Ethnio
  • ClickTale
  • Google Website Optimizer
• Long sales pages are ok when done right. In fact, they are often necessary to be able to address all the different objections your customers might have about your products or services. Check out the Conversion Rate Experts optimized SEOmoz Pro Page, or the Amazon Kindle Product Page for two very successful examples.

Conversion Rate Optimization has a massive return on investment. Get started on it right away!

Check out these great articles on the Conversion Rate Experts website, and also sign up for their newsletter. I have been on their list since January, and they do not spam you. They just send you an occasional email every few weeks that is full of good tips.

 

Well, that covers the top take-aways I can think of at the moment. I am certain that I forgot a few gems, so please, if you attended the seminar, it would be great to get your additions in the comments. Hope this post is helpful to you!

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