I’m preparing a presentation on ‘Finding Readers for your Blog’ which I’ll be giving at the Melbourne Blog Training Day next Tuesday.

It’s got me thinking back to some of the bigger days of traffic that I’ve had on my own blogs over the years and I thought I’d open up some discussion on the topic to see if we can identify any trends.

What was your biggest day of Traffic (or ‘days’ if you can think of more than one) and what happened to make them occur?

I asked this on Twitter yesterday and it was interesting to see the responses. Some of the reasons giving included:

• controversial posts
• creative posts
• random links from bigger sites
• social bookmarking events (getting popular on Digg or Delicious)
• ranking high for terms in Google around big news events
• breaking a scoop news story

I’m sure we’ll see some of these themes in your experiences but know that there will be other themes too.

For me there have been many bigger than normal days over the last 8 years. Two that spring to mind include:

• My Six Figure Blogging Moment – I had been blogging for a while and suddenly realised that I was on track for over $100,000 in a year earnings from my blogs. The first time I mentioned it was in an interview that I did. I didn’t really think about the implications of talking about it at the time but that interview went viral – as did my followup post. What kicked it all off was a mention on Slashdot (which at the time was equivalent to getting on the front page of Digg).
• Front page of Yahoo (sort of) – then there was the day that a post on my photography blog was featured by one of Yahoo’s tech blogs. That in itself didn’t sent much traffic but when that particular Yahoo blog’s post was featured on the front page of Yahoo for 4-5 hours one day I saw traffic hit my blog like I’ve never seen traffic before or since. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I saw more traffic from that 4-5 hours than I’d normally see in a week of traffic.

So now it’s over to you. What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day and Why did it Happen?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day?

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A couple of weeks ago I had this interesting question from Arlene Crespo from lifeplanweb.com.

I have been blogging since November of 2009 and I really enjoy writing especially about my experiences with life.

My problem is that my age works against me, If people see how old I am which is in my fifty’s they will be turn off. Most of the bloggers are young people in their twenty’s thirty’s forty’s.

What’s one to do when your at this age?

I thought this was an interesting question and one that might generate some good discussion so I’d like to hear your opinion on it. But before I do – let me share a few thoughts:

I’ve not really run into this question before and as a blogger still in my 30’s have not had to face it personally – so I can only really speak from my own personal experience as a blog reader but when I arrive on a blog by someone who is a little more ‘mature’ than myself I don’t think I’m any more likely to read, if anything it could make me think that the person is a little more experienced.

I’m a big believer in trying to use the situation that you’re in to your advantage and to try to turn perceived problems into opportunities – so if I was in this situation I’d probably be wanting to almost use my age as a way to market and brand myself rather than hiding it.

I’d be exploring trying to position myself as someone who has experience in my field, who has faced the challenges that others might not have faced and as someone who can coach and mentor a less experienced person.

That approach may not work in every niche but it’s probably where I’d be starting.

What Do You Think?

• Do you think age matters (on either end of the spectrum)?
• Could being a little older be used as an advantage?
• Have you used your age in some way in marketing yourself (whether you’re younger or older)?

PS: as I’ve written this post I realize I have been asked the question before, but by young bloggers who have asked if they should reveal their age out of fear of not being taken seriously.

I know of a number of bloggers who are still teens who’ve chosen not to reveal their age for this reason – but also have seen a few who have used their youthfulness to their advantage as a blogger by shouting from the hilltops that they’re young. I guess it can work both ways but I’d love to hear from both younger and older bloggers on their experiences with this.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Does A Bloggers Age Matter?

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Posted by randfish

A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer (one of my Art of SEO coauthors) authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

SEO is a field where reputation is a huge part of your ability to perform well. Because the search engines don’t publish comprehensive guidelines (or even guidelines that cover 1/10th of the material necessary for good SEO work), businesses rely on the savvy of individual consultants, contractors and employees. If your boss reads Stephan’s article and sees him contradicting advice that you’ve been giving for years, faith erodes and with it, job security. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), there’s probably 5-10 articles you can find on the web that support your side of the story, many from quality, trusted sources.

The lack of standards sucks. But, it’s also the reason our industry is so exciting. New experiments & experiences can reveal critical data about search engine operations. The ability to become an expert is open to anyone with the skills and perseverance to see it through. But, no matter how hard you try, it’s hard to overcome some of the persistent myths of the SEO field – I’ve been caught in plenty of them myself (and who knows, maybe still am today).

This post is going to look at some of those nagging, lingering falsehoods that continue to thwart good SEO efforts, specifically those that Stephan called out and faced strong resistance. As always, this is my opinion, based on my experience (see the moz disclaimer) except in cases where research and data exists, in which case it’s my opinion that the research cited is good enough to warrant that opinion

How Significantly Does Personalization Affect Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.

Comments Include:

I’m not sure I agree with your statement under #5 that personalization changes are “relatively minor”. I’ve been seeing some drastic rank changes due to personalization. I just posted about it at http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/49-are-google-serp-personalizations-relatively-minor.whtml While there are still “absolute rankings” that display most of the time, your site can be ranked much higher or lower, based on personalization.

My Opinion – They’re both right. Personalization seems to primarily affect areas in which we devote tons of time, energy and repeated queries. This means for many/most "discovery" and early funnel searches, we’re going to get very standardized search results. It’s true that it can influence some searches significantly, but it’s also true that, at least in my experience, 90%+ of queries I perform are unaffected (and that goes for what I hear/see from other SEOs, too). The linked-to post above actually helps to validate this, showing that while rankings changes can be dramatic, they only happen when there’s substantive query volume from a user around a specific topic.

Do We Need to Update Our Homepages Every Day to Maintain Rankings?

Stephan Says:

"It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.)" This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.

Comments Include:

It actually is important. Sure, a stale home page might rank, but Google definitely takes freshness into account in rankings. I’ve seen rankings boosts whenever I post new content.

This varies from niche to niche, of course a site can rank well whilst remaining static, it may also have a considerable number of links pointing to it. In a competitive niche where the link volume/quality is pretty even, then regular updates to the home page, and other pages within the site can make all the difference – to describe this as a fallacy is a fallacy itself.

My Opinion - There was a time when I was pretty convinced this was true. I did lots of testing around it for my clients sites and would put in time each day making sure new content appeared on their homepages. Today, I’m much less of a believer. Stephan is certainly correct that plenty (if not the overwhelming majority) of homepages and, indeed, web pages that rank well for many queries are static. I do think it’s a great idea to continually have new content linked-to from homepages – by linking to the latest blog posts, YOUmoz posts and marketplace postings, the SEOmoz homepage helps drives spiders to revisit frequently and crawl these new posts (though RSS pings may make that obsolete).

Overall, I wouldn’t advise updating pages just for the sake of possibly getting a "fresh content" boost. QDF operates on unique, fresh, individual pages (or older pages that are earning newly fresh links). I’d have serious doubts as to whether anything in Google’s ranking system rewards pages that simply change frequently – it doesn’t pass my smell test.

How is Google Treating "Reciprocal" Links?

Stephan Says:

Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.

Comments Include:

Google places less weight on reciprocal links that they used to, but they still count. I’ve done numerous link exchange campaigns for websites, and seen huge boosts in rankings. At the end of the day, would you rather have a reciprocal link from another site in your niche, or no link at all? The answer is obvious.

Reciprocal links aren’t necessarily of dubious value. Consider this example:

I’m a news site. I link to CNN because it’s CNN and they have news. One day, CNN links to me (huzzah). Technically, this is a reciprocal link, but no way in hell is Google going to discount the value of the link because the sites are linking to each other. So now you have to determine intent — and how do you do that?

In many niches, every authority site links to every other. Not only is it natural, but these are the most relevant possible links. So what you seem to be saying is that Google lowers the value of a site’s most relevant links — thereby increasing the relative value of irrelevant or off-topic ones. That makes sense how?

My Opinion - This one really depends on how we’re defining "reciprocal links."

The post you’re reading links to Stephan’s SELand article. Would Stephan updating that post with a link here potentially hurt both our rankings? No.

However, if SEOmoz built a link directory on our site (ironically humorous because, as long time readers may recall, we used to have one) and promoted linking to your site if you reciprocated with a link back here, I’d be more concerned. This is essentially link graph manipulation and while it’s a fine line to tread, plenty of folks have crossed it in the past and, as Stephan notes, unnatural reciprocal link behavior is remarkably easy to spot on a link graph.

I wouldn’t be concerned at all with a technically "reciprocated" link, but I would watch out for schemes and directories that leverage this logic to earn their own links and promise value back to your site in exchange. Also – watch out for those who’ve evolved to build "three-way" or "four-way" reciprocal directories such that you link to them and they’ll link to you from a separate site – it’s still attempted manipulation and there’s so many relevant directories out there; why bother!?

Keyword Density is Not Used – How Many Times Do We Have to Say It?

Stephan Says:

Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.

Comments Include:

Folly? Hardly. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you want to make sure you use it a few times on a page. That’s just common sense. Of course, you don’t want to overuse a keyword, or it might come across as spammy. Any smart SEO pays attention to KW density.

My Opinion - Again, we’re likely coming down to semantics. The formula for keyword density – a percentage of the total number of words on the page that are the target phrase – is indeed folly. IR scientists discredited this methodology for relevance decades ago. Early search engines and information retrieval systems already leveraged TF*IDF as a far more accurate and valuable methodology.

In my opinion, the reason the myth persists is that sometimes, optimizing towards a keyword density can actually improve your relevance and targeting of TF*IDF. I’ll make an analogy – let’s say you believe flight is accomplished not by lift, thrust, drag and weight, but rather by reaching a particular velocity in a bird-shaped device. It’s entirely possible that you might stumble upon flight, or flight-like elements even without understanding the physics. That said, could you honestly call yourself an aeronautics engineer?

If we’re going to call ourselves professional SEOs, we should bother to learn the science. Yes, adding additional instances of a keyword term or phrase to a page might indeed help your rankings (usually not massively and almost never in highly competitive spaces), but that does not mean that the keyword density average you’ve been using is accurate or that engines leverage the metric. Spreading this ignorance of math and science does little to further the SEO field’s reputation - let’s end it. 

Do Hyphens in Domain Names Really Suck for SEO?

Stephan Says:

Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.

Comments Include:

Hyphens in domain names are less than ideal for flagship businesses because they’re hard to communicate, but you better believe Google ranks domains with keywords in them highly, even if they contain hyphens. Again, it’s less than ideal (a hyphen-less .org or .net is preferable to a hyphenated .com), but if the top choices aren’t available, a domain that includes a hyphen can be a decent substitute.

Don’t make a blanket statement that having hyphens in your domain hurts your potential. This is just fallacy. Yes, hyphens suck for direct traffic, as the domain is more likely to spelled incorrectly. But when it comes to search, domains with hyphens in them do just fine.

My Opinion – They suck. Yes, I realize that technically, they may not have a formal algorithmic component (though I’m guessing part of Google’s spam filter early warning system does look at hyphens, particularly when there’s more than one in a domain name). But, they certainly correlate with worse branding value, which means fewer links and citations, less reputation in the eyes of visitors and potential business partners, less viral spread through word-of-mouth and, as the comments note, lower type-in traffic.

All of those are going to have a 2nd-order impact on rankings through metrics like inbound links, social mentions and usage data (to whatever degree you believe that mya be a signal). Thus, hyphens in domain names do, indeed, suck for SEO (and lots of other stuff). I’ve never liked SEO practices that operated in a vaccum or didn’t consider usability, virality, positioning, branding or other basic marketing techniques. Going back to the analogy above, it’s like the aeronautics engineer who doesn’t consider seats a necessity. Sure, it flies, but who exactly will pay for a ride?

Does Click-Through Rate Matter?

Stephan Says:

The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.

Comments Include:

Don’t assume that clickthrough rates don’t matter just because of some potential abuse that would happen if absolutely zero logic were built in.

In regards to CTR influencing rankings, there are a number of things that lead me to suspect that user behavior does affect search results.

I’m sure you are familiar with the so-called google \honeymoon period\ that seems to occur when a new site launches. The site will rank highly for a few weeks, and then see a dramatic drop in SERPs. I’ve launched over a dozen sites in the past year, and have noticed this pattern.

I believe this goes beyond QDF, it’s a site-wide phenomenon. The hypothesis is that Google will temporarily rank a new site highly, to see how users perceive the site. If people visit the site, and then immediately hit the back button to return to the SERPs, that’s a good signal that the site did not meet the needs of the user, and that google should not rank it as highly.

I am on the fence, I could literally flip a coin whether it is myth, magic, or the CTR really does make a difference. If it does it is such a small difference it’s nothing I would ever focus on for success.

My Opinion – I’ve written and spoken about this extensively in the past and it doesn’t need a great deal of re-hashing. I will, however, say that should any SEO ever discover that it substantively impacts rankings, we’re going to be faced with an army of zombie botnets trying to take over our computers not to send email spam, but to click on links through our "reputable" Google accounts. Just look at the hacks of Facebook, Twitter & WordPress over the past few weeks and ask yourself – if any spammer could show any financial incentive or ability of clicks to influence Google, would we really have as (organic) click-fraud free a world as we do today? 

We do have one data point from Google that suggests they look at some kinds of less manipulate-able click data. A Googler speaking at the first SMX East show in New York mentioned during his session that Google will record searches that are performed frequently with no clicks, followed by query refinement or abandonment, as potential searches that need work (because it seems no one likes the results). If this is what you mean when referring to click-data being used in the engines, I think that’s completely reasonable.

Do H1 Tags Help with Rankings?

Stephan Says:

H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.

Comments Include:

H1 tags are very important, I’ve seen pages rank well for targeted keywords once the tag has been tweaked to be more targeted, not spammy or purely for SEO, but well written. Ok, in some cases it may not be “crucial” but after the title tag I think it’s up there as one of the most important on site factors.

My Opinion - Covario’s research is spot on; I got to listen to and speak with their chief scientist, Dr. Matthias Blume, at a conference in Silicon Valley. It also matches up to our correlation and rankings model data. You’re invited to repeat on-page keyword prominence testing and check the results for yourself (more on search engine testing methodologies here). H1 tags are very slightly better than Bold/Strong tags for keyword usage and both are barely better than simply using the keyword on the page (in any text format).

In every instance I’ve seen a report of H1s improving rankings, it’s been because the keyword phrase was now included as some of the first text on the page and provided an additional instance of the target term and title element in the on-page copy. As Stephan recommends in the comments, try taking a site with H1s and replacing them with CSS styles that mimic the text formatting. You may see tiny fluctuations in a few close rankings, but likely little else.

All that said, H1s are still a best practice. If you’re building a site from scratch today, you should certainly use them for headlines, and they do provide some (albeit quite tiny) benefits for SEO. However, I feel incredibly guilty about the many times in my SEO consulting career I pushed hard for engineering and development teams to get H1s right in the markup when it generated such tiny results. That time would have been far better spent on dozens of other projects. If I can, I’d love to save you that same embarassment and disappointment. H1s may fit with SEO stereotypes, but that doesn’t make them a high priority, high value activity. If you don’t believe the research of others, do your own, then listen to the results.

Can Linking to Other Sites Help You Perform Better?

Stephan Says:

Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.

Comments Include:

Not true. Matt Cutts has said that linking out to high quality websites is one of the many factors that they use to evaluate a site. NOTE: the comment references the below copied text below from this post by Matt Cutts (on Google’s webspam team):

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

My Opinion – I suspect there may be some small, positive effects of linking out to relevant, quality sites and pages for SEO. However, Stephan’s likely correct in his assertion that just linking to a "high Domain Authority" or "high PageRank" site won’t normally help. He’s also right to say that hoarding link juice is likely a very bad move. You can listen to the NYTimes’ SEO, Marshall Simmonds, talk about how adding external links to articles on the site had a noticeable positive impact on the Times’ rankings and traffic.

I don’t have correlation or ranking models data on this, nor have we experimented internally to the degree that I’d feel comfortable calling this a settled debate. My instincts say Google probably considers outbound links in some form or fashion, but I doubt it’s a huge ranking factor. It might be more important than H1s, though

PageRank is a Good Predictor of Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.

Comments Include:

Come on now. It’s true that a lot of people place too much emphasis on PR, but let’s not take it to the opposite extreme and say it’s irrelevant. PR is not the be-all-end-all of rankings, but it still matters. Having a high PR homepage clearly means *something*.

I probably couldn’t disagree with anything more than this one. I guarantee a website that has homepage PageRank 6 and then 2 page deep pages having PageRank 5 and trailing off into 4’s and 3’s get’s WAY more traffic than the one with PageRank 3 and trails off into 2’s and 1’s. PageRank is not 100% accurate, but it’s an extremely good indicator, it’s not just make believe or useless non-sense that authoritative sites have PageRank; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

My Opinion - They’re both right (though the "guarantee of traffic on the PR6 vs. 5 site" sounds like a bet this commenter’s opponent could win many, many times over). Our data on PageRank correlation is very solid and suggests that yes, PR is positively correlated with rankings on Google.com (though much less so in Google.co.uk – sorry Brits!). However, the degree of correlation is not overwhelming and there are far better single metrics if rankings correlation is your goal.

I would strongly get behind Stephan’s statement that what the toolbar server reports is not what Google uses internally. They’ve messaged this many times. It’s also very true that PageRank is only one of a plethora of ranking signals, and plenty of PageRank 3 pages outrank PageRank 6 or 7 pages for given queries.

Does Great Content Equal Great Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

Comments Include:

I see no one is criticizing "Great content = great rankings." This is job number one.

My Opinion – I think the commenter may have missed Stephan’s intended sarcasm. I am in full agreement that great content ≠ great rankings. This is no more true than the statement: "the way to win elections is to propose the best legislative ideas."

Marketing, promotion, networking, partnerships, virality, incentives and hundreds of others feed into the inputs for a site’s success on the web. Unless you believe that links are meaningless and Google’s content analysis systems can read and rank content like a human (e.g. Google thinks the Times’ article on Brown’s stepping down was more adroitly perceptive than the Post’s), the ability to draw in links, which is not and likely never will be about the "best content" will have an overwhelming impact on rankings.

The future likely holds greater usage of data from social media and social web interaction, but even this depends on far more than the content’s quality. Those brands and sites that have early-adopting, viral-sharing, people-connecting, idea-distributing users invested in promoting their work are likely to be long term winners with little regard for comparative levels of content quality. 

---

There’s lots more fun and interesting discussion on the SearchEngineLand post, but hopefully these will spark some interesting chats in the comments here as well.

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As this post goes live I’ll be in the process of arriving at SXSW Interactive in Austin Texas.

I was fortunate enough to at SXSWi two years back and it was one of the best conference experiences that I’ve had – so I’ve made it a priority this year to return.

My schedule is pretty open. The main thing that I’ll be doing is a book reading this Friday night. I’ll be talking about some of what Chris and I have included in the 2nd edition of the ProBlogger book (due out next month).

The book reading is on at 5pm, Friday 12 March on the Day Stage. I hope you’ll come!

For those of you involved in the Third Tribe there is a drinks/meetup the next evening (on Saturday 13th from about 5.30pm) at a bar called ‘Lovejoys’ at 604 Neches Street (2 blocks north of the convention center).

Note: I originally thought that my reading was on Saturday and we’d do one after the other…. but I messed up the time so the book reading is Friday and the Drinks/Meetup is Saturday. Sorry for the messing around 3rd Tribers.

Other than that I’ve got a pretty open few days and am looking forward to checking out a few panels and keynotes and doing as much networking as possible. If you’re at SXSWi I’d love to meet you – feel free to come up and say hi any time!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Let’s Meet at SXSWi!

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Posted by randfish

Last week, while in London, I received an email from Paul Graham, whom I’ve long admired, possibly even idolized a bit. He asked if I was available to come speak at a YCombinator SEO event in Mountain View. Tonight, I presented at that evented and thought I’d share my experiences, recommendations and yes, my presentation. Not everything that was discussed is public, in fact, much of it is "classified" at YC’s request. However, there’s so much good material that it would be criminal not to share.

First up, my presentation from the YCombinator SEO for Startups event (naturally, hosted on YC company and prior SEOmoz consulting client, Scribd):

SEO for Startups: YCombinator February 2010

Next, since it’s hard to do any slide deck justice with just the slides, a list of top advice and recommendations, not just from the slide deck, but from many years of interactions, consulting and Q+A help for startups:

1. SEO as a Strategy, not a Tactic
   Yelp uses SEO as a strategy. When their community finds something new in the neighborhood, content is created. They are limited in scale only by the physical world’s local businesses. Plus, it’s only natural that local businesses with good rankings will want to share those via a badge and a link; it’s only natural that their top contributors will want to share the reviews they’ve given. SEO is a strategy – it’s part of what makes them the business they are. If you’re just thinking in terms of keywords in the title and submitting to some directories, you’re going to get lapped by someone who understands how to make content, links, sharing & search demand an integral part of how users interact with their website.
2. Start SEO in the Concept Phase, Not After the Site is Built
   It’s hard to do, particularly when you spend your first two years as a founder thinking SEO is a cross between black magic and BS, but SEO works best when it’s architected alongside a businesses marketing plan. I’ve mentioned in the past that I think VCs and angel investors should be asking about SEO in the first meeting – startups should be three steps ahead of that.
3. Build Accessibility First & Foremost
   I come back time and time again to the SEO Pyramid. It all starts with unique content that engines can find and users find valuable. I’m now the proud owner of a Y Combinator t-shirt bearing the tagline "Make Something People Want." All I’m asking is that you also make something Google (and Bing) can find, too. And, in concert with this advice, check out Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization to help solve that puzzle.
4. SEO is NOT a One Time Event
   Fire and forget works with smartbombs (or maybe not – scroll to section 5), but it doesn’t work with SEO. This is a constantly evolving field, and not so much because Google’s algorithm is changing all the time, but more so because 300 (or 30,000) competitors are constantly trying to produce better content and market it more effectively while the engines are constantly experimenting with new kinds of results and information. No product is good enough to survive without marketing – even Google itself just ran a Super Bowl ad. SEO is marketing, and as such demands the same attention. Ignore it, and you will fall by the wayside.
5. Analytics are a Religion
   An ad salesman comes to you and tells you that 20% of your exact target market is reading a particular magazine. By putting in a full-page ad every month for the next year, you can ensure that they’ll all know your name and many will buy from you. But wait… How many saw it? How many took the desired action? How many heard about it from a friend or read a loaner copy on a flight? You’ll never know. With SEO, it’s the complete opposite – every action has a trackable reaction. If you ignore the data, use last-touch attribution or neglect to build serious models that track the value of your campaigns, you may as well blow the money on a giant billboard on the 101. Who knows? Maybe the right investor will drive by and decide to invest… Just don’t count on it.
6. Clever Tricks Aren’t that Clever (or New)
   I promise that no hairbrained scheme to manipulate the search rankings by registering thousands of sites or scraping the web for open places to link or contacting 6,000 "friends" for a link exchange are either A) new or B) going to work. Apply your creativity in white hat ways and make sure it passes the Google web spam litmus test. And no, that doesn’t just mean it passes Google’s Quality Guidelines, it means you would happily show it to any engineer on the webspam team content in the knowledge that they’d actually WANT it to help your site rank better.
7. Don’t Let Search Dominate Your Traffic Sources
   If Google sends 90% of your traffic, your business has real danger associated with it. Why aren’t people coming directly to your site, being passed links in email, getting Tweets and Facebook mentions that send traffic? Why is no one blogging about you, writing about you in the press, commenting in forums with links to your content? These "natural" signs tell a story of a real business providing real value. The 90-95% Google trafficked site says something strange is going on, and Google themselves are likely to figure that out sooner or later.

And last, but not least, I’d like to recognize some of the brilliant people and companies represented. It was humbling to receive such kind praise and attentitive ears from companies like:

• Apartment Rentals Site – AirBnB (whose founders were kind enough to give me a ride back to my hotel at SFO!)
• Dead Simple Publishing Site – Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it – "pastarus")
• Concerts & Tour Dates Startup – Songkick
• Time Management Software Provider – RescueTime ( a local Seattle startup, and host of the Feb. 25 event)
• Gift Card Exchange Marketplace – Cardpool
• Real Time Search Startup – Scoopler
• Live Video & Chat Hub – Justin.tv

Tragically, the following brief set of photos from the event were taken on my new Android camera phone (yes, I’m such a Hacker News/Paul Graham geek that I had to pull it out):

YCombinator Founders Eating Dinner (noticeably absent in the photo was the single female founder – but they do have one!)

Luckily, there was plenty of Coke to help keep me hydrated (and caffeinated) during the event

The rush for pizza (apparently, The Flash is one of the founders they funded!)

Paul and Rand in the Anybots lab – thanks again, Paul; it was a fantastic experience

There were more than 40 companies in attendance, so there’s no way to name them all here, but the above represent some of the most active on the SEO panel and during the lengthy, but phenomenal Q+A. Later this week, SEOmoz’s own Danny Dover will be attending the Y Combinator meetup in Seattle, and he’d love to say hi and chat with folks there, and hopefully help to bring a good name to SEO.

p.s. At the end of the presentation, Paul noted that the startups owed me a debt for sharing information about SEO. I disagree, but who am I to pass up such a wonderful opportunity. My only request to the attendees was that, if they should see SEO being badmouthed on Hacker News to kindly step in and help others realize the power and legitimacy of this marketing channel.

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Over the last few weeks I’ve had three conversations with readers regarding different sources of traffic.

In each case I had a number of email exchanges with each blogger (all on the same day) and ended up laughing to myself at the common theme but extremely different opinions being expressed by each of the bloggers.

In each case the bloggers had strong opinions (and experiences to back those opinions up) on what type of traffic was ‘best’ and how to get it.

1. In one case the conversation started with a blogger telling me that I focus too much upon social media traffic and not enough on traffic from search engines. Their niche didn’t work with social traffic but with search traffic they did best.
2. In another case the blogger told me that they’d been told to forget about search traffic in their niche and work more on building traffic from other sites and to convert it into ongoing traffic with newsletters.
3. In the last case a blogger told me that in their opinion the best type of traffic was social media traffic and they didn’t see the point in newsletters.

I was reminded through these conversations just how many different valid approaches there are to blogging. I also came away with a few thoughts that I thought I’d jot down here on the topic of driving traffic to blogs.

1. There are Many Valid Sources of Traffic

The above chart shows just 8 of many sources of traffic to a blog. As I write this others are already springing to mind (for example some bloggers run paid advertising to drive traffic to their blog – others get it from banner exchange programs). The reality is that there are many potential sources of traffic.

2. The ‘Best’ Source of Traffic Varies from Niche to Niche

As I thought about the 3 bloggers I was chatting to above it struck me that each had found great sources of traffic but that they were each operating in very different niches.

The first blogger who had written off social media was in a niche that people were simply not using social media for (I won’t reveal the niche as I don’t have their permission but it was a very very niche focused blog). Perhaps they could have driven a tiny bit of traffic with social media but for them Search was a much better place for them to invest their time.

3. Different Sources of Traffic Will monetize differently

Another important factor to consider is that some sources of traffic will monetize ALOT better than others. I’ve found that search traffic can work very well with AdSense for example (it depends upon the niche and intent of the reader). People arrive on your site searching for specific information, read your content, see an ad that relates to their search term and click on it.

RSS readers on the other hand don’t tend to convert for AdSense as they tend to be loyal readers and many don’t even click through to your site to read your content. RSS readers (and social media traffic) however can convert really well for affiliate promotions or selling your own products to.

4. Traffic Patterns Change over the life cycle of a blog

As a blog matures its sources of traffic often quite naturally change.

There’s no typical one size fits all pattern to this but at first the traffic might mainly come from other blogs or forums where you comment – or blogs where you guest post – or articles that you write. In time you might start to see more traffic from RSS or newsletters as a few people subscribe. Perhaps then some traffic will come from other sites who link to you (people who subscribe via RSS might have their own blogs) and from social media. After a while your search engine ranking might kick in as a result of the links from other sites and your guest posting and article writing and you might start seeing Google traffic. Once your blog is more established you might start seeing social bookmarking viral events that spike your traffic.

Again – this is not going to be the pattern for all blogs but in time traffic will naturally start to come from different places – the key is to try to leverage it for ongoing good (trying to get your blog to be sticky rather than just having one time visitors) and to work out how to convert that traffic for the goals you have.

5. Bloggers should be open to different approaches

While each of the three bloggers had discovered great lessons and good sources of traffic for their niches and the life cycles of their blogs – I was left wondering in each case whether the bloggers were being a little too closed off to different sources of traffic that perhaps could have added to the overall mix of traffic.

I see a lot of SEO type bloggers write about the worthlessness of social traffic for instance. One common comment that I get from some SEOs (definitely not all) is that social media traffic can’t be monetized. The reality could not be further from the truth. It won’t always convert but it certainly can. For example I know in each of the E-book launches that I’ve done in two niches that I’ve seen significant conversions from Twitter traffic.

On the flip side of things I hear some social media focused bloggers write off SEO and say that it works itself out and you don’t need to optimise your blog for search if you just produce good content. While there is some truth in that (good content does tend to generate natural incoming links to some extent) with a basic understanding of principles of SEO and a few minor tweaks a blog can rank much better in search engines without compromising the integrity of the content.

I guess what I’m getting at is that if you get exclusive about the type of traffic you are after you could actually be limiting the potential of your blog’s incoming traffic.

6. Too many Eggs in One Basket Can Be Dangerous

I used to be very focused upon search traffic in my early days of blogging. I worked hard to optimise my first blogs for search and got to a point where I was making a full time living from the ad revenue I was getting almost exclusively from Google. As a result I got a little lazy in some of the other areas – I didn’t work to convert readers to be loyal with newsletters or with prominent calls to subscribe to RSS, I didn’t build too many relationships with other bloggers to generate referral traffic and I was very inactive in social media (although it was much more limited back then).

As a result when Google decided to adjust their algorithm one day and my rankings dropped (and almost completely disappeared) in their results I lost almost all of my traffic – and as a result almost all of my income.

I was lucky in that Google readjusted their algorithm a couple of months later and I regained a lot of (but not all) of that traffic but in the mean time I looked for and found a ‘real job’ – and more importantly learned an important lesson about the power of having more than one source of traffic.

That experience was the beginning of me doing a few things that included working harder on capturing readers as subscribers (email and RSS), networking more with other bloggers in my niche and getting more involved in promoting my blog in other places (mainstream media, social media etc). My hope in doing all of this was to build up other sources of traffic so that if Google ever switched off my traffic again (temporarily or permanently) I’d at least have enough traffic to survive.

Google still does send me around 40-50% of my traffic (it varies a little from blog to blog) but I’m in a position now where I could survive for an extended period if it all disappeared (not that I’d like for that to happen).

7. The Importance of Personality and Being Yourself

I’m sure there are other factors that are at play that might be worth considering when looking at traffic. One of these (that I’m yet to fully think through) is personality type.

For example a lot of my my technically thinking friends seem to enjoy the challenge of SEO a little more. They love experimenting with and testing what happens when they make small tweaks to different aspects of their blogs. They’re constantly testing different setups and do quite well from it. I am not technically minded and find their attention to detail very very unusual (and so far from where that I’m at that I feel like I’m from another planet).

Other friends are perhaps a little more social by nature and as a result seem to do well on Twitter.

Others seem to do better by applying their freakish ability to write blog posts that get tonnes of links from other sites and which do brilliantly on social bookmarking sites..

Others are networkers and spend a lot of time interacting with other bloggers and site owners and tend to get links and traffic that way.

Others just seem to be brilliant at building community on their blog and as a result retain almost everyone who ever comments and build new readers from those people telling their friends.

I guess the lesson here is to be yourself and work with your strengths. Of course you don’t want to let your strengths dominate so much that you ignore or become lazy in areas that you’re not as strong in – but do follow your natural abilities and leverage them as much as you can.

Remember that there is no wrong or right way to generate traffic for a blog. If you were analyze the sources of traffic on many top blogs you’d find quite different factors at play!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

7 Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog

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If you’re a blogger where English is not your first language – I’d love to get your participation in this discussion.

Recently I surveyed subscribers to my newsletter on the challenges that face them going into 2010. Quite a few of the responses to that question came from bloggers for whom English was not a first language.

The problems that this group of bloggers presented to me were numerous but two recurring challenges were:

• Not knowing which language that they should blog in – should they blog in their own first language and have a smaller potential readership or blog in English where their readership could be larger but where they had challenges in writing as well?
• Feeling isolated from other bloggers – a number reflected that at times they felt that they were not taken as seriously by bloggers in other parts of the world and found networking difficult.

As a blogger who speaks no other language but English I’m probably not the person to bring much wisdom to this topic – however I’d love to get the thoughts, experiences, tips and stories of bloggers who have been in this situation in comments below.

My hope is that this post will not only give bloggers struggling with these and other issues a place to tell of their challenges – but that some might also share how they approach the challenges and give some tips and advice for bloggers from a non English speaking background. I’d also love to hear stories of (and see examples of) your successes (and those of others) as I know that the blogosphere is alive and well in all corners of the globe.

If you’d like to share in your own language and/or English I’m happy for you to do so in any way that you feel comfortable.

I’m looking forward to reading what is shared below.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Bloggers from Non English Speaking Backgrounds – Share Your Tips and Stories Here

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Prelude: I’ve long promised blog readers a detailed accounting of my experiences raising capital over the course of last summer and into the fall. My apologies for the long delay, and to those seeking more SEO-focused content. This entry is lengthy, detailed and designed to share as much as possible, so hopefully you’ve got a good 20 minutes to read it We’ll be back to SEO tips & tricks tomorrow.

Sections in this post:

• Introduction & Venture Capital Primer
• Building the Pitch Deck
• The Pitch Itself
• Getting Introduced to Venture Capitalists
• The Meeting Process
• What VCs Liked and Didn’t
• The Final Outcome & the Future

Introduction to our Process & Venture Capital

In this post, my goal is to walk you through the process we used, the feedback we received and the final results and decisions. Fundraising is a demanding, lengthy, emotionally charged process and something that challenged me personally more so than any other single part of my life in the last 5 years. I hope that by sharing my experience I can help others who start down this road and give you an idea of what to expect. The more knowledge you have, the less fear can hold you up; that’s what this post is here to accomplish.

First, I’ll try to provide some context around why we went to raise money in the first place, how we constructed our "pitch deck," how we got introductions and meetings to a large number of VCs and the progress from initial meetings to partner meetings to final decisions.

SEOmoz started the VC process in June 2009, in possibly the worst climate for fundraising since 2001. You can see the stark contrast from our timing with the previous round in, arguably, the best environment since 2000.

Graph of Venture Capital Invested by Quarter (via NVCA)

Ventue capital is "expensive" money, not just in terms of the price paid in equity, but in the obligations and requirements that come with it. In our Series A, we took money more like a seed investment – Michelle & Kelly saw potential and wanted to see what could happen. Raising another round meant aiming to hit the "home run." For those who are unfamiliar, the startup world has built an entire lexicon around the "seriousness" and exit-size focus of a company that ranges from "lifestyle" businesses that don’t try to achieve multi-million dollar scale to "home runs" that exit for $1billion+.

Note that there’s plenty of criticism of this model from both the venture side and from entrepreneurs and operators. Lots of other blogs have talked about the imbalance in interests between founders and investors and current market conditions vs. expected VC portfolio returns. I won’t re-hash these, but as a broad overview, most venture funds have 100s of millions of dollars from their LPs (Limited Partners – folks like large endowment funds, pensions, government entities, extremely wealthy individuals, etc). In order to provide significant returns, they follow a model of investing in a few dozen startups, most of which will go bankrupt and, hopefully, 1-3 of which will provide most of the profits in billion dollar+ "exits" (an acquisition or IPO).

This somewhat odd scenario means that VCs are often investing in "long shots" to be huge, rather than low-risk bets for more reasonable exits (for example, an 80% chance of exiting for $150 million is not nearly as interesting as a 10% chance of exiting for $1 billion). As an entrepreneur, particularly a first-time startup guy who has $3,000 in his checking account, an orange scooter and a small apartment, the incentive is completely the reverse. Fred Wilson wrote a bit about this disparity in his post on Swinging for the Fences.

In order to be appealing to a venture investor, especially those with larger fund sizes ($300 million+), a company must be able to show a credible path to that $1 billion+ exit. Since the average VC-backed exit is actually something under $100 million, it’s a bit of a "wink, wink; nod, nod" game. Both parties recognize that a more likely outcome is something far lower, but the "sell" has to include the envision-able path to hundreds of millions in annual revenue that can yield those tremendous exits. Again, I’ll point to Fred, who wrote about the Venture Capital Math Problem (and a Part 2).

Building the Pitch

You can read a lot more about the catalysts for fundraising on my post – My Startup Experience: VC, Entrepreneurship, Self-Analysis & the Road Ahead – so I’m going to dive right into the process for creating a pitch deck.

We started with a lot of great advice and direction from entrepreneurs who’d been down this road before and also got terrific help from the partners at Ignition, for whom we delivered a "mock" pitch and collected feedback that helped push us in some smart directions. As a base, we used the model promoted by VentureHacks and sprinkled in bits liberally from Dave McClure’s excellent How to Pitch a VC deck and Guy Kawasaki’s – Perfecting Your Pitch (PDF).

The process itself involved sheets of paper affixed to a large wall, which we’d then swap around, tear up, mark up with pens and generally treat like a post-it-note fight. We started with blank paper that we’d draw on, then began creating real slides in Powerpoint. It was fun – exhilirating and stressful, yes, but also exciting. We were going to raise millions of dollars, put that money to work and build incredible product and an amazing revenue stream.

Before we did that, we had to get beaten up a bit first. I mentioned that we gave a test-run pitch of the deck to the board at Ignition Partners (our first-round investors). We also privately delivered the pitch to a handful of CEOs and angel investors, hoping to garner feedback and assistance (these weren’t serious attempts to raise money, as we weren’t seeking an angel-type deal). The great part is, we really did get beat up. I have pages and pages of notes from meetings where I showed the pitch to other entrepreneurs and got feedback ranging from "this is almost perfect, just tweak X" to "you need to start completely from scratch, and here’s the deck I used to raise $XY millions in my last round."

I’m going to come back to this again below, but the generosity of time, energy and prior work (even stuff that’s usually very private) from other startup CEOs and entrepreneurs was absolutely remarkable. I found none of the closed-door mentality or brash indifference I expected, especially in Silicon Valley. Founders and CEOs, who had multi-million dollar businesses to run would take hours out of their days to have lunch, walk through the deck, and introduce us to VCs they knew. I’ve rarely known so much goodwill from people who have so many demands on their time.

The Pitch Itself

Let’s get to the meat and potatoes, as I’m sure by now you’re hungry :-)

The "elevator pitch" sounded something like:

SEO is huge – every site on the web is doing it or wants to be. But the process is broken – it’s hard to learn, hard to measure, hard to know what’s working and far more art than science. We are going to build software that helps transform SEO into a mainstream marketing activity, the way analytics software (Urchin, Omniture, etc.) did for web visitor reporting or email software (iContact, ExactTarget) did for email marketing.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to share the exact deck we used, nor all the details from it. Transparent though I love to be, there’s a lot of information and data points that aren’t fit for public consumption. It’s less that I believe any of this data could be used to materially harm us and more that we’ve made promises to our investors and board to keep this stuff internal for now. I will say this – while I believed strongly in the deck when we first created it, that confidence was somewhat eroded by the end of the process. In late September, for example, I think I could have done a far better job crafting and delivering the pitch than when I gave my first one in July (only 60 days before).

Below, you’ll find a modified version of the original pitch deck (we later crafted many customized versions with slides particular VCs wanted to see). It doesn’t include things like a P&L statement or specific customer retention/churn/lifetime value metrics, but hopefully it will still be valuable and interesting.

Since I didn’t include revenue/profit numbers in this deck (and it’s hard to get a sense for how a potential investor might perceive this without it), I’ve included some non-specific growth charts below, illlustrating the top-line numbers in a profit-and-loss statement:

 

I’ve also left out some portions of our very large appendix. The appendix, in fact, was one of the most interesting parts of the deck. When we started the process, it was 5-6 slides with additional information about market size, importance, some detailed stats on membership, lifetime customer value calculations, etc. A month into the process, it was nearly 30 slides, attacking every question, problem or issue that had been raised in meetings where we didn’t have an immediate solid answer or data point. I really believe that the VC process is all backwards in this fashion. The pitching company should:

1. Have an introductory call to see if there’s interest
2. Attend a sit down meeting with a partner or two, some associates and a dilgent notetaker to get all the questions, concerns and issues on the table
3. Go back home, make a great deck that addresses the things the VCs care about
4. Come back and give the formal pitch

Instead, many pitch meetings at the beginning made us feel like amateurs and it was only at the end of the process that we felt more comfortable tackling any question thrown our way (mostly because we’d heard nearly all of them before). In my opinion, venture capital shouldn’t be about who has the most experience pitching, or who can deliver the best pitch, but about who has the most exciting, interesting company. In the current model, it feels like 80% sizzle (pitch) and 20% steak (company).

Then again, what do I know about the VC process? I got lucky in my mid-twenties, landed a bit of capital, and have never invested or even studied the venture model the way the professionals have. Perhaps ability to pitch and success of company are well correlated metrics or at least, indicative of company performance. I’ll leave that to those more knowledgable on the topic.

In any case, now that we had this story to tell (the pitch deck), we needed an audience.

Getting Introduced to Venture Capitalists

I initially presumed that our investors (Kelly & Michelle) would drive this process of introductions and networking, but in reality, this is apparently a suboptimal methodology. Michelle explained (and many others concurred) that entrepreneurs themselves provide the best introductions. Thus, it was my task to find other founders & CEOs who would provide positive connections to the investor community. Outside of Ignition, I knew virtually no one in that sphere, so this would be my first formidable challenge.

Thankfully, the entrepreneur community was incredibly kind – generous to a fault, actually. Busy CEOs of important startups took time away from their jobs to sit down for coffee with me, buy me lunch, take me to dinner, review the pitch deck we’d built, give advice and make introductions to a very impressive set of folks in the VC world. In exchange, I did the best I could to help them with SEO, and we hosted a number of great companies at our offices in Seattle for hour-long SEO reviews. It will be hard to thank everyone here, but I’ll do my best:

• Seth Besmertnik from Conductor
• Dion Lim & Gautam Godhwani from SimplyHired
• Jeremy Stoppleman from Yelp
• Dave Goldberg from SurveyMonkey
• Alex Schultz from Facebook
• Barnaby Dorfman from Foodista
• David Niu from BuddyTV
• Jonathan Sposato from Picnik
• Trevor Traina from Driverside
• T.A. McCann from Gist
• Merril Brown from Curious Office
• Nirav Tolia from Fanbase
• Mike Cassidy from Ruba
• Maria Thomas from Etsy
• Nathan Kaiser from nPost

I’m indebted to all of these great folks and I can only hope that the SEO help we provided to many of them has returned some of that.

However, this part of the process is also where we made our first big misstep. Explaining will take a bit of background.

SEOmoz’s business model is what’s generally called "self-service SaaS." Similar to most SaaS companies, we sell software in a subscription/licensing type of model and, as has become common in the last few years, do it "in the cloud" (meaning we don’t install software; everything’s run remotely over the web). However, we’re very different from traditional "SaaS" in that we have no sales team. There isn’t a single person at SEOmoz whose job title or description includes sales (though, technically, if Gillian and I had descriptions, "sales" might be part of that).

Our business model and margins might result in an acquisition price (sale of the company) of between 3-6X trailing revenue, depending on the market circumstances, growth rates, strategic importance, etc. This is massively favorable to consulting revenue, which typically garners 1-1.5X. Put another way:

• An SEO consulting business sale price (assuming $5 million in trailing revenue) = $5-7.5 million
• An SEO self-service SaaS business sale price (assuming $5 million in trailing revenue) = $15-30 million

It’s no surprise that investors are far more interested in these "scalable" business models that have higher exit multipliers. This is a big reason why you rarely ever see venture or angel capital flowing into consulting firms. The margins on a consulting business hover between 40-55%. Margins in software get closer to 80%+ and scale isn’t proportionally tied to cost (in most consulting businesses, the more you want to make, the more consultants you need to hire). 

In our situation, a VC in the B-round would be likely to get something between 15-20% ownership in the company (depending on valuation, amount in, etc). Let’s look at a chart that helps explain why we messed up from a strategic standpoint in the introductions process:

Doing the math, even at the high end of the revenue/exit numbers, the VC is making 15% x $450 million = $67.5 million. If you have a $300 million fund and invest in 20 companies, you need at least 6 and hopefully 7-8 of those to hit in that range. The odds say that 10 of those companies will go under, 8 will have much more modest outcomes and 1-2 will return the lion’s share. Thus, big fund VCs are going to be seeking portfolio investments that address multi-billion dollar markets and have a shot at that massive IPO/acquisition.

A smart entrepreneur would look at this ahead of time and specifically chase venture capital firms with small-moderate fund sizes. Unfortunately, we didn’t plan ahead intelligently on this, and thus talked to many folks with funds between $100-500million. At those levels, it’s the 1/20 or 1/50 billion dollar+ exits that bring all the returns for the VC. They’re not seeking a reasonable bet on a company that has an long-shot, outside chance at a $500 million exit. They want 20 or 30 companies with 1 in 20 or 1 in 30 chances to go all the way to that billion dollar acquisition or IPO.

Our introductions came streaming in very unstrategically. I met with lots of entreprenuers and people in the tech community, who put me in touch, usually via an email introduction, to a partner at a firm. We’d exchange a couple emails to set up a time to talk, chat for 15-45 minutes (sometimes longer) and then schedule an in-person meeting for the next time I was in their area. Those introductions didn’t come all at once – in the first 30 days of actively pursuing introductions, I had ~10 calls. Then, over the next 40 days, more and more introductions would roll in from people I’d connected with in the past couple months, and those would turn into calls and meetings.

I talked to entrepreneurs who were much more strategic and exacting about their introductions process (and plenty who followed a similar pattern to what I did). In hindsight, it wasn’t perfect, but I did get to meet a tremendous number of very impressive investors and get their feedback.

The Meeting Process

During our fundraising experience, we connected with a lot of VCs. I’ve taken a screenshot of the the firms we talked to below (from my Google spreadsheet file on the subject), though I won’t go into more detail about who from each firm we talked to or how far along we progressed with each of them. I think there’s an expectation of privacy most VCs have, and I want to respect that. BTW – I’m not listing every single firm we talked to, but this is a more-than-representative sample and hopefully fulfills our core value of transparency.

Initially, we were very excited and I’ll try to explain why. When starting out, our expectations (thanks to both advice from other entrepreneurs and via blog posts/articles the web) were that 10-20% of phone calls would lead to first meetings , a few of these might turn into partner meetings and we’d hopefully get a term sheet or two at the end. Instead, the funnel looked like this:

As you can see, we had phone calls with 40 firms, and had a surprisingly high conversion rate to first meetings, which had us initially enthusiastic. VCs are notoriously busy, and scheduling time with them is often a massive challenge. To have such a high percentage of firms interested in such a dour climate made us believe we could buck the trend. Unfortunately, it also meant lots of time we needed to invest in preparing for, and in most cases, flying out of Seattle for in-person meetings.

The entire process from the first call I had with a partner (on June 18th) to the time we stopped actively pursuing funding (September 30th) was 93 days. In that time I made 5 separate roundtrips to San Francisco, which adds up in hotel, airfare and car rentals. Raising money takes time, resources and a tremendous amount of energy, not just from the founder/CEO, but from the entire team. Adam & Matt were consistently pulled away from day-to-day and strategic work to create and refine the product demo. Sarah, Christine & our accountants labored to provide detailed financials. Jeff often had to postpone critical work items to make custom queries against our members database to pull an obscure metric about recitivism, churn or usage.

The meetings themselves are fascinating. I’ll be honest – the first few were completely intimidating and overwhelming. Like most times in life when you’re nervous, it wasn’t until I stopped worrying and (very nearly) stopped caring, that I got good at the process.

You arrive at a non-descript, but very well-adorned office building, almost all of them on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. An assistant, who is nearly always young, female, very attractive and somewhat cold (though there were a number of exceptions), greets you in the front room and will offer a beverage. I typically waited only 5-10 minutes, though a few times it was 20 minutes or more, after which I’d be escorted into a meeting room with a place to plug in my laptop to a projector or screen. VC offices provide free wifi (though I always brought my AT&T aircard just in case) and are designed to impress – expensive furnishings and artwork, placards showing the successful companies they’ve backed and the massive IPOs/exits those companies had.

The VCs themselves ran the gamut, from friendly, approachable and jovial to overly serious, harsh and distant. Intentionally or unintentionally, they all have some emotional walls up, which I believe are out of necessity and certainly don’t begrudge. If you’re meeting with dozens of entrepreneurs every week, you can’t get personally attached or build close relationships with even a fraction of them, especially if you’re not going to make an investment. It’s a very different experience from the many hundreds of other meetings I’ve had in my professional career, where establishing rapport and working in a mutually positive fashion is the norm. VCs need to drill down on specifics, call out your flaws, explain what they don’t like and gloss over a lot of positives in the process. A typical partner meeting lasts precisely one hour, and in my experience, that rarely deviated (a few times we ran over, and more than a few times things started late).

Second meetings are often pretty similar in format, though there’s typically more than one partner from the VC firm in attendance, as well as an associate or two. I also found that it was extremely helpful to bring Sarah Bird (SEOmoz’s COO and a guru when it comes to our financials) as well as Nick Gerner and/or Ben Hendrickson (who convincingly play the role of "way smarter about technology than anyone else in the room") to these meetings. They’d sometimes be a bit longer, and would almost always request a much greater degree of detail, as well as significant "objections" ot the investment, which were frequently presented as challenges we were intended to conquer using slides, data and verbal acuity.

Following both first and second meetings would be the impossible-to-parse "thanks, we’ll be in touch." We’d take guesses about which VCs were actually interested and would follow up vs. those who’d email to say "no thanks" or simply never communicate again (the latter bothered me at first, but once you realize it’s just part of the accepted cultural practice, it’s fine). Surprisingly, we were never good at this. We’d often mistakenly think one VC was interested when they weren’t and vice versa. They’re a notoriously hard-to-read bunch, perhaps intentionally.

I have a much tougher time presenting a representative partner meeting, as we only had two. They almost always take place on Monday, though, and you’re often back-to-back scheduled with pitches from other entrepreneurs. A larger, board-style meeting room will be filled with all of the firm’s partners and you’ll present the same pitch you made to the first partner to this group. Questions can get a bit strange if my experience is any guide – tangents and off-topic discussions come into play and it seems to be up to the entrepreneurs to keep things on track. I think this happens because in any given partner meeting, a good number of the partners won’t be familiar with your industry, company or technology, and may not even be interested. I imagine that if you specialize in clean-tech investments, listening to an SEOmoz pitch can get a bit boring, and you might, naturally, focus on the one or two areas you know something or have heard something about.

I will say that my experience with the vast majority of VCs we saw was not nearly as negative as what Fred Destin wrote about in his posts for VentureHacks – The Arrogant VC: Why VCs are Disliked by Entrepreneurs and Part 2. Certainly a few of these traits came out, but by and large, I felt these were responsible, talented, experienced individuals doing a hard job the best they could and putting forward both a serious effort and respect for me, my company and my time.

For a completely alternate perspective on what it was like for my wife, who accompanied me on 2 of my 5 fundraising trips, check out A little more than 24 Hours in Palo Alto and San Francisco. I do wholeheartedly recommend someone who loves you unconditionally and pretends to be unable to identify a single flaw in you, your company or your pitch, supporting you in the VC process. It can get very lonely and emotionally turbulent.

What Worked & What Didn’t

When it came time to analyze the results, we tried our best to aggregate feedback, both positive and negative, for our board meetings back in Seattle. Early on, we focused on refining the pitch, but we were (I think uncommonly) stubborn about changing our business plan or product roadmap significantly to suite investors’ opinions. We felt (and feel) strongly about the direction we want to pursue, and that may have been perceived negatively by some (though I know it was a positive to at least one investor who talked to us afterwards).

Following any "no" response, including a "no answer" within a couple weeks following the meeting, I’d email and ask for a phone call to discuss. 60%+ of the VCs we had met in person took those calls and explained to us some of their reasons for rejecting the investment.  I’d specifically ask what they liked, what they didn’t and what they recommended for us to improve. I was both impressed and grateful to receive a number of thoughtful, honest answers, and encountered only a couple of folks who clearly didn’t remember our pitch or company well enough to provide a cogent response.

Some of the things the VCs generally liked:

• The Self-Service SaaS Business Model – although there were a few dissenters who thought we should pursue a more classic SaaS business with tele-sales would be better, most were supportive of the self-service methodology.
• The Community & Userbase – that’s you! Great work, gang
• The Marketing/Sales Funnel – investors tended to like the freemium/content model that attracted potential customers at a low marketing cost
• The Technology Achievements – nearly all of the VCs with technical backgrounds were impressed by what we’d achieved with the Linkscape web index and ranking models work, particularly on such a small amount of capital.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a clear winner in the reasons VCs didn’t want to make an investment. I did, however, make a quick chart noting which reasons were most frequently given by the investors for why chose against us:

It’s important to note that many of the VCs who said no that we followed up with gave multiple reasons for the decision. Some of these we found very reasonable and agreed with, others we struggled with. The most perturbing by far were the few folks who came back and said they didn’t like to back the consulting revenue model and would be more interested once we were more product-focused. When I’d explain that we had 80%+ of revenue for the past three years coming from the self-service SaaS product, awkward silences would follow. Still, these are investors who likely talk to hundreds of companies each year, so it must be incredibly challenging to keep things straight – and it speaks to our need to move away from consulting in our branding and perception.

The Final Outcome

It’s likely very obvious at this point that we didn’t receive term sheets or offers to fund. In actuality, that’s not technically the case – we did have firms interested, just not a the relatively high pre-money valuation numbers we sought. As you can see in the graphic above, there were a number of VCs who may have offered us terms at a lower valuation, though it’s hard to say for certain.

The reason we went in with a high valuation "ask" goes back to the very beginning of the post. From the founders’ perspective (and those of employee shareholders), an exit has to be judged through the lens of ownership percentages. If I or Gillian or Sarah owned, for example 50% of SEOmoz’s shares (none of us do - this is just an example), in a $20 million exit, we’d make $10 million. If venture capital comes in and dilutes that to 35% ownership, that number drops to $7 million in the same exit scenario. Hence, every owner of SEOmoz shares has a vested interest in seeing the final exit price reach the highest possible figure while maintaining the lowest possible level of dilution.

My understanding is that it’s very unorthodox to present a minimum pre-money valuation to investors prior to a term sheet. I believe this is because you’re potentially "laying too many cards on the table" and you may actually be hurting yourself if the VCs planned to offer a higher pre-money figure. We did it both because we like to be transparent and because we hoped to prevent ourselves from wasting time with investors who couldn’t meet our minimums. Our hope was that by giving that number in the first conversation (over the phone) and in the initial pitch deck, we’d achieve similar results as those we had in the past by publishing our prices for consulting – reduce the target market size and improve the quality.

I tell this story about our VC experience to a lot of people – it seems to be a subject that attracts great curiousity and I, of course, love to share. Most of the time, folks follow up by asking "are you disappointed?" and my answer has been the same since October. I’m not disappointed we didn’t get funded. In fact, the more time passes and the more I think about the pitfalls that could have come with another round of investment, additional board members and pressure to reach $75-$100 million in annual revenue, the more I’m glad we didn’t. However, I do regret the decision to seek funding – it cost our team countless days and weeks of productivity, took our eyes off our primary goal of delighting our members and customers and, in the end, was a learning experience with a shockingly high cost.

That said, I do think we learned a tremendous amount and really helped clarify the vision internally and to our existing board members and investors about where this company is going and what our roadmap looks like. We had dozens of smart, analytical, experienced investors reviewing our plans and ideas, and we received a lot of very positive feedback. Nearly everyone we encountered had positive things to say about the business’ future, regardless of investment, and I’m glad we were able to be in a situation where we could turn venture funding down. I have friends here in Seattle and in the Bay Area who didn’t have that luxury – who HAD to get funded, no matter the cost, because their company’s future and employees depended on it. That’s a burden I don’t wish on anyone, and I hope more and more startups are finding ways to live lean and do more with less.

So, it’s 3:45am and I’ve been working on this post on and off since before the holidays. There’s so much more I want to add, but I think I’ll leave that up to you. If you have questions I can answer, PLEASE post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to incorporate that material into the post as it makes sense. Thanks for all the support, kindness and patience – I hope this has been valuable.

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More and more, search isn’t just a matter of lots of text and ten blue links. Mixed media – think pictures and video – is a big deal. And an important Yahoo executive recently explained how this affects search from the perspective of his company, search engine users, and publishers.

Larry Cornett, Vice President of Product Management and Design for Yahoo Search, said in an interview with Abby Johnson that Yahoo is attempting to create a “personally relevant search experience” for people. The company wants to provide a comprehensive amount of information so that individuals can always find what they’re looking for.

To this end, Yahoo’s introduced a universal header that helps determine users’ intent. It can help direct someone who’s searching for a football player to Yahoo Sports, for example.

Of course, this approach means that publishers should take more than text search results into account. According to Cornett, they need to pay attention to how their brand is portrayed in image and video search results, and on Twitter, too.

Cornett then boiled the matter down to a fairly simple question publishers should ask themselves: “Am I really being represented the way I want to be in every one of these search experiences?”

This guest post was written by Rob Sutton from Ramped Reviews. Image by kharied.

This comes to be a surprise to many, but I hate writing. Every paper in grade school through college was a futile effort in an attempt to pull out my own teeth. I could not stand it and I would do everything in my power not to have to write one more paper. My senior thesis to complete my economics degree was one of the worst experiences of my life. I dreaded every word on the page and had to stretch out every thought just to make it past the minimum page point to graduate. So…with all of these harsh, I’d rather die feelings about writing, how do I throw over 2,000 words a day on a screen for others to read and why is everyone I know surprised that my words now turn into dollars?

We Are Conditioned To Be Boring Writers

Throughout grade school and college, we are basically taught to be boring research paper writers. Unless you were a lit major (and probably even then), every single paper had to be double spaced, 12 point font, researched, cited and with 1 inch margins. As you typed out every content driven sentence, you had your grammar book open researching how you needed to structure every sentence and cite every reference. Really does sound like pulling teeth doesn’t it?!

This is how we wrote…this is how we were taught to write and this is how we were graded. We were in a boring writing cycle as we continued to attempt to make the grade writing about subjects we had little passion on. It was pure torture (at least for this blogger).

Writing was not seen as a form of expression, but a method on which we were ranked against others with defined topics and content.

How Getting An F Makes You A Better Blogger

Blogging is the polar opposite of research paper writing. Blogging is full of feeling and life, but many new bloggers struggle with boring writing as they are conditioned for years to write in a manner that does not speak to their own personality. Readers engage with blogs to step into the world of the blogger and feel that personality and connection…not to find a list of citations at the bottom of the blog article. It is time to fail lit in pursuit of the successful blog! But how do we do it?

Write As You Talk – One of the easiest ways to get over the hurdle of boring blog writing is to type exactly like you talk. After you get all of the words on the Add New Post screen, you can go back and edit/organize. By not worrying if the article is perfect on the first pass, you are able to make sure that your voice rings through and your readers are able to connect with you through your words.

Be Unique and Have Unique Ideas – Much of research paper writing is regurgitating what someone else has already said in your own words and formulating your hypothesis off of those conclusions. You are a blogger…you have an opinion…you can express that opinion and listen to other readers differing opinion. It is a beautiful thing! Conversation among semi-like minded individuals on the Internet without the aid of compound sentence structure and rules. Bring out your unique ideas and be unique yourself to engage in the conversation we call blogging.

Throw Away Conventional Sentence Structure – Some of the sentences in this article would fail me instantly in a written paper during the years I attended school. Now…I am not advocating writing in a way that no one can understand because you do not want to use spell check or construct sentences that actually mean something. But…you can throw in triple periods for the pause effect and have the occasional misspelled word. You can use run ons and fragments to get feeling across in your writing where only rambling and abruptness will work. You can stray away from conventional sentence structure to bring back feeling in your writing. Just make sure your readers can still understand it.

Be Super Descriptive – By being super descriptive in your writing style, you are able to pull your readers into your world. As I sit here listening to the clicks of the keys on the keyboard, I am imaging a day when my head was buried in a 40 pound book just bleeding for that last paragraph that would get me out of the nightmare. I can still smell the pages of the worn out book as I flipped through mindless text gasping at each failed page turn. See what I mean? No citations there…just painting a picture of the even as it unfolds…

Language - Are there slang words that will connect with your readers? How about a certain form of speech? You already know the type of speech that is going to engage your reading population. Your goal is to speak and connect with them, so what better way than to speak in a way they are comfortable with? Often times, this kind of speech writing would fail your paper, but it builds you credibility in your niche as a blogger.

What We Did Learn From Writing In School

Unfortunately, all of that time dreading papers in grade school was not wasted. As much as I hated it, there were certain aspects of that style of writing that we really need to take to heart as bloggers. Without these ideals and foundation, much of our writing would be worthless and unrecognizable.

Content…Content…Content – Remember when you tried to fill space by repeating the same thought in a different way? Your teacher used to crack down on that pretty hard didn’t she! Well…the same holds true in blogging. Many beginning (and experienced) bloggers are sometimes more interested in the word count stat than getting their point across efficiently. Your readers will be able to tell when you are padding up an article just to make it look longer…and they will count off points for that.

Sentence Structure – I know…I just told you to throw away all sentence structure and really go for it in the outside the box writing world, but you can not go too far. Even-though there is the urge to really expand your eclectic writing style, people still need to be able to understand it! You can stray away from the conventional way of writing, but don’t stray off into your own world. If your readers can’t understand what you are saying, they are not coming back.

Keep Your Paragraphs Organized – Typically, teachers back in the day wanted paragraphs around 5-6 sentences with a defined subject and conclusion. While we may stray from that some, there are a lot of bloggers out there that think writing the entire article in one paragraph is a good idea. It is a proven fact that readers digest information much better when it is separated in organized chucks. Keep your paragraphs short and concise. If I see a huge block of words…I go on to the next site. That much content jumbled up looks like too much work to translate.

As You Draft Your Next Blog Post…

Take an honest look at your writing. Are you speaking from the heart or are your feelings getting lost in the type? It is our goal as bloggers to engage and connect with our readers, and nothing kills that connection more than really boring writing. It is time to start thinking outside of the box in the quest to build a better blog and a better life.

This post was written by Robb Sutton. Auther of Ramped Blogging, Ramped Reviews and Ramped Mindset. He blog about blogging tips and lifestyle design at robbsutton.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How Getting An F On Your School Paper Makes You A Better Blogger

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