Since there are now so many different ways for people get to websites, natural search has become increasingly difficult over the past few years. Seth Besmertnik, the CEO of Conductor, talked about this idea with WebProNews and explained what search marketers need to do to leverage the changes.

In past years, SEO focused on content and keywords. However, when Google came along, the game changed. Google introduced links in relation to content and more.

Today, organic search is even more complex with personalization, real-time search, social media, and other new features popping up rapidly. As a result of the complexity, Besmertnik emphasized the need to have a scalable infrastructure that tracks everything.

He said this is critically important for businesses that want to compete in natural search. In addition, businesses that want to find synergies between their marketing efforts need to make sure they make the most of one area before they add more and complicate matters.

Besmertnik used the analogy that “you have to have bricks before you can build a wall.” Ultimately, companies will not be able to successfully blend efforts until each is established.

Most marketers utilize search engine optimization in order to make it easier for customers to find them and, ultimately, buy their products. As search, social media, and public relations become more intertwined, marketers need to understand that journalists are essentially customers as well.

Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, spoke with WebProNews at OMS and explained this idea. It is no secret that all companies want media coverage since it produces credibility, sales, search visibility, and more. So, what can marketers do to get noticed by journalists?

Based on survey conducted by TopRank, 91 percent of reporters, journalists, and editors used Google to help them find contacts in 2008. Of those surveyed, only 27 percent used social media. However, George Washington University and Cision released a report this year showing that 86 percent of the media use blogs and 64 percent use social media.

What does this tell marketers? According to Odden, marketers need to optimize their content in regards to what journalists are looking for. In other words, he suggests including terms such as “expert” and other credentials, specifications, and trends that journalists would use.

Incidentally, the survey found that TV and online journalists were more apt to use social media to find information.

According to Lawrence Coburn, the President of RateItAll, this is an exciting time for search marketers due to new opportunities in search queries. Historically, people would go to a search engine and enter a query. Now however, with a mere tap of a button on a phone, people can send out their location and it acts as a query.

Coburn comes from a user-generated content background and knows that it is not easy to get people to post content. But with check-in applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla, a single tap on a phone creates the content.

These applications tell your friends where you are while also letting Foursquare and Gowalla what places are popular. In addition, this data provides valuable opportunities for advertisers to get involved with location.

What does all this mean for search marketers? Location is important to them because they can build upon the APIs that Foursquare, Gowalla, and other similar applications have. Coburn’s company is even developing a product called DoubleDutch that will allow users to build their own Foursquare and Gowalla if they have a community tied to a specific location.

Because this idea of location as a query is relatively new, there are and will be challenges for search marketers. To help avoid them, Coburn advises marketers to create content around latitude and longitude. If they do this, then when people reveal their location, the marketers will know what to deliver.

How do you feel about using location as a query?

Posted by jennita

The holidays are long over, 2010 is well underway, we’ve already launched a new product, made a big announcement… and it’s barely February! While our amazing development and product teams are busily building new tools as I type (and I’m not even kidding, those guys work a lot), some of us are hitting the road.  For the next couple months, the SEOmoz team will be galavanting across the globe attending, speaking and even keynoting (yea.. is that a word?) at multiple Search Marketing Conferences. Essentially, in the next 45 days there’s an opportunity to see one of us at a city near you… or somewhat near you… or at least in the same country… or possibly the same continent. Anyway,  you get the picture.

Following is a detailed list of where you can find us over the next couple months. Being a part of such an amazing community means the world to us, so please if you’re attending any of these events, stop by and say hello. We’d really love to meet you. (Unless of course you’re a stalker, then make sure to look for either Sam Niccolls or Danny Dover… They’d LOVE to meet you.) Without further ado, here’s the list!

OnlineXcellence – Glasgow – February 12

Kicking off this international tour, Rand will be presenting to business owners and CEOS during a day of SEO training at OnlineXcellence.

SES London – February 15-19

This is the first of many trips to London this year for the mozzers.  SES London is known for having great content, and this year one of my favorite speakers, Avinash Kaushik is giving one of the keynotes. Rand will be attending and speaking at the following sessions:

• PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle
• Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand

OMS San Diego – February 22-25

At OMS San Diego, Rand is organizing a panel of Search Marketing leaders who will be discussing advanced tactics at the SEO 2.0 Leadership Forum. Rand will also be speaking on the panel, "PR, Social Media and Search".

Miva Merchant – San Diego – February 24-26

The mozzers will be camping out in San Diego for a few days! For the Miva Merchant conference, Gillian is speaking on three sessions while Rand is keynoting about SEO on the second day.

SMX West – Santa Clara – March 2-4

This will be my first SMX West and you’ll find me volunteering in the In House Track on day 3. Rand is speaking on the Link Building Fundamentals panel, which looks pretty awesome. I’ll have the flip video camera, so be sure to hunt me down, maybe you’ll make it onto a Whiteboard Friday.

Use the code "smx10seomoz" to get a 10% discount at SMX West!

SphinnConn – Jerusalem – March 4-7

SphinnConn Jerusalem is the first of it’s kind. It sold out quickly and is sure to be an amazing event. Gillian will be speaking at the SEO Fundamentals panel and the Link Building Clinic.

MVIXcon Dubai & Cairo – March 8-11

Gillian is looking forward to addressing a Women in Business group at MVIXcon in Dubai and to a meeting with members of the Royal Family during her visit.

SEMpdx Portland – March 9

Just a skip, hop and a jump from us, we’ll be heading to SEMpdx Portland which has an amazing lineup of speakers. Rand will be speaking on SEO Tools panel and covering both SEOmoz tools as well as others.

InfusionCon – Scottsdale – March 10-12

Scott will be presenting on SEO to this group of small to medium e-businesses at InfusionCon. Also, we’re always interested in learning more about how to most effectively reach new customers, optimize our payment systems, and get better at customer service. Sarah will also be attending!

MountainWest RubyConf – Salt Lake City – March 11-12

The  MountainWest RubyConf is an excellent Ruby conference, which is our preferred dev language at SEOmoz. It will be a good opportunity to meet others doing cool things with the language and to get to know the community more personally.

SXSW Interactive – Austin – March 12-16

Danny Dover will be at SXSW Interactive joining and talking with the literally 10,000s of other attendees. The technology conference is aimed at all things interactive (Websites, Video Games, Movies). It will be a good opportunity to meet website creators who operate outside the sphere of the SEO industry. (Yes they exist, yes they are in Texas)

IMC Calgary – March 16-17

As part of Gillian’s world wide tour 2010, she’ll be speaking at IMC Calgary on the The Power Triumvirate of 2010: The Convergence of Social-Mobile-Local.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SES New York – March 22-26

SES New York is jam-packed with training workshops, sessions and brilliant keynote speakers. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend some time in New York City in March? Rand is speaking on a panel plus Adam and Kate will be attending as well. This might be Kate’s first Search Marketing Conference, so go easy on her folks.

Get 50% off SES NY with the purchase of 1 Year of SEOmoz Pro. Go Pro Now and Save on SES NY!

IMC Stockholm – March 22-25

Gillian will be keynoting at IMC Stockholm, a broad group of entrepreneurs, affiliates, and search marketers.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SMX Munich – March 23-24

Our own rockstar developer Ben, will be speaking at SMX Munich on both a ranking factors panel, as well as a spam issues panel. (Wow, I didn’t even know Ben spoke German!)

The Freemium Summit – The Business of Free – San Francisco – March 26

The Freemium Summit was recommended by Dharmesh Shah as a good conference for folks who have free offerings as an important part of their business plan. Sarah will be attending and it’s a great opportunity to learn and network with other entrepreneurs.

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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 randfish

I ran across this survey data eMarketer released last week and my heart sank:

 

This first chart looks innocent enough. It’s when you look at the next one (from the same report) that things get ugly:

As a CEO, an SEO, a web marketer and a participant in social media, this drives me absolutely crazy. The very last item on the list is "conversions, ROI, etc." If your pulse isn’t pounding, you might need to cut back on the pharmaceuticals.

Absolutely nothing in the analytics world should trump conversions and ROI for "senior marketers" or anyone else who cares about the success of a company. If you’re thinking in terms of time on site or unique page views as primary metrics – metrics you’d describe in a survey as being those you’re "most interested in" – there’s a big problem. The web as a medium is designed to let you capture data beyond number of viewers or engagement level. It lets you track return visits and actions and build sophisticated models that predict what activities will drive up revenue and earnings in the most cost-effective ways. Why let it go to waste?

This report from Forrester suggests that the spend on web marketing has a lot of growth, and social media in particular is poised for exceptional CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). But, I’m tremendously concerned that if marketers obsess over metrics like time on site, unique page views and CTR, they’ll miss out on the real opportunity of all these channels.

ROI should be the ultimate metric – it should be the most important thing on every marketer’s mind for every project and every channel. I’ll grant that prioritizing the projects and investments that have the highest return is challenging, and even the best do it imperfectly. What worries me is that there are marketers who may be taking their cues not from the great analytics data suggesting that, although first-time visits from social media may have low value, over time, they can drive greater brand engagement, predict higher rates of repeat visits and eventually become buyers and brand evangelists, but from the onslaught of press coverage and media attention around social networks.

If you’re taking your clues about where to spend your marketing budget from the media, rather than experiments and data, get ready for disappointment. Likewise, if you’re measuring the wrong thing, you’ll never know the right place to spend those dollars.

The beauty of online channels like SEO, landing page testing, conversion rate optimization, email marketing and, yes, social media is that the data tells a story we can read. So long as we’re willing to hear the message, we can draw the connections to find the traffic sources that cost less and earn more. We can invest in those until the ROI from them diminishes to a point where other channels become viable. But only if we’re paying attention to the metrics that matter.

There have been tools, data and experienced professionals in this field, fighting these fights for over a decade now. Tragically, it seems that we’re in for a long slog.

p.s. We’ve filled up about 600/1,000 spots for Thursday’s PRO webinar on SEO Analytics – feel free to join in

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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 RobOusbey

To make a valuable impact, SEO has to be understood by more than just an organisation’s search marketers. This post suggests how to explain the concepts, and get buy-in, from different people within an organisation.

I’ve chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed:

• Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities.
• Persuade them: once you’ve described SEO, this gives something extra to get them excited about the possibilities of SEO for them / their department, to help get them on side.
• Ask them: I’ve tried to list one particular request you can make to people in each role to benefit the SEO process within your organisation.

In addition, you should remember to give back to each of these stakeholders. There’ll be some metric, data or graphs that will demonstrate to them the ongoing effect they are having on the project, how it has benefited the organisation as a whole, and (for bonus points) how their role has benefited from SEO success. Inspiring people in this way leads to their ongoing commitment, and a successful organisation full of motivated, happy people.

CEO

• Their role: Responsible for the whole company; interested in the ‘big picture’ and needs to be able to justify decisions and costs to the board and shareholders.
• Persuade them: SEO gives a competitive advantage in attracting visitors and customers. Though it requires an initial push of effort, and ongoing resource, the work will show a demonstrable ROI, they’ll be provided with regular figures for the board about the profit generated by SEO efforts.
• Ask them: if there are any questions or objections they have, so that you can answer / resolve them. It can be important to get senior management to understand and appreciate online marketing, both so that they can approve investment in it and so that they will enthuse about & promote the project internally.

CTO

• Their role: Responsible for developing technology within the organisation and we’ll assume in this case responsible for the organisation’s website and online development.
• Persuade them: There is a large technical aspect to optimising a website for search engines – lots of information is available (both officially from the search engines, and recommendations from third parties) but there is work to be done in adapting this best-practice advice to the organisation’s unique needs. However, it’s not an entirely technical process, and much of the ongoing work will be done ‘off-site’, by those in the advertising / promotions teams.
• Ask them: to assign a proportion of their team’s time to SEO – ideally including members from both web development and R&D departments.

Web Designer

• Their role: Designing the look and branding of the organisation’s website
• Persuade them: Designing websites that will adhere to SEO principles need not be a significant constraint. There’s a significant overlap between designing human-usable and SEO-friendly sites, and many of the most well designed & stylish sites follow the appropriate guidelines.
• Ask them: to spend time talking to developers and SEOs about design practices that may harm or hamper SEO, and use this knowledge in their online design work.

Web Developer

• Their role: To turn designs for web pages into code which can be published online.
• Persuade them: By following some relatively straight forward (and typically common-sense) practices when writing code, developers have a vital role in creating pages that can be easily read and understood by search engines. They’ll see the impact of their work very visibly, as pages from the site get indexed and returned in appropriate search results.
• Ask them: to read lots! They can start with SEOmoz’s guides and blog posts (espec. pages from the technical issues category) and should print out the web developer’s SEO cheat sheet. Also, remind them that as easy at this basic best-practice stuff is, lots of people do get it wrong, so they should be prepared to get mad-props from their SEO colleagues for not fouling up this stuff as much as some of the competitors.

Sales Manager

• Their role: In commercial organisations, they’re responsible for the journey through the funnel from enquiry to sale.
• Persuade them: We can use data from the website and experience from the SEO community to target phrases which will generate visits & enquiries from the people most likely to convert into a sale. Their feedback about new enquiries and leads, combined with analytics data, will help tailor the products/services and marketing messages to minimise poor lead for the team and maximise sales profit.
• Ask them: to help with keyword research by giving you the words and phrases that potential customers use to describe their problems or to ask for product types.

Marketing Manager

• Their role: Responsibilities can include product development, advertising, press and promotion.
• Persuade them: Highly ethical SEO can be undertaken by following all the marketing best practices they’re familiar with. Giving a positive experience before and after purchase, creating and fostering conversations around the brand, getting coverage on trusted websites, etc can all contribute to improved rankings. In addition, search engine marketing produces very clear returns in terms of number of visitors, their activity on the site and purchases made / revenue generated – so they’ll be able to demonstrate value and justify ongoing investment in this activity.
• Ask them: to get up to speed on the importance of inbound links, and discover ways that their teams’ activities can help to generate links.

Content Editor

• Their role: Responsibilities may include any of creating, commissioning, editing and publishing content on the site.
• Persuade them: As well as being able to attract more visitors to your content, we can use SEO insights to help generate ideas for new site content that could be particularly successful. We can produce guidelines for your writers to help their content be more successful in search engines, and we can provide statistics that show how successful different pieces of content or different writers have been, to help inspire them to create more great content.
• Ask them: to review analytics and link data with you, to look at what has been particularly successful (in terms of total traffic, links and search traffic) and to try creating copy and content that is more SEO targeted. In addition, talk to them about writing great headlines and about linkbait’ show how their team can create content that goes wild on social networks and gets loads of links.

Community / Outreach Manager

• Their role: Responsible for the organisation’s relationships with individuals on and/or off the site, often with a view to generating conversation about the brand.
• Persuade them: By reaching out to people elsewhere online and encouraging them to mention us & link to the site, you / your team will increase the strength and trust of the site – this increases its ability to receive traffic for relevant search terms. Using tools such as Linkscape, we can show the value of every link you create and help you find new opportunities for outreach and linkbuilding.
• Ask them: to try requesting links from a few people they have close relationships with. Demonstrate how to find new places and people to reach out to and reasons to contact them (such as sharing content, offering resources, writing guest content, offering prizes etc.)

More

Every organisation has different roles, and the roles may have different responsibilities, but this gives some idea of the ways you might persuade different people that they can contribute to and benefit from SEO.

Feel free to use the comments to share any particular advice you have for explaining & promoting SEO internally. If you have any particular objections that come up, do mention them and we’ll see if we can come up with suitable responses.

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Although storyteller marketing is a form of traditional marketing, it is also a critical part of Internet marketing. WebProNews spoke with Dana Todd of Newsforce about the why it is especially important for search marketers to utilize this effective method.

According to Todd, storyteller marketing has been somewhat abandoned due to the short-sided nature of performance marketing. Most search marketers think in terms of click-to-click or campaign-to-campaign, but storyteller marketing takes a bigger commitment.

Todd recommends that marketers look at communication goals and understand what they want people to believe about their business. Once that is determined, marketers can then develop a storyline with those goals integrated into their brand.

Next, Todd says marketers need to commit to that storyline for a minimum of three years. While this doesn’t mean using the same ad over and over, it does mean building and developing the storyline in a variety of ways.

Storyteller marketing is a powerful way to connect with people, so why not utilize it?

Site Logic’s Matt Bailey isn’t sick of Twitter, he’s just tired of marketers telling their clients they HAVE to be there.  Same with Facebook and whatever other ‘next big thing’ comes down the road.

At the 2009 Chicago SES, Abby Johnson caught up with Matt Bailey who shared his perspective on social media marketing and it’s relative importance to the overall marketing mix.

Bailey feels like businesses feel an unwarranted pressure to ‘get someone on Facebook or Twitter’ without fully understand why they are doing it – aside from the fact that some marketing expert told them they needed to.

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