Posted by randfish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by RobOusbey

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

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

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

Competitors and Benchmarking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry Assessment

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

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

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

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

Actions

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

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

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

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

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

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

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

Do you like this post? Yes No

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

Do you like this post? Yes No

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.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by great scott!

Last week we unveiled our newest toy, Open Site Explorer, to the world and the response was phenomenal. Now we want to take some time and really show everyone just what this powerful link analysis tool is capable of and answer your questions, so we’re hosting not one, but two FREE Webinars this week (it’s the same content, run twice to help accomodate schedules and time zones).

The presentations will be 60 minutes each, 25 minutes of slides, followed by 35 minutes of Q+A on Wednesday, January 27th at 2:00PM (PST), and Thursday, January 28th at 10:00AM (PST)  In each live webinar, Rand will show you around Open Site Explorer, offer tips and strategies for getting the most out of it, explain our new Domain Authority & Page Authority metrics, and answer your questions.

Here’s the catch: each webinar is limited to 1,000 attendees. The last time we announced a webinar on the blog, we had over 3,000 people try to register in the first hour, so if you want to attend one of the live sessions, register quickly. If you can’t make it, we’ll have a recording of the presentation available in a couple of days on our webinars page.

---

Looooove Webinars and can’t get enough of ‘em? Then you should totally become a PRO Member! In the last couple of months we’ve started running regular webinars just for PRO Members and they’ve been really popular.

In February we’re stepping it up even more. In addition to our monthly educational webinar (February 4th on Analytics), we’re adding a second monthly webinar where we’ll be performing live site reviews of sites submitted by our PRO Members!

PRO Members can head over to the PRO Webinars page for more info on February’s webinars, as well as recordings and slide decks from past webinars. If you’d like to join us for the next PRO Webinar–and possibly even get a live site review–sign up for PRO to access the PRO Webinar page for registration details or just watch your inbox for an invite.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by great scott!

This week we’ve got a special Whiteboard Friday double feature! As you’ve probably heard, we launched our new link checker and backlink analysis tool, Open Site Explorer, this week and it makes use of some exciting new metrics: Domain Authority and Page Authority. We asked our old chum, Will Critchlow, to talk to Rand about these metrics to help everyone understand what they are, what goes into them, how to use them, and why we created them.

In Part One, Will and Rand discuss how to use these metrics to gain insight and intelligence on your (and your competitors’) pages, domains, and link profiles, as well as why these metrics can be a better predictor of ranking success than others that you may have used in the past.

In Part Two, the guys dive into detail about what exactly goes into Domain Authority & Page Authority: how they were modeled, how they compare to actual search results, why your DA & PA scores may change over time, and lots of other details to help you better understand how these metrics work.

Both videos are viewable below, simply select the one you’d like to watch from the playlist on the right of the player. I’d recommend watching them in order, but it’s not necessary.

These new metrics have already been quite popular among users of Open Site Explorer, and one of the big questions is, "When can I get them in the SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar?!"  Well, surprise, surprise, we’re on top of it! They’ll be available in the new toolbar update coming out next month…here’s a sneak peek

 

New scores, new features and much more are on their way in the February version of the mozbar

If you’ve got questions about Domain or Page Authority, please leave us feedback below. We’re trying to make these metrics as useful and valuable as possible and would love your suggestions.

Do you like this post? Yes No

A Guest Post by Warren Davies from GenerallyThinking.com.

It’s pretty clear that if we want to be pro bloggers, we can’t rely purely on producing fantastic content. We have to optimise our pages for search engines, build backlinks from relevant sources, as well as putting our heart and soul into our content to make it as valuable as possible for the reader.

But what if the reader gets what they want from the post and then leaves? Well, that’s nice of us to solve their problem, but it’s not going to help us earn the money and freedom we want!

We need to entice first time visitors further into our blogs, expose them to its different areas and articles, make them feel like a kid in a candy store when they see all the information inside!

One way we can do this is through a landing page analysis – to see which pages people are landing on, checking the metrics for these pages, and then optimising them so that they are better placed to convert first time visitors into regular readers. Here’s a 4 step plan.

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content -> Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. These are the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through. Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at another page on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (or not) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’re missing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. This is vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential to converting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

• Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is it significantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so, it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the question they had when they clicked through.
• Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve this article: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, and don’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, a simple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can be useful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post, to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.
• Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Are people mostly finding the article through Google images? This might account for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise the article. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe you want to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it more appealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design is unattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on the page. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other content on your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in and category list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax your reader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may want to use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page. Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, and you can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Step 4 – Check Results

One week should be a good enough time frame to compare the before and after effects. Going back to Google Analytics, bring up the Content Detail page for the entrance article you’ve been playing with. Set the date for the week leading up to the day you edited the page (but not including that day). Copy and paste the stats into a text editor or Excel; the main ones you’re interested in are Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit %. Then set the date for the seven days after you optimsed the article. Again, copy and paste the results, and compare.

How did you do? If you were successful, you may have seen an increase in the Time on Page – although maybe not – but certainly a decrease in the Bounce Rate and Exit %. This would indicate that more readers are looking further into your site – congratulations!

What if there was no difference? Then go back to step 2. Conduct further research on how you might improve the page. Ensure you have links to other content on your blog, and that the wording of your article makes these links seem like essential further reading.

What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate?

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all figure to aim for. It depends on many factors. A bounce could mean the visitor literally only wanted one piece of information, and left because they got it. The ambiguity of the keyword you’re targeting will be important. If you’re getting a high bounce rate from an 8-word keyphrase, it’s probably a worse situation than the same bounce rate for a 2-word keyphrase. Your domain name could play a role too – ‘Problogger’ is pretty clear, but would an article on, say, ‘marketingtips’ be specific to blogging, or to offline marketing? Maybe you’d have to read it to find out.

Having said that, bounce rates over 80% generally mean there’s work to be done.

Landing Page Analysis – A Case Study

I performed a landing page analysis analysis on GenerallyThinking.com, my psychology blog. My top landing page by far was my post on personal strengths and weaknesses. This article proved hugely successful with search engines, and accounts for 25% of the overall traffic of the site! However, the bounce rate and time on page were dismal, as you can see below:

• Time on Page – 00:01:35
• Bounce Rate – 86.67%
• Exit % – 82.98%

I ran a WP-Poll asking what people were looking for at the bottom of the page, and got no results. I put it to the top of the page, and got a few replies, but still not many. Clearly, people weren’t reading to the bottom – there was a need unfulfilled. The data I collected from the poll indicated that people wanted more information on strengths than I was offering – the article was too focused on weaknesses.

So, I ripped out the section on how to manage and work around your weaknesses completely, and posted it as a new article. Then I re-wrote the post as a portal, giving a basic overview of personal strengths and weaknesses, including how and why they could be identified – but not giving too much away. I preferred to point to other articles on my site that cover these topics in depth.

I uploaded the new page, waited, and then tested the results as described above. Here they are:

• Time on Page – 00:02:31
• Bounce Rate – 66.67%
• Exit % – 66.20%

Fantastic! Time on Page increased by a minute, bounce rate reduced by 20% and Exit % reduced by nearly the same amount. A little more tweaking and playing with images might improve things further.

(By the way, if Darren will forgive the flagrant self-promotion that article’s worth a read actually – what successful entrepreneur would say personal development is not an important part of their craft?)

How much could you improve your site by performing an entrance analysis? Remember – don’t make assumptions; test and measure everything!

Warren Davies is a positive psychology student at the University of East London, who runs a psychology blog at GenerallyThinking.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Perform a Landing Page Analysis on your Blog

Share This

This morning I glanced down at the Alexa traffic indicator for ProBlogger in my Firefox browser and noticed that in the last week I’ve had a noticeable upswing in traffic to ProBlogger.

At first I couldn’t think of why this might have been. In the last 7 days none of my posts have gone viral around the web – no big site has linked up – nothing much has changed.

I clicked through to Aweber to see if the chart there was any different. It similarly showed an upswing in traffic.

Perhaps it is just one of those Aweber ‘glitches’ that happens every now and again – so I checked my site metrics and the same upswing was reflected there. Traffic was up a bit over 30% on normal over the week.

I dug down further to see which post drew in all the traffic thinking that perhaps one went viral while I slept one night and then returned to normal – but there was nothing abnormal. All of the posts in the last week had normal kind of traffic – hmmmm.

As I continued to ponder I realised that the upswing wasn’t due to any one post – it was simply due to the fact that last week I posted 13 posts instead of my normal 7-8. The increased number of posts wasn’t a strategic move – it was just that there were more stories to cover during the week with a few breaking news stories.

I guess the take home lesson is that an increase in posting frequency can lead to an increase in traffic.

Of course it isn’t quite as simple as just doubling your posts and seeing an automatic increase in traffic. A few things to keep in mind are:

• This will be more the case for a site with existing subscribers than a new one – increased numbers of posts means your subscribers are being presented with more options for things to read – increasing their chance of finding something that fits their needs.
• Of course increasing your post frequency too much and too quickly can annoy some of your subscribers. Keep in mind that when I surveyed readers on why they unsubscribe to blogs that the #1 reason given was too many posts.
• The key is to keep your posts relevant, on topic and useful. If you do want to increase your post levels you probably should also do it a little gradually. I got away with 13 posts last week instead of 8 like the week before but if I’d posted much more than that in the week I’m sure I would have got some push back from readers. Don’t suddenly decide to be like some of the big tech blogs and push out 20 posts in a day unexpectedly!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Increase Traffic 30% in a Week

Share This

Google today announced a new feature that impacts bloggers – a new URL shortener that integrates with Feedburner and a new ’socialize’ feature on Feedburner.

This allows bloggers to use Feedburner to send Tweets out automatically via Feedburner.

Of course most bloggers already have tweets going out to promote new blog posts by using either a plugin or a service like TwitterFeed.

Feedburner give you a number of options – including the ability to tweet out just the title or include some of the body (or only the body), adding hashtags (based upon your category), adding something before or after the title, filtering (to stop some new posts going out) – and limiting how many tweets go out.

Get more help and details on setting up your Feedburner account here.

In many ways it is pretty similar to what a lot of the other alternatives give you for this type of thing – but it is good to be able to have it all managed from one account. I’ll also be interested to see how Google/Feedburner integrate this into their Analysis/metrics (ie to see if they can measure clicks on their URL shortened links accurate – I’m not seeing any mention of this but it would seem like a logical extension).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Google Add Socialize Feature to Feedburner – Tweet Your New Blog Posts from Feedburner

Share This

Posted by randfish

Thanks so much for all your votes and feedback on our PRO Webinar Series over the holiday weekend. We received 285 responses and we’re taking your suggestions very seriously and conducting the webinar as you’ve requested

Here are the stats from the questionairre/form (you can still fill it out if you’d like to give more input):

Will you be able to attend the PRO Webinar on Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London)?

• 74% – Yes, I’m planning to attend!
• 20% – I’m unsure if I can make it (but would like to)
• 6% – No, I’m busy at that time (but would like to join in others in the future)
• 0% – I’m not attending (because I’m not a fan of webinars or uninterested in the subject matter)

What topics most interest you for the webinar (check all that apply)?

• 79% – Link Building & Link Acquisition
• 51% SEO Metrics, Analytics and Key Performance Indicators
• 44% – Social Media Marketing for SEO
• 41% – Keyword Research Tools & Processes
• 40% – Navigation & Site Architecture for SEO
• 35% – Content Creation & Optimization
• 24% – Avoiding Spam, Penalties & Filters
• 20% – Incenting UGC & User Participation for SEO

What webinar format would you prefer?

• 47% – 45 min. presentation, 45 min. Q+A (90 min. total)
• 37% – 30 min. presentation, 30 min. Q+A (60 min. total)
• 12% – 30 min. presentation, 60 min. Q+A (90 min. total)
• 4% – All Q+A (60 min. total)

Based on this, we’re going to be running a 90 minute webinar, with a 45 minute slide deck presentation (and possibly video as well, though it will likely just be of me on the webcam) from 11am – 12:30pm Pacific (2pm – 3:30pm Eastern, 7pm-8:30pm London) on Thursday December 10th. The webinar will cover the following rough outline (obviously, in more detail):

• Link Building Strategies for 2010
• What Goals Can Link Building Help Us Achieve?
  • Bolster Individual Rankings
  • Improve a Domain’s Ability to Rank Pages
  • Achieve Full(er) Indexation
  • Drive Direct Traffic & Branding
• The 8 Basic Link Building Food Groups (with examples)
  • Manual Link Submissions/Requests
  • Competitive Link Research + Acquisition
  • Links via Embedded Content
  • Content Based, Linkbait & Viral Link Attraction
  • Content, Technology & API Licensing
  • Link Exchanges & Trades-in-Kind
  • Paid Links
  • Link Reclamation
• What are the Right Kinds of Links to Accomplish my Goals?
  • Links for Individual Rankings
  • Links for Domain "Authority"
  • Links for Indexation
  • Links for Traffic & Branding
• How to Use Tools & Processes to Make Link Building Easier
  • Tools for Competitive Link Research
  • Metrics for Evaluating a Link’s Value
  • Building a Link Acquisition Process (i.e. the "Link Conversion Funnel")
  • Making Processes Scalable
• Link Building Shortcuts to Take (and Avoid)
  • How to Get Your Community Link Building for You
  • How to Get the Anchor Text and Target You Want
  • How to Avoid Links that You Think Are Helping Your Competition (but really aren’t)
  • How to Spot Strategies that the Engines May Devalue
• Wrap-Up / Q+A

I’m certainly open to feedback about what you’d like to see in there, and happy to make some inclusions where possible. All PRO members will receive an invite via email in the next 2-3 days with a link to register. You’ll be able to dial-in or hear the webinar via your computer speakers/headphone and ask questions via a chat interface. You can see an examples of a past presentation I’ve made below:

This lengthy one came from my HostingCon keynote and serves as a fun introduction to SEO (BTW – let me strongly recommend against creating slide decks using photos of a whiteboard; it’s fun and the audience likes it, but it took about 12 solid hours of surprisingly intensive whiteboard drawing and erasing, nevermind the editing, cropping and pasting):

I’m very much looking forward to spending the morning with our PRO members next week! If you’re not yet PRO, Scott’s got some pretty sweet offers still available including the SES Chicago ticket + 1 year of PRO for $799 (and you can trade in the Chicago pass for any SES event in 2010) and the Advanced Training DVD for PRO members at $199.

Note that the other topics that received lots of votes – SEO Metrics & KPIs, Social Media Marketing, etc. will likely be the topics for webinars in January, February and March.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Newer Posts »