Since SEO is constantly changing, how can SEOs determine the most important areas of focus? As Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing tells WebProNews, the foundation has to be strong in order to be built upon.  For this reason, he believes the fundamentals are critical to SEO success.

Content is just one of the fundamental areas of SEO. Not only is the content itself important, but the structure of the content is also important. Bailey says content needs to be scalable, readable, and allow users to understand the content on the rest of the page by simply looking at the headline. This is significant because numerous studies show that the majority of people scan content instead of reading it.

There have been many recent debates pertaining to long content versus short content. People often say they tried blogging, Facebook, or Twitter and found that they didn’t work. However, Bailey believes users need to examine their efforts to see if they are utilizing them correctly.

“The what is going to change daily. The why will never change,” he says.

He goes on to say that if you have a purpose, the “what” doesn’t matter and can always be applied.

Marketers also struggle with the challenge of creating content for both users and search engines. Bailey says the key to this dilemma is in the analytics. For example, it is very possible to have the right ranking with the wrong page. As a result, marketers need to look at their analytics to see which metrics work. He tells WPN that marketers can celebrate when they determine what is profitable, not when they rank high.

Although there will be many more changes for SEO, the job of driving people to a destination will always be constant.

Are you focusing on getting the fundamentals right or are you distracted by the “shiny, new object syndrome”?

Posted by Danny Dover

Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google’s Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

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Whether it’s from Twitter, Facebook, email or comments here on the blog, almost every day we get some sort of request for a Chrome Toolbar. We knew there was a high need for it, and wanted to make sure that we didn’t rush and put together something unmozworthy. The new toolbar is pretty baller if I do say so myself (which I just did). It works very similarly to a toolbar in Firefox where it displays across the top of the screen, but with the ability to easily drop it down to the bottom of the page as well.

The new Chrome toolbar has most of the same features as the Firefox edition, but if you want to learn more… please keep reading.

 

So How Does This Help Me?

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1. Search Results Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

 
 

"I get the best ‘feel’ for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I’m familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." –Will Critchlow

2. Quickly find important SEO information with the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay provides quick access to useful data points which include:

• On-page Optimization Elements – All of the essential SEO on-page elements (title tag, meta description, meta robots, rel canonical) are in one place.
• Location Data – As local search becomes more important, the value of information like server location increase.
• Google cache – Want to see exactly what Google saw when it’s bot crawled a given site. The link to Google’s cache will get you there.

 

"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it’s using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using ‘view source’ and searching through code; overlay FTW!" –Rand Fishkin

3. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain information.

 

What if I find a bug?

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Reporting Bugs

The best way to report bugs is to e-mail us at customerservice(at symbol)seomoz.org. This is the quickest way to get into our development queue.

Known Issues

1. The toolbar overlays some of the page content. We attempted to inject the CSS into the page and push down the page content, but this ended up breaking some useful sites (like Twitter) so we overlay the page instead , but do now offer the ability to display the toolbar at the bottom of the page, which should hopefully help, when you’ve just got to see the Facebook nav.

2. Because of the way the toolbar is rendered as part of the page, it only shows up when the page loads, so if the toolbar is turned on while other windows already have loaded content, you will need to click refresh to see the toolbar. Unfortunately, this is also the case when you open a new chrome window, since chrome shows cached content on open to appear faster.

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We hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to post feedback in the comments below.

 

Not yet a Chrome fan? Still plugging away in good ol’ Firefox? Well we haven’t forgotten about you! You were our first love, and can still be downloaded here.

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Posted by Oli Gardner

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear: 

“My name is Earl. My conversion rate sucks, and I can’t stop sending expensive PPC traffic to my homepage.”

Feel better? You should.

You just passed the “unofficial” first test of landing page rehab, and now you’re ready to take 12 little steps that’ll lift you from that river in Egypt (denial?!?) to a higher place on the conversion charts. This is the intervention your landing pages have been crying out for, so take a deep breath… and let’s get started.

Study the 12-step infographic to see where each step in the program should be applied to the conversion funnel.

(Click to image view full size)

View Full size version  |  Download a poster sized version (24"x13")

MEASURING YOUR PROGRESS – THE CONVERSION SCORECARD

Before we begin, we need a quick breathalyzer test to get some baseline metrics in place and measure how effective your treatment program is. The conversion scorecard can be used whether you’re using a standalone landing page for your marketing campaigns or sending traffic directly to a page on your website (homepage, shopping cart or registration page) – although it is geared slightly more towards the standalone variety.

(Click to view or print the full size graphic with the complete set of 20 questions on it.)

Scoring your page
Answer each of the 20 questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The goal is simply to get a ballpark sense of how good your page is. Then take all of the “No” responses and create a “To Do List” of things to improve on your page. You’ll find some guidance and tips for making these improvements as you follow the 12-step program below.

Remember that after you leave the rehab clinic and have made some positive changes to your conversion funnel, you should revisit the scorecard to measure your improvements.

View and print out the full sized Conversion Scorecard

STARTING THE 12-STEP PROGRAM

STEP 1 – Use a Separate Landing Page for each Inbound Traffic Source  

The principles of inbound marketing are founded on facilitating multiple streams of traffic. Examples include PPC, email, banner ads and social media. There are two key reasons why you should be using a separate landing page for each source:

• Each inbound medium has it’s only unique style and limitations. Using separate pages allows you to sync up the visual and tonal qualities  with the source. Email for instance can contain a lot more information that a tweet, so the amount of extra information your landing page needs to communicate is inherently different. Imagine also that one of your inbound streams suddenly requires a different offer (perhaps a 20% discount for an affiliate) – with only one page you would have to show this change to all inbound sources.
• With measurement comes accountability. With separate funnel flows, you can measure the effectiveness of each inbound stream and focus your efforts on the one(s) that convert the best.

Doctors Orders: Start thinking of each inbound source as it’s own mini campaign. You want to have multiple rivers bringing boats to your port (rather than many tributaries feeding one river). Print out the ads for each inbound source (PPC, email, banners, social media) and spend time observing their differences – size, tone, language and visual weight. This will help you design appropriate landing pages.   

STEP 2 – A/B Test Your Landing Pages

A/B testing is the process of splitting your traffic between a series of pages to see which performs the best. Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com is a fun site that shows examples of A/B tests and lets you pick which version you think would produce the highest conversion rate.

On a corporate level, testing helps to remove conjecture and subjective argument from the boardroom and is a great way of understanding your customers (which messaging and design do they respond to best). It should be done as an iterative process – think evolution vs. revolution.

FACT: Your landing page can always be better. Just like a plant, it needs ongoing attention for best results.

Some online tools/services for testing:

• Unbounce (landing page platform including self serve A/B) – disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Unbounce
• Liveball (A/B & Multivariate)
• Google Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate)
• Visual Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate)

Doctors Orders: Take the plunge and get a tool set up so you are at least able to start testing your landing pages. Then the fun part of trying new ideas and experimenting can come.

STEP 3 – Match Your Landing Page Message to the Upstream Ad

If the primary headline of your landing page doesn’t match the copy on your ad you’ll be getting a lot of action on your browser’s back button. As an example, consider the following:

Bad message match
Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro
Landing page message: Welcome to Bobby’s Computer Store
  
Good message match
Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro
Landing page message: Get 20% off a Macbook Pro at Bobby’s Computer Store

Seems obvious right? The problem is that most inbound traffic gets sent to company homepages where the messaging is necessarily generic. Using a targeted standalone landing page is key to reinforcing the customer’s belief that they made a “good click”. You will also get a better quality score and thus a lower cost-per-click from Google AdWords if your message match is strong (this extends to the entire content on the page which should be congruent with the headline message).

Bonus tip: If you are driving social media traffic, you can enhance the “social message match” by including an appropriate social icon on your landing page to further reinforce the connection between the source and destination.

Doctors Orders: Learning to construct your campaigns in the right order can help you ensure good message match. Start with a concept based on communicating your product/service/offer to your target market. Come up with your promotional headline and landing page content, then work on a series of ads that closely match the headline. If you do it the other way round (ad first), you are forced into building from what might be the wrong foundation. 

STEP 4 – Context of Use
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A better picture is one where your product or service is shown being used in context. Salespeople will tell you to sell the fire, not the fire extinguisher – the point being that you need to illustrate the need in order to develop desire for the solution.

Effective landing pages use photography and video to provide evidence of how your product or service solves a real problem.

A statement like “Our vacuum cleaner is so powerful it can suck up a bag of nails” beside a stock photo of the product against a white background is far less likely to convert than a video showing (and letting you hear) the vacuum cleaner actually doing the job. An example using photography could show a fold-up ladder in two states. Being tucked into a small cupboard by it’s owner, and then extended to show the owner reaching onto high shelves to retrieve something. Simply showing it in it’s intended context of use will improve your sales. 

Would you really have bought a ShamWow without seeing it in action?

Doctors Orders: Take your product or service and actually use it for real (you’d be surprised how many people haven’t even used the item they’re selling). This will help you to understand and visualize how it should be presented in your photography and videos. If it’s an online tool, try observing someone else using it.

STEP 5 – Use Videos to Increase Engagement & Conversions

According to a study by eyeviewdigital.com, the use of video can increase your conversions rates by as much as 80%. By providing users with a passive engagement mechanism you can keep them on your page longer allowing your brand message to seep into their subconscious.

Warning: don’t just throw up a poorly animated Powerpoint presentation – nobody will watch it.

If you are peddling a physical product, show people using it as mentioned in step 4. If it’s an online tool, provide a demo of the primary features while narrating the benefits of it’s use (don’t show every step, make it a highlight reel). If you offer a service, put yourself front and center and communicate directly with your viewers. Make eye contact for maximum engagement and make use of directional cues to guide them to your intended conversion goal. Great videos do this by having the host look and point outside the frame towards other elements on the page – bringing the whole page into the experience.

Usability best practices say to never auto play a video as the audio shock can make people hit the back button immediately, especially if they are in a sound sensitive environment – like most offices. However, this is something you should test on your visitors. My advice if you want to start the video automatically would be to at least allow a shot delay before it starts, and make the controls very obvious in case someone wants to mute or pause the video.

(This is a decent example of a nice pause and transition into video – http://raw.glow.com/dms1825/ – warning: the alerts when you try to leave the page aren’t so nice).

Doctors Orders:  If you don’t use video yet, plan to start soon. For online product demos, try recording a screencast using software like Jing. It’s really simple and cost effective. Once you get a feel for it you can upgrade to more elaborate tools with stronger editing and post-production features. Audio is very important – write a script before you record so you’re not bumbling your way through and try to use an external mic for better quality. 

STEP 6 – Use Directional Cues to Lead the Way

Imagine an airport without the expertly placed wayfinding signs and maps – it would be chaos. If you’ve visited the emergency room at a hospital, you might be familiar with the colored lines they paint on the floor to take you to different departments – follow the yellow brick road. These are examples of directional cues, which can be broken down into explicit and implicit (both of those were explicit).

Directional cues are used on landing pages to guide the visitor to your call to action. Here are some examples of ways to do this:

• Graphical arrows: Take a look at the header area of the lead gen form on this landing page template. When you add a lead gen form to your page, the call to action button is often pushed below the fold. Here, the arrow lets you know that the point of interaction can be found directly below that area.
• Whitespace: Don’t cramp the style of your CTA. Resist the temptation to fill in every pixel of your page, instead give your buttons plenty of room to breathe.
• Color: Classic colors for buttons include blue (link color) and orange. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that it stands out clearly from the rest of the page (e.g. don’t make your button blue if your page has a blue background).
• Contrast: This is essentially the same as the point about color (but thinking in terms of black and white or tonal range).
• Eye direction: It’s been shown that when using photos of people (or animals), that you can improve conversion by having them look at your intended call to action. It makes sense. If you see someone looking up at the sky while you’re walking down the street, the chances are you’ll follow their gaze in case you’re missing something important.
• Interruption: Surprise is an excellent way to get someone’s attention. Breaking established design boundaries gives reason to pause and observe. Boo!
• Encapsulation: Think of binoculars or the viewfinder on a camera and how they focus your vision. You can construct similar experiences using shapes and contrast. Think about archways, holes and windows for inspiration.
• Pathways: Roads or the earlier example from the hospital floor are examples of pathways. You can use background design elements (lines with arrows generally) to walk someone round your page in the order you prefer.

For a more exhaustive study of the effects of directional cues, I wrote a post that uses photography to illustrate each of the methods above: Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages.

Doctors Orders: Learn to point. It might be considered rude in some cultures, but in conversionland it’s actively encouraged. Make the intended action of your page as obvious as possible – subtlety is for shy folks. Add at least one directional cue to an existing landing page. If your design is quite restrictive, you can try breaking the visual boundaries by placing an arrow outside of the page edge, pointing in towards your CTA – this disruptive visual tactic can be very effective at directing eyeballs.

STEP 7 – Find the Optimal Balance of Data vs. Conversion Rate

Lead generation is about two things – the size of the barrier (how long, personal or complicated the form is) and the size of the prize (what you are giving away in return for the data). If these are out of proportion you risk losing customers.

It’s a delicate balance to achieve: make the form too long and people walk away from the perceived effort, make the questions off-topic or too personal and you wind up with false data. Conversely, if the form is too short you can skew your leads towards those just seeking a freebie instead of real, determined and relevant customers. It can also result in you not being able to qualify your leads accurately.

The other factor that complicates all of this is the giveaway you are offering. If your eBook, coupon or webinar isn’t good enough to warrant the information you are asking for folks will bounce. For a webinar registration keep the info to a bare minimum – name, email and maybe company and role if it’s B2B. If you’re giving away an eBook, it needs to be one of two things: significant in size or significant in it’s exclusive data content. Above all, quality is what counts. You can tease people into completing your form to get your super awesome whitepaper, but if it turns out to be smoke and mirrors, you’ll have a lead that’s disappointed and likely to unsubscribe immediately.   

Doctors Orders: This is where A/B testing becomes really useful. Set up multiple versions of your form and test them to find where the balance lies. Is it acceptable to remove a few questions in order to get more leads? Does your conversion rate even get affected by the addition of extra questions. Only testing with your target audience can answer these questions.

STEP 8 – Be Honest About Your Writing & Edit Ruthlessly

Never publish the first thing you write. Unless you are in the business of reportage poetry (I may have just made that name up). Campaigns and their associated messaging need to be refined over time through testing but also through editing. Steve Krug (author of the classic usability book “Don’t Make Me Think”) made the best observation on the subject I’ve heard: delete 50% of your page content, then throw away half of what’s left.

Doctors Orders: Try removing 2 sentences from the main body of copy on your landing page. I bet it won’t hurt as much as you think. If you have 5 bullet points, try going with the 3 most important ones. Keep deleting extraneous words and redundant phrases until your copy is as tight as a Scotsman being asked to pay a bar tab. Like everything you change on your pages, you should make your edits on a duplicate page and run an A/B test to verify if it produces higher conversions.

STEP 9 – Make it Easy to Share

The impulse to share content can be fleeting, so don’t make people work for it. While not applicable to all landing pages, those with special offers or special content (perhaps a great video) – should have a simple way for people to spread the word for you.

There are two great ways to make this work:

1. Use Twitter @Anywhere to add widgets that allow people to tweet your offer. Make it part of the contest rules that they follow you and tweet your message in exchange for entry into the contest (free marketing).
2. Place sharing widgets such as retweet buttons on your confirmation pages (see step 12 for more on this)

Doctors Orders: Design for your audience. If you’re driving Twitter traffic, retweet buttons are familiar and easy to use. The beauty of Twitter @Anywhere components is that they utilize Ajax style interaction and don’t take you away from the page. Similarly if you are funneling Facebook traffic, add a “Like” button to the page. Most Facebook’ers are logged in all the time and the button will add your landing page into their timeline with a single click. 

STEP 10 – Leverage Social Proof & Trust Devices

Testimonials work, if they’re real. Avoid stock photos and scripted hyperbole as most people can spot a fake testimonial a mile away. Try a mixture of testimonials that describe how your product or service has benefited someone’s experience, coupled with the enthusiastic style that say “you guys rule!”. I’d only use the latter from a well known industry expert or celebrity.

To modernize your landing pages, illustrate social proof by showing your standing in a relevant social network. There are many widgets available that can show how many people like or follow you. Social capital and the herd mentality of network participants can help convince prospects to become customers.

Doctors Orders: Ask 10 of your customers for a fresh testimonial and add the best to your landing page. Remember to state your usage intentions and ask for a photo if possible. If you have a decent social network presence, try adding a live feed widget based on a specific phrase or #hashtag search to show who and how people are interacting with your brand.

STEP 11 – One Page, One Purpose

Imagine a web page that exhibits the same tendencies as a kid with ADD. If your content can’t decide on one thing to do at a time, then your visitors certainly won’t want to take the time to figure it out.

The principal of congruence states that each element on your page should support a single focused objective. A good way of looking at this is to imagine a series of arrows all pointing to the center of a circle where there is a big button (your CTA). Each arrow represents a piece of content on your landing page, and you need to ensure that they are all in conceptual alignment.

Contrast this to those same arrows all pointing in different directions (conceptually).

To maintain focus, don’t talk about other products or services – you can use a different landing page and ad source for those. An exception to this is on an ecommerce product page that provides the ability to add extra products to the cart as add-add-on’s to your main conversion goal.

Doctors Orders: Try this exercise. Explain the purpose of your campaign to a colleague. Now read the content of your landing page out loud and ask her to stop you if you veer away from the central purpose as previously stated. If this happens, remove the offending content and start over. You will notice a lot more about your writing style by saying it out loud. For visual elements, try writing the goal of your campaign on a piece of paper, then print and cut out the images from your landing page and place them around the goal. Remove or replace any that don’t seem to be in total agreement with this goal.

STEP 12 – Post-Conversion Marketing

Post-conversion marketing is one of the most overlooked stages of the conversion funnel. The confirmation page from your lead gen form, ecommerce checkout, or registration form is the perfect place to start capitalizing on the positive mood of a newly qualified customer.

In the case of lead gen, you achieved the conversion goal of your lead gen page and you are probably going to start sending your new lead a series of email messages to encourage them to step up to the next level. Note that it can take up to 6 or 7 contact incidents to make this happen (according to email provider Constant Contact).

To increase your engagement potential, try to add your leads to other channels in your sphere of marketing influence (from your confirmation page). This amplifies the reach of your messages and can be the difference between being heard and being forgotten.

Some common examples include:

• Follow us on Twitter (so they see regular updates)
• Like us on Facebook (so they see updates and become part of your community)
• Download our free eBook (to keep your brand in front of them and increase your “thought leadership” score
• Visit this page (send them to other content they may find interesting)
• Share this with your friends/colleagues (leverage their network)
• Bookmark us on Delicious

Doctors Orders: Go beyond a simple “Thank you” on your confirmation pages. Start by adding one new link to the page and track how much extra traffic visits that target. 

WHAT NOW?

Now you have the tools and advice to break those bad conversion habits and rehabilitate your struggling marketing funnel. Did you do the scorecard exercise? Are you on the epic end of the scale or the “I did like, 19 things wrong!” end of the scale? The scorecard is there to provide you with a "to do list" of conversion improvements. Take every question you answered No to and create a personal task to fix it. Then implement a new A/B test to see how well your new landing page fares.

SHARE YOUR PAGE & SCORECARD SCORE
Show me your landing page and score and see if I agree with your assessment (I’ll run through the checklist too).

Good luck with your rehab, and remember, your landing page can always be better.

Oli

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Posted by randfish

Another great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled "Startup Competitive Advantages that Work." It’s definitely worth a read, even if you’re not at a startup.

As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn’t help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we’re in – domination of the organic search results – can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it.

The core of Jason’s post is below:

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven’t already.

To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don’t have an "edge" just because you’re passionate, hard-working, or "lean."

The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought.

Like what?

And he’s got a number of terrific answers, but SEO, and more broadly, phenomenal organic web marketing, isn’t among them. Before I tackle why I think it belongs there, let me explain the difference between "good" SEO and defensible, "competitive advantage" style SEO.

"Good" SEO means

• You have a solid quantity of unique, quality content that users and customers will find useful.
• Your pages and links are crawlable, indexable and generally search friendly.
• You’ve done your homework with keyword research and update it regularly (monthly – quarterly) as new terms/phrases rise/fall in demand.
• You’ve engaged in some decent link acquisition campaigns, garnering links from a few authorities in your industry, some blogs, maybe a few article sites, press releases, link exchanges and the like to the point where you have similar metrics to your competition.
• You’ve engaged in social media and have profiles on the major sites, have a few tweets every week that point to your site and a few hundred fans on Facebook.

In other words, you’ve followed best practices, done the "right" things and while an SEO audit might reveal some missed opportunities and an error here or there, you’d generally come away with an "A" on your SEO report card.

"Competitive Advantage" SEO means

• Your site produces content people love to visit and love to share in a scalable, hard-to-replicate way
• Your on-site SEO is "best of breed." Note: This isn’t much different than good SEO – on-page/on-site optimization is unlikely to ever be a competitive advantage.
• Your keyword research is baked into the content generation process. The material your site produces fulfills keyword demand just as, or even before it exists by tapping into the subconscious of the web and the culture of ideas/questions in your industry/niche.
• Website owners and content creators have a powerful psychological incentive to link to your work frequently, just as those who participate/contribute to the social web are incented to share via their network of choice.

Some Examples of "Competitive Advantage" SEO Sites:

• StackOverflow
• Yelp
• Wikipedia
• LinkedIn
• Mashable
• Last.fm
• NY Magazine
• Amazon
• Cheezburger Network
• WordPress
• AllRecipes
• SmashingMagazine

All of these have content pouring out of them, generated rapidly, scalable, and in time with query demand. They have broad networks of patrons and participants that incent the spreading and sharing of their content through links and social networks. They employ content+SEO+sharing in a high-return equation that’s nearly impossible for competitors to match. I’ll illustrate:

That’s not to say they can’t be beaten, but runner B (a new competitor) is going to have to go dramatically faster than runner A (the market leader) if they want to catch up before runner A sees them coming and turns up the jets.

SEO Can Be a Competitive Advantage

This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages.

1. It’s massively hard to duplicate
2. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines)
3. It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so)

It’s certainly not the only option, but it can have a dramatic impact. If you’re starting a company, starting an SEO campaign or just want to renew your vision for how your site will go from ranking for a few keywords to becoming a dominant market player, it’s, at the least, a strategy worthy of consideration.

p.s. If you’re interested in some more practical SEO advice this morning, my slide deck from the Blueglass LA conference – Strategic SEO Link Analysis – may be able to scratch that itch.

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Posted by randfish

It’s that wonderful time of the month again! Linkscape, SEOmoz’s web index powering our mozbar, API, Open Site Explorer, the classic Linkscape tool and many features in Labs and elsewhere pushed out new data (over the weekend) from a web crawl that ended earlier this month. There’s lots of fresh info to explore on your sites, including new links and metrics, but I wanted to show off some spiffy new features, too.

First up, by popular request, we’ve got a calendar of Linkscape updates available on the API Wiki:

This should be updated regularly with ETAs for new Linkscape updates and as promised, we’re sticking to our schedule of new data every 4 weeks.

Next is a picture of how the web looked in our latest crawl. For those of you who, like me, geek out on data about the web, this stuff is pretty cool:
_

I also grabbed some information about the use of internal vs. external links and usage of nofollows & rel=canonical tags:

• Percent of Pages with Rel=Canonical: 4.63%
• Percent of Links that are External vs. Internal: 15.2% External vs. 84.8% Internal
• Percent of Links that use Rel=Nofollow: 2.08%
• Percent of Internal Links w/ Rel=Nofollow: 1.44%
• Percent of External Links w/ Rel=Nofollow: 5.67%

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve got some great new calls in the API to request data. You can see a visualization of just a few of these below:

In speaking to lots of users of our Linkscape data, I hear the following requests, all of which are on our roadmap:

• Historical data – show the links I’ve gained/lost since the last index
• Historical data – show my link counts and metrics from the last 6-12 months of index updates (this is challenging, as what we crawl changes month to month, but we believe we’ve got a workable solution coming by Q4)
• IP Address / Origin Country – show the country and IP address of the link source
• Fresher & Faster Updates – this should be arriving by Q3 of this year, as we move to a more recursive model with fresh data updating possibly as quickly as every 1-2 weeks, while the larger, less-change prone portion of the index updates only 1X per month or two
• Deeper Crawls on Large Domains – also on its way for Q3
• Text Surrounding the Anchor – another project in the works; we’re first testing to see if it has correlation/impact on rankings (this should be exciting research)

If you have a feature or request that’s not listed, please let us know! We want to make sure you’re getting all the link information you need with the highest possible freshness and quality.

A big thanks to Kate, Ben, Chas & Phil from SEOmoz’s engineering team, who put effort into this month’s update.

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Posted by fabioricotta

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Hi SEOmoz folks,

Sometimes we begin a new SEO consulting job and do not to know where to start our Link Building. We have a lot of options but the first thing I really like to do is to analyze what my competitors are doing. As we know, one of the best ways to analyze backlinks is by using Open Site Explorer (OSE). With this tool we can submit a domain and see which pages on the web are linking to it and some awesome metrics. We can use it to begin our analysis.

The first thing you need to do is to create a competitor list. Then you need to go to OSE and insert your competitor(s) domain(s). Then you will filter by links from "External Pages Only" and "All Pages in the Root Domain", as you can see below. With these filters, we guarantee that we will have an overall look at your competitors’ website backlinks.

After the above steps, we need to export all this data by clicking on "Export to CSV". After that, you will import this data to Excel:

Next, you will remove the 6 first lines, as they are only comments. Then you need to select the first line, click on the Data Tab and select "Filter". This will give you the ability to sort every column by some filters.

Now we can begin our competitor analysis. For this part, I have chosen 9 commonly used link building strategies that you can use OSE and find what your competitors are doing. So, let’s take a look:

Finding Directories

As some SEOs know, using Directories as part of your link building strategy can provide a good value to your backlink profile. If your competitor is using any directory strategy, we can find it using OSE data, filtering the Title column by the text filter "directory" or you can filter the URL column with text "directory". The good part of that is that you can see the Page Authority and Domain Authority of each directory page that your competitor is listed in and figure out to which one you should submit your website. A "bonus" filter you can use is filter by PA above 5 and DA above 20, so you will remove all the bad directories from your list.

Niche Forums

One thing that I really like are forums, maybe it’s because most of my knowledge came from there. Well, thinking about link building and SEO, when you find a niche directory, you find a community that talks about the same thing (or related) as you. If those members recommend your services you can get really good leads. So, one thing you can do is to investigate which forums your competitors were recommended in, so you can interact with those people. The idea here is to filter the Title column by the text filter "forum" or you can filter the URL column with text "forum". Using it will retrieve all the forums that provide at least 1 link to your competitor. You can use the same tip here that I gave in the last topic.

Powerful Profile Pages

Sometimes when we do a link building strategy we use some profiles to post and interact with customers and people about our website. And sometimes, those platforms that we use for it provide ways to drop a link (eg. user website). Based on this idea, one cool idea is to check which social networks your competitor is working. You can do it easily by filtering the URL column or Title column by text filters "user" or "profile". After identifying those profiles check how you competitor is working with it, like how is he interacting with the community, check if he is creating new content, check which keywords he is using on that new content.

A good tip here is to check the backlinks to that profile page. We noticed that some competitors are buying links for that profile page, so they can get more juice and spread it to their content. I am not telling you to do the same, but maybe you can file a spam report.

Tag Pages

A common and cheap link building tactic is to submit your website to social bookmarking websites. Sometimes, social bookmarking does not provide a strong enough value, but many SEOs use it as a base for their link building strategy. So, you can find which social bookmarking websites your competitors are using. The good thing (tip) here is to find a niche social bookmarking website. Those kind of websites can provide you some good leads as they are related to your niche. So, be careful when checking this.

To find the tag pages and then the social bookmarking websites, you can filter the Title column by text filters "tag" or "tagged". Another filter you can use is "tag" in the URL column.

Where They are Submitting Articles

As Rand pointed in a previous Whiteboard Friday, if you create a good Article Submission strategy you can get some good links and traffic. For example, you can filter the URL column with some already known article directories ("ezinearticles.com", "amazines.com", "articlealley.com", "articleindex.net", "goarticles.com", "articlesltd.net", "365articles.com", "articletrader.com", "articlesbase.com", "thebestarticles.com", "mycontentbuilder.com", "thinkarticle.com", "articlerumble.com", "gsarticles.com", etc…).

The idea here is to find where your competitors are gaining links and then find their profiles. After that, grab a list of all articles that they posted and run a OSE report for each link (you can do it using the SEOmoz API). Check which ones have a large number of backlinks. Then you need to check why they attracted so many links and just use that idea to create some new content.

A bonus tip here is that some article directories enable comments with link… so, try to comment in your competitors’ best articles.

Resource Pages as Good Backlink Sources

Some years ago, one of the common things that webmasters did was to create pages listing some useful links as resources. Nowadays it’s not common but the point is that there are a lot of resource pages out there. So you can check if your competitor is listed in any resource page and then ask the webmaster to include your valuable website. It’s really easy, but don’t forget to be generous and really show that your website can help their visitors.

To find the resources page, you can filter the URL column using the text filter "resources". I’ve tried to filter the Title column but I didn’t like the results I found.

Competitors Press Releases

When we talk about press releases we need to be careful about our objectives. The first thing here is to identify which company your competitor is using to distribute their press releases. So you can filter the URL column by the common PR Distribution companies ("prweb", "send2press", "prnewswire", etc…) and since those companies sometimes publish the press release inside their domain, you can find your competitor’s press releases. The second step is to grab a list of all press releases they published and do the same thing I told you about article directories’ profiles. Find which are the most linked press releases and why. This will give you some advantage in your next press release.

Linkbait with InfoGraphics

One of the latest link building tactics is to create amazing InfoGraphics. The cool thing for link building is that if you create a good infographic it can go viral and provide a lot of backlinks. So the point here is to see if your competitors are using infographics to get links. To check it, just filter the Title column by text filter "infographic" and you will find the list of infographics that give links to your competitors.

The point here is that you can tell me "Hey, when I create an InfoGraphic I post it at my site, not in someone’s else blog". You are right, but the point here is that some websites can’t use / post those kind of images inside their structure, so they need to publish it as guest post.

A tip here is: if you find an infographic inside a blog, don’t forget to comment in the comments area. You can get some value there.

Trusted links: Any .EDU or .GOV links?

Most of the linkbuilders love .edu and .gov links. They are strong, they are trusted and they really rock. Based on that, you can check if your competitors have any link coming from any of those TLDs. You can find it filtering the URL column by text filter ".edu" or ".gov".

You need to check why your competitors have those links and then try to find a way to get them. Don’t forget to avoid those .edu crap networks.

Wikipedia Links

Worldwide known, Wikipedia is a great source of visitors and leads. We can’t count their backlinks because of nofollow, but they still provide value by sending you traffic. We made some Wikipedia strategies for some clients and those links are just growing our referral visitors. You can find the Wikipedia pages that link to your competitors by just filtering the URL column by text filter "wikipedia.org".

One thing to remember is that Wikipedia (moderators) does not like spam or commercial stuff. So the easy way we find to get a link from them is by adding some valuable content, specially when you adds notes about statistics that you published in your press release. This really rocks and in most cases they allow you to reference your data source (you).

Conclusions

We saw in this article that using a SEO tool such as Open Site Explorer could help you to find what our competitors are doing, providing us some insights on how to create our SEO strategy. It is important to highlight that I am not telling you to get the same backlinks that your competitors had, but I am trying to show you is that you can begin your strategy by getting the best of what your competitors did, and then, improve with your own ideas.

Hope you liked this post!

Fabio Ricotta is the Co-Founder of MestreSEO, a brazillian SEO company.

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Although most businesses understand the need for measuring analytics, unfortunately, that is as far as some businesses take it. As Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified explains, marketers need to actually use the data they collect in order to see true benefits.

There are many tools that are useful such as Google Analytics and Omniture, but Peterson says that these solutions cannot do everything. In other words, marketers have to act upon the data the solutions provide.

According to Peterson, many businesses do not dedicate resources to analytics. He believes this is one of the most common mistakes businesses can make in regards to analytics. If someone could focus all his time and energy on analytics, Peterson says good things would happen.

The next big challenge marketers have is determining which data to pass where within the company. For this, he recommends that a business have a strategy since each department will need different metrics.

Once all these elements are in place, Peterson says companies will be able to make better use of their data.

Posted by randfish

Many of our keen members observed that late last week, Linkscape’s index updated (this is actually our 27th index update since starting the project in 2008). This means new link data in Open Site Explorer and Linkscape Classic, as well as new metric data via the mozbar and in our API.

Index 27 Statistics

For those who are interested, you can follow the Linkscape index update calendar on our API Wiki (as you can see, this update was about a week early).

Although we’ve now crawled many hundreds of billions of pages since launch, we only serve our uber-freshest index. Historical data is something we want to do soon – more on that later. This latest index’s stats feature:

• Pages – 40,152,060,523
• Subdomains – 284,336,725
• Root Domains – 91,539,345
• Links – 420,049,105,986
• % of Nofollowed Links – 2.02%
• % of Nofollows on Internal Links – 58.7%
• % of Nofollows on External Links – 41.3%
• % of Pages w/ Rel Canonical – 4.3%

These numbers continue the trend we’ve been seeing for some time where internal nofollow usage is declining slightly while rel canonical is down a bit in this index but up substantially over the start of the year (this likely has more to do with our crawl selection than with sites actually removing canonical URL tags.

Comparing Metrics from Index to Index

One of the biggest requests we get is the ability to track historical information about your metrics from Linkscape. We know this is really important to everyone and we want to make this happen soon, but have some technical and practical challenges to overcome. The biggest of which is that what we crawl changes substantively with each index, both due to our improvements in what to crawl (and what to ignore) and with the web’s massive changes each month (60%+ of pages we fetched 6 months ago are no longer in existence!).

For now, the best advice I can give is to measure yourself against competitors and colleagues rather than against your metrics last month or last year. If you’re improving against the competition, chances are good that your overall footprint is increasing at a higher rate than theirs. You might even "lose" links in a raw count from the index, but actually have improved simply because a few hundred spam/scraper websites weren’t crawled this time around, or we’ve done better canonicalization with URLs than last round or your link rotated out of the top of a popular RSS feed many sites were reproducing.

Measuring against other sites in your niche is a great way to compare from index to index

If you’ve got more questions about comparisons and index modifications over time, feel free to ask in the comments and we’ll try to dive in. For those who are interested, our current thinking around providing historical tracking is to give multiple number sets like – # of links from mR 3+ pages, # of links from mR 1-3 pages, etc. to help show how many "important" links you’re gaining/losing – these fluctuate much less from index to index and may be better benchmarking tools.

Integration with Conductor’s Searchlight Software

SEOmoz is proud to be powering Conductor’s new Searchlight software. I got to take a demo of their toolset 2 weeks ago (anyone can request one here) and was very impressed. See for yourself with a few exclusive screenshots I’ve wrangled up:

And at the bottom of the series is Seth Besmertnik, Conductor’s CEO, during the launch event (note the unbuttoned top button of his shirt with the tie; this indicates Seth is a professional, but he’s still a startup guy at heart). Searchlight already has some impressive customers including Monster.com, Care.com, Siemens, Travelocity, Progressive and more. I think many in the SEO field will agree that moving further into software is a smart move for the Conductor team, and the toolset certainly looks promising.

Conductor’s also releasing some cool free research data on seasonality (request form here). Couldn’t resist sharing a screenshot below of the sample Excel workbook they developed:

mmm… prepopulated

SEOmoz’s Linkscape index currently powers the link data section of Searchlight via our API and we’re looking forward to helping many other providers of search software in the future. We’re also integrated with Hubspot’s Grader.com and EightFoldLogic‘s (formerly Enquisite) Linker, so if you’re seeking to build an app and need link data, you can sign up for free API access and get in touch if/when you need more data.

The Link Juice App for iPhone

We’re also very excited about the popular and growing iPhone app – LinkJuice. They’ve just recently updated the software with a few recommendations straight from Danny Dover and me!

The LinkJuice folks have promised an Android version is on its way soon, and since that’s my phone of choice, I can’t wait!

If you’ve got an app, software piece or website that’s powered by Linkscape, please do drop us a line so we can include it. I’ve been excited to see folks using it for research – like Sean’s recent YOUmoz post on PageRank correlations – as well as in many less public research works.

Oh, and if you somehow missed the announcement, go check out the new Beginner’s Guide to SEO! It’s totally free and Danny’s done a great job with it.

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Contrary to some people’s beliefs, Arnel Leyva of Covario says that search and social media actually have a lot in common. On a certain level, many people think the two would not mix well. For example, when you think about SEO, Leyva says you often think of wizards looking for their secret potion to increase their Page Rank. On the other hand, when you think about social media, he says you think about chatty people who are always linking to everyone.

Despite these differing examples, search and social media are both scattered across several departments within organizations. In addition, they both provide value.

In terms of integrating search and social, Leyva suggests a “digital center of excellence” that takes people from each department within a business and creates a counsel. This counsel should receive strategic guidance from upper management and develop a framework that manages SEO and social media.

He also adds that the counsel should find ways to measure performance. At this point, PPC can be integrated as well, since paid search is really where search became measurable and PPC experts understand the need for metrics.

Leyva says this model should be implemented on a local level but emphasizes the need for guidance from a higher, strategic level.

Posted by randfish

As some of you likely noticed, Linkscape’s index updated today with fresh data crawled over the past 30 days. Rather than simply provide the usual index update statistics, we thought it would be fun to do some whiteboard diagrams of how we make a Linkscape update happen here at the mozplex. We also felt guilty because our camera ate tonight’s WB Friday (but Scott’s working hard to get it up for tomorrow morning).

Linkscape, like most of the major web indices, starts with a seed set of trusted sites from which we crawl outwards to build our index. Over time, we’ve developed more sophisticated methods around crawl selection, but we’re quite similar to Google, in that we crawl the web primarily in decending order of (in our case) mozRank importance.

For those keeping track, this index’s raw data includes:

• 41,404,250,804 unique URLs/pages
• 86,691,236 unique root domains

After crawling, we need build indices on which we can process data, metrics and sort orders for our API to access.

When we started building Linkscape in late 2007, early 2008, we quickly realized that the quantity of data would overwhelm nearly every commercial database on the market. Something massive like Oracle may be able to handle the volume, but at an exorbitant price that a startup like SEOmoz couldn’t bear. Thus, we created some unique, internal systems around flat file storage that enable us to hold data, process it and serve it without the financial and engineering burdens of a full database application.

Our next step, once the index is in place, is to calculate our key metrics as well as tabulate the standard sort orders for the API

Algorithms like PageRank (and mozRank) are iterative and require a tremendous amount of processing power to compute. We’re able to do this in the cloud, scaling up our need for number-crunching, mozRank-calculating goodness for about a week out of every month, but we’re pretty convinced that in Google’s early days, this was likely a big barrier (and may even have been a big part of the reason the "GoogleDance" only happened once every 30 days).

After processing, we’re ready to push our data out into the SEOmoz API, where it can power our tools and those of our many partners, friends and community members.

The API currently serves more than 2 million requests for data each day (and an average request pulls ~10 metrics/pieces of data about a web page or site). That’s a lot, but our goal is to more than triple that quantity by 2011, at which point we’ll be closer to the request numbers going into a service like Yahoo! Site Explorer.

The SEOmoz API currently powers some very cool stuff:

• Open Site Explorer – my personal favorite way to get link information
• The mozBar – the SERPs overlay, analyze page feature and the link metrics displayed directly in the bar all come from the API
• Classic Linkscape – we’re on our way to transitioning all of the features and functionality in Linkscape over to OSE, but in the meantime, PRO members can get access to many more granular metrics through these reports
• Dozens of External Applications – things like Carter Cole’s Google Chrome toolbar, several tools from Virante’s suite, Website Grader and lots more (we have an application gallery coming soon)

Each month, we repeat this process, learning big and small lessons along the way. We’ve gotten tremendously more consistent, redundant and error/problem free in 2010 so far, and our next big goal is to dramatically increase the depth of our crawl into those dark crevices of the web as well as ramping up the value and accuracy of our metrics.

We look forward to your feedback around this latest index update and any of the tools powered by Linkscape. Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

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