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

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 Danny Dover

 This week’s Whiteboard Friday features the return of Rand (woo hoo!) and his self declared biggest SEO mistakes. We screw up a lot here at SEOmoz (hell, they hired me), so we feel it is only appropriate to take this opportunity to share what we have learned in an effort to prevent you from making similar mistakes. SEO is complicated. The best we can do is practice, work hard and compare notes.

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1. Reciprocal Links + Robots.txt NoFollow

Back before the formal SEOmoz days, Rand used to dabble a bit in some grayer areas of SEO. The first mistake he mentions is a tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value. This tactic didn’t really work and he ended up having to do a lot more work to get in the good graces of the webmasters he had fooled. Head smack!

2. Buying Links for Clients

This tactic also took place before formal SEOmoz days. At the time, Rand spent client budgets on paid links. This is a bad idea because the value of the links can’t be determined (was Google even counting them?). He later found out through Google employees that the links were not being counted and that they may actually be hurting the client’s site ability to rank. Oops!

3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords

This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn’t actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s.

4. Recommending People Not To Use XML Sitemaps

When XML Sitemaps first debuted, Rand and SEOmoz recommended not using this. While the idea was sound in theory (having a XML Sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) the observation ended up being outweighed by the impact we saw with the increased indexation rates of sites that employed this tool.

5. Incorrectly Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer

Recently we decided to 301 redirect all of the old Linkscape reports to our newer, better converting, Open Site Explorer reports in a 1-1 relationship. This was in theory a good idea but unfortunately including various tracking components on the redirect URLs resulted in us losing a significant amount of traffic. We later fixed this with rel=canonical but a lot of the damage was already done. Ouch!

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Do you have any lessons you have learned after making some noteworthy mistakes? If so, we would love to hear what you learned in the comments below.

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Posted by timsoulo

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.

Howdy SEOmoz fans! It is an overused practice to start from some "shocking" stats and dissertate on how Facebook is powerful and important for business. So, I will just consider you all know what is Facebook and how cool it is.

What you’re about to read is a step-by-step SMM strategy for promoting your business on Facebook. I’ve gathered all the best practices and tips that I have used myself, together with some advice that I haven’t tried but am confident will work well. Ok. That’s enough for the intro, let’s go!

Where To Start?

1. Brand Ambassador.

First of all, don’t use your personal account to promote your business, unless you want your customers to see your childhood pictures and lulz from the recent party. You can create another (purely business oriented) instance of yourself or hire someone to become your brand ambassador. This will be the person who represents your business online and handles all communications, so the info on the profile should be brief and clear and all the pictures neat and professional. Remember that users will associate your business with this guy.

Power Tip: Create a separate e-mail account in Gmail and import all the e-mail addresses of your clients there. Now when you use this account to create a new Facebook profile – the system will automatically find all of your clients in your address book and suggest to add them as your friends on Facebook! What a great start!

2. Creating a Facebook page.

Promotion on Facebook is all about having a page for your business. To create one, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the "+ Create a Page" button.

Power Tip: "Page Name" is one of the the strongest ranking factors on Facebook search. Don’t miss the opportunity to add some keywords you wish to rank for as you are not allowed to change your page name later.

Configuring Your Facebook Page

1. Profile picture & avatar.

Profile picture is one of the few things in the design of your page that you can actually customize, so be sure to make the most of it. Here are two great articles that will help you: "5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Profile Photo"; "Making the Most of Your Facebook Profile Picture". 

2. Page info.

The next important thing to do is fill your Facebook page with information about your business. Most of it is stored under the "Info" tab, which you cannot remove or hide. Lots of people visit it, so work hard to make your info as brief and engaging as you can. "Think SEO" and use your keywords, as each of the tabs is indexable by the search engines.

Power Tip: if you type a URL starting from http:// in the info box under your profile picture, Facebook will turn it into a clickable link. So you can easily refer your visitors to your website, blog or twitter account.

3. Applications.

• Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) – allows you to create 10 additional tabs, which can contain HTML/CSS, Flash, FBML, iframes and FBJS; 
• NetworkedBlogs – allows you to post your RSS and Atom feeds directly to your wall; 
• Twitter Tab – posts your twitter updates to a separate tab; 
• Extended Info – adds an additional box which supports html/fbml, images, video and music to the left sidebar of your page; 
• Fan Appz & Promotions – helps you handle all kinds of contests, sweepstakes & give aways.

Tip: you’ll probably end up with lots of tabs by adding various applications. However you can easily drag them around if you think that some of them are more important.

4. Vanity URL.

To be able to convert your ugly "326727833086?ref=sgm&ajaxpipe=1&__a=7" URL into something fancy-looking, like "http://facebook.com/mybusinesspage" you need to have at least 25 fans. Once you do – go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and click the "Set a username for your Pages" link at the bottom.

5. Custom landing page.

You need an attractive landing page, which will convert your visitors into fans. Here is when the FBML application comes into play. Using HTML, CSS, FBJS and even flash you can create awesome landing pages that people will not only "like", but link to, and suggest to friends.

Tip: If you’ve got no development skills you can find some nice facebook FBML page templates that have just started to appear around the template stores.

What To Expect?

Before we start reviewing various Facebook promotion techniques, I’d like to clear things up a little bit. Essentially when someone "Likes" your Facebook page, they will be notified every time you update its status, it’s almost the same as following someone on Twitter. To have your message spread on Twitter you need to have your followers retweet your post so that their followers could see it and retweet in turn. On Facebook, the principle is a bit more sophisticated: when someone likes or comments your status update, this fact is being reflected in his profile. And when your status update gets a decent amount of "likes" and comments it is promoted to the Top News section of a user’s News Feed, so that more people could see it.

 Now let’s refer to a famous "90:9:1 Social Behaviors Rule" to understand what it takes for your message to become visible.

Let’s consider that "Heavy Contributors" are those ready to comment on your update, "Intermittent" ones will probably "like" it, and "Lurkers" will read it or just scroll through. Say your page has 100 fans. Knowing the fact that only 12%-20% of all your "Fans" will see your status update in their Live Feed, we can see that:

I hope this delivers a clear understanding that Facebook promotion takes an enormous amount of effort to become successful.

Promoting Your Facebook Page Internally.

1. Using your Brand Ambassador.

• Add to friends any people that may be your potential customers or somehow relate to your business. Recently, Facebook has added Skype integration, which can suggest you some Facebook friends from the list of your Skype contacts. Once you have a decent amount of friends use the "Suggest to friends" and "Share" buttons to promote your Facebook page to them;
• Use Facebook Search to discover relevant pages, groups, events, people and even messages. With Search you can easily track any mentions of your brand and provide feedback – people really love that;
• Once you join pages, groups and events, you are able to participate in the conversation, which is a great way of direct promotion. Moreover you can see the list of the group members and easily add them to friends;
• Communicate. Once someone comments on your new status, a photo, or anything else – answer back. Moreover you need to make people love your brand and become active contributors and then brand ambassadors. 1/4 of search results on each big brand is UGC (User Generated Content).

Power Tip: When composing a message put the @ symbol and start typing the name of your business page to mention it, just like you mention someone on Twitter. This can be used as a signature to your updates.

2. Keep the page fresh and interesting.

People join your page hoping to receive some interesting stuff from you, so do not disappoint them. Facebookers usually prefer pictures, videos and links to plain text updates. Here is a comprehensive list of things that you should keep in mind to avoid losing your fans: don’t post too many updates; don’t automate your content; don’t be a duplicate of your website and don’t be boring. Your page wall is your social proof and a signal for people to get involved.

3. Cheat a bit.

Ask fellow staff & your team members to post "likes" and comments on each of your status updates to boost its rankings. Only status updates with 5 or more "likes" and comments show up in the Top News section. This will also make your wall look "alive", which will inspire your fans to be more active on your page and participate in the conversation.

4. Fill in your page with media content. 

• Upload pictures of your products/services, your office and your team at work to make your company easier to relate to;
• Encourage your fans to post  pictures of how they use your product;
• Upload pictures from each event you host and tag your fans there;
• Post videos of your team members talks;
• Show your products/services in action;
• Use video to respond to your fans (Bill Clinton frequently does video responses on his page).

5. Treat your fans.

You need to offer your fans something special and reward them. For instance 1-800-FLOWER Facebook page shows the discount code only when you click the "Like" button.

You can make some special offers, which are available to your Facebook fans only and are not announced outside of Facebook. It’s dead easy to reward your loyal fans by promoting them to the admins of your page, which will most likely turn them into enthusiastic brand ambassadors. Anyway, if there is some prominent fan – he should be publicly rewarded.

6. Send an update to Fans.

Direct messaging is a very powerful tool, but do not misuse it. Think twice before sending a message to all of your fans – it should be really valuable if you don’t want everyone to ignore it or get irritated.

Tip: Facebook allows you to send targeted updates. Think of a way you could use that feature for your business.

7. Ask your fans for help.

Now and then you can post a status update asking your fans to help build the community by suggesting your page to their friends. Just refer them to "Suggest to Friends" and "Share" links on your page and measure their response.

8. Build partnerships with other pages.

Notice that each page on Facebook has an "Add to my Page’s Favorites" button. When you do this, the logo of this page appears in a special "Favorite Pages" box on your own page. People see it and they might click the link to find out more about this page.

Your aim here is to build partnerships within your niche and be "favourited" as much as possible. Add to favorites pages that you like or that your business is related to and inform their owners about it with a wall post or a private message. Most likely you will be "favorited" back.

9. Use the applications.

There are a lot of crazy apps that you can use to promote yourself. You can even develop one of your own if your budget allows that. But how do the viral applications work in common?

You need something that people would willingly launch. This might be a game or a quiz or any other kind of dynamic content that most people love. Once a person has his score, bagde, vitual gift or any other result – the application publishes it to his wall so that all his friends could see it. The application should have a clear call to action, so that new people could easily get engaged. If the application has some kind of a High Score – people will play it again and again till they outrank their friends. You can (should) use the apps for sweepstakes and giveaways – people love them a lot.

10. Spy!

Yes! Always keep an eye on your competitors, especially on those outranking you. Check what they do and if you consider it to be a successful strategy – do the same. When they fail – try to avoid their mistakes. Anyway, you should always be informed on what others are doing to promote themselves.

11. Ads?

Indeed the most common way to promote your page. But before you use it, check out these stats:

 

Promoting Your Facebook Page Externally.

 1. Facebook for webites.

The Facebook team has come a long way toward making your website more personalized and social. There is a list of great social plugins that can be easily embedded into your website and drive lots of new visitors: "Like Button" plugin, which is almost everywhere now, "Like Box", which let’s you become a fan of the website without leaving the page, "Live Stream" which is often used while broadcasting some event. Try them on your website and see what happens next.

2. "Like" and "Share" buttons.

These two are so powerful that they require a separate paragraph. Once you own an online store – those buttons are of exceptional value. Whenever you find something that appeals to you in an online store – you no longer need to copy the URL and send it to your friends to ask for their opinion. Just press the "Like" button. They will see that and comment on it. This applies to photos, videos, games, blog posts, reviews – literally anything that can be found on the web.

3. Put a link everywhere.

Once you have a website, you put its address everywhere – e-mail signatures, forum signatures, twitter info, author bio section, LinkedIn profile, links section of your blog. Do exactly the same with your Facebook page. Highlight your Facebook presence at offline events, print it on your business card, use every opportunity you have.

Power Tip: Take some twitter auto follow script that follows a person whenever he has specific keywords in his tweet. Some percent of the people you’ve followed will follow you back. Write an engaging request to join your Facebook page and set it as an automatic direct message to people, who have just followed you. Being launched, this system will drive some new fans to your Facebook page on a regular basis.

4. Using video.

Almost every video sharing service allows you to annotate your videos with links. This is a great way to drive some new fans onto your Facebook page. You can make viral videos, funny videos, tutorials, explanations, presentations etc. and include a link to your Facebook page with a request to join. Works perfectly!

5. Other services.

There are a lot of websites where you can get some targeted audience. For instance, upon writing this guide I’ve gone though dozens of presentations at SlideShare and Scribd. There I’ve seen many referrals to join Facebook pages specialized on marketing, and I did join some of them truthfully as I enjoyed their presentations. Examine carefully all the websites where you post information or showcase your services and think of the way you could refer people to your Facebook page.

Power Tip: In case you have some kind of a digital product – create a torrent with some demos, name it with trending keywords and upload to all torrent trackers you can find. In the info or in the comments section add a link to your Facebook page. Then go to your analytics and watch your numbers grow.

Wheew… That’s the end of my guide. Sure there’s a lot more to add, but I tried to keep my tactics brief, to leave some space for your imagination. I’m sure each of you can invent lots of fantastic ways to use Facebook for SMM. I am open for any questions, shoot!

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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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Posted by randfish

One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is "What’s the best way to learn SEO?" There are many ways to answer, but in this post, I’m going to cover the responses I give most often and those I’ve seen have the most success. But, before I describe each of these, it pays to understand that not all learning methodologies are the same in style, substance or where they can take you. If you’re completely new to SEO, some of these won’t be appropriate and if you’re already a veteran, others won’t teach you much you don’t already know.

Thus, let’s start with a chart of relative knowledge/experience levels (similar to this old/outdated post on levels of knowledge):

Now that we have some context, let’s dive in to the ways I recommend learning SEO. For each, I’ve provided a description of the process, the ideal starting level(s) (and where you can expect to reach via that methodology) and a list of resources with my notes.

#1 – Free Online Guides

A number of free guides, eBooks and downloadable PDFs exist on the web to help provide insight into SEO. Some are highly comprehensive while others touch only lightly on the topic. The key to being successful with this process is to identify guides that are both up-to-date and accurate in their recommendations. No council exists to regulate the dispersal of SEO information and thus, a few proprietors of free guides can lead you down incomplete or even dead wrong paths.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman

List of Resources:

• SEOmoz’s Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO (just updated for 2010)
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Guide for Bloggers
• Google’s Starter Guide for Webmasters
• Danny’s Checklist for Learning SEO

Time Investment / Commitment Required: 1-3 hours should get you through any of the guides above

#2 – Published Literary Works

For those who like to curl up with a book, a number of authors/publishers have come out with solid resources in the past couple years. Books have a unique advantage over online guides in that they’re often better written, more carefully edited and can be more easily judged on the reputation of the authors/publishers. Conversely, they are hard to update (even in the book I wrote last year, a few links and references are already broken) and thus, don’t always contain the most up-to-date information.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman

List of Resources:

• Inbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah & Brian Halligan
• Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing by Kris Jones
• Search Engine Optimization Secrets by Danny Dover
• Marketing in the Age of Google by Vanessa Fox
• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grapone & Gradiva Couzin
• The Art of SEO by Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola, Eric Enge & Stephan Spencer

Time Investment / Commitment Required: The largest of these is ~450 pages, which might take between 4-8 hours depending on how fast you read

#3 – Blogs, Forums & Search Communities

In my opinion, everyone learning SEO can garner value from discovering 3-5 favorite sources of information online and keeping up to date with each on a daily or weekly basis. Forums and blogs pump out a tremendous quantity of content, but just by browsing the headlines and reading teh stories that stand out, you can get exposure to strategies, techniques, news and trends that would otherwise be difficulty to stumble on by yourself.

Many SEOs (myself included) first learned the practice almost entirely through contributions, questions and threads on industry blogs & forums. Today, I’d suggest starting with a base from a free guide or book, then diving into the communities to stay sharp and get individual questions answered. I’ve provided a few of my personal favorite resources below, but will be working on a more comprehensive list in the near future.

Recommended for: All

List of Resources:

• Forums / Q+A
  • Cre8asite Forums
  • SearchEngineWatch Forums
  • Onstartups Answers (SEO)
  • Quora (SEO)
• Blogs
  • Search Engine Land
  • Search Engine Roundtable
  • Search Engine Journal
  • Performable Blog
  • Conversation Marketing
  • Distilled Blog
• Other
  • SEO Alltop
  • Delicious SEO Tags
  • Techmeme

Time Investment / Commitment Required: 30-45 minutes per day or 90 minutes per week (if you aggregate your time into a single slot)

#4 – Building Sites & Earning Rankings

Many in the SEO field will say that building your own sites and practicing SEO in the real world is the only way to learn. I disagree with that message, but I do concur that it’s possibly the most crucial step to advancing your career and abilities.

My view is that if, prior to building a site and attempting to earn some rankings, you have a great mental model of the field, you can build a truly defensible strategy for your site(s). If you simply register a domain that sounds nifty and start trying to rank for a keyword you think is popular, you can get a very warped sense for how to do SEO and what matters in the short, medium and long run. At the very least, read a free guide and engage a bit on some of the online communities.

Once you’ve got a base of knowledge, building a site is the next logical step. I strongly suggest starting small and preferrably with a topic that you’re personally passionate about rather than one that just has high AdSense payouts. I’ll recommend a number of options for building/hosting below, but if you have the technical know-how to configure your own server and write from scratch, that’s a perfectly reasonable alternative (just make sure it’s not too time consuming to leave room for some actual SEO).

Recommended for: Aspirant, Journeyman, Authority

List of Resources:

• Posterous
• Page.ly
• WordPress
• Tumblr
• SquareSpace

Time Investment / Commitment Required: A minimum of 4-5 hours for setup and creation of initial content, and more likely 40-50 hours to produce something high quality and robust and conduct initial off-site SEO/marketing efforts.

#5 – Conferences & Events

If you’re hungry to learn SEO in person, see real life examples and hear stories from the front lines (as well as meeting the practitioners and evangelists), getting out to events is an excellent next step. The last few years has seen an explosion in the quantity and variety of events in the field and many have different foci and target audiences, so be sure to choose the right one for accomplishing your goals. Many of the large conferences are focused on drawing out discussion around topics, advancing the discourse in the field and promoting networking while some smaller events are more specifically geared to pure education or intimate networking.

Recommended for: Journeyman and Above

List of Resources (in order of upcoming dates):

• Blueglass Los Angeles - July 19-20
• SES San Francisco - August 16-20
• SEOmoz PRO Seattle - August 30-31
• SMX East New York - October 4-6
• Inbound Marketing Summit Boston - October 6-7

Time Investment / Commitment Required: Typically 2-4 days plus travel time

#6 – Online Classes

The online online learning series I’m familiar with in this category is Market Motive, but they’re impressive enough to warrant both a category of their own and a recommendation. Founded by Michael Stebbins and John Marshall (who previously founded & sold ClickTracks) along with Avinash Kaushik, Todd Malicoat, Bryan Eisenberg and more, the staff is a who’s who of Internet marketing. When this many great brains get together, the results are smashing. Market Motive combines webinars, phone calls, coursework and more into a comprehensive curriculum. They end the series with a dissertation defense given over the phone and only passing candidates earn certification.

I’ve personally been on a few calls with early entrants and master certification candidates and been seriously impressed. Since I’m recommending them so highly, I connected with the folks at Market Motive, and they’ve put together a discount  for moz readers. You can sign up for MarketMotive using the code "SMZ6TOOLSMC" and get $600 off their master certification course + 3 months of SEOmoz PRO membership FREE. But, make sure to do it in the next 5 days as the upcoming master certication course starts on July 19th.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman and Authorities/Gurus seeking formal, recognized certification

List of Resources:

•  Market Motive

Time Investment / Commitment Required: Over the course of 90 days, this is a 10-20 hour per week commitment, possibly more when cramming for the dissertation.

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The field is certainly much richer with options than when I began, but as we know from the science of conversion, more choices don’t always indicate more actions. Hopefully, the recommendations above have helped to give you a starting point. I’d love to hear from you in the comments about where and how you learned SEO and what you’d recommend to others.

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Posted by randfish

Last week, Mixergy’s Andrew Warner interviewed me about the founding of SEOmoz and our trajectory to date. It was a very personal interview about the background of the company, but turned out to be a great experience. I’ve posted it below for those who might want to watch over the weekend and if you prefer, there’s also a full text transcript on the Mixergy blog post.

After the interview, I noticed the Mixergy chatroom had dozens of questions I wasn’t able to answer and I’ve been receiving a fair number of emails and tweets about it as well. Thus, I figured it was time to put together a post on SEOmoz’s history and offer to formally answer questions in the comments of this post.

SEOmoz’s History (1981 – 2010)

1981: Gillian Founds the Company that will Become SEOmoz

When my parents moved from New York to Seattle (so my Dad could work for Boeing), my Mom opened up a small marketing/print design/consulting business. Over the next 20 years, she’d raise three kids (myself, my brother and sister) and maintain the solo operation.

1999: Rand Starts Working with Gillian

At the time, I built mostly static Flash + HTML websites for local small businesses around the Seattle area including small banks, dentists and even a retail clothing store. Knowing nothing of SEO or the power of search engines, most of the pages I build are completely inaccessible to the bots.

2001: Rand Drops out of School

I’d been pursuing a degree at the University of WA, but left two classes shy of graduating to devote 100% of my time to the company, which was struggling to make ends meet thanks to the dot-com bust and the dropoff in demand for website construction. Our company starts going into deep debt, which will continue until late 2005 / early 2006.

2004: SEOmoz is Founded

Although I started trying SEO in 2002, I’m still pretty awful at it. In an attempt to grow my skillset, I participate vigorously on half a dozen SEO forums and eventually build SEOmoz.org as a site to host my thoughts, struggles and discoveries. Google’s sandbox, in particular, had been vexing me and I kept hoping to stumble onto the secret of getting a site "released."

Feb. 2005: First SES Conference

Thanks to the generosity of Danny Sullivan, I attend SES New York (and take a ridiculous quantity of notes about every session I attend). I’d later pitch to speak at SES Toronto, scrape together the money to go and, following on that first experience, get invited to attend many other future shows.

Dec. 2005: Newsweek Covers SEOmoz

Newsweek magazine writes an article about "the shadowy world of SEO" using SEOmoz as the "white hat" example. I author the first version of the Beginner’s Guide to SEO as a resource for those seeking to learn more (figuring the Newsweek traffic will be curious – instead, it gets Slashdotted, which sends us tens of thousands of curious webmasters and developers).

2006: SEOmoz Turns Around Financially

Although 2005 had been a reasonably good year financially, my personal debt hovered close to $500,000. In 2006, Gillian works with debt collection agencies, banks and creditors to eliminate most of the debt and build repayment plans. By July of 2007, we’ll be completely debt free (though even in 2010 my credit history will still prevent me from renting an apartment or leasing a car). We post our financials at the end of the year and for the first time, I have a salary, and don’t need my girlfriend (now wife) to pay for everything

Feb. 2007: We Launch PRO Membership

Although consulting has been a growing source of revenue, we decide that it’s not as scalable or as far-reaching as a recurring revenue model. PRO membership is launched after 3-4 months of development on tools, resources and guides. The initial price is just $29/month (and we still have a solid handful of folks who are grandfathered in and continue to pay that rate!)

Oh, and I proposed to my girlfriend (and got a yes… after a few instances of "what?!") We married the following year and are still over-the-top stupid for each other.

Nov. 2007: Investment Capital Comes Our Way

Ignition Partners & Curious Office co-invest $1.1 million in SEOmoz to help us scale our software, build our web index and grow the team. Michelle Goldberg from Ignition and Kelly Smith from Curious Office join Gillian and I on the board of directors and things get a bit more serious and focused (in a very good way).

We posted financials for 2007 just after taking the investment.

Oct. 2008: We Launch Linkscape

After 10 intensive months of work, we build a scalable, sizable crawl of the web, conduct processing of metrics and launch our first tool to expose that data – Linkscape. Unfortunately, launch day coincides with the collapse of Bear Stearns and the beginning of a very rough period for the world’s economies (and somewhat dampens our press coverage).

Dec. 2008: We Return to Profitability

Despite a tough environment, SEOmoz returns to profitability in December of 2008 and has been profitable again ever since.

June 2009: A Second Attempt at Fundraising Fails

We decided in 2009, after exciting growth in Q1-Q2 to seek a second round of outside funding. But poor timing, unoptimized metrics and a subpar pitch eventually yield no results. Tragically, this costs the team many months of product progress. On the plus side, no dilution of shares.

January 2010: Open Site Explorer Launches

Our most exciting project to date, Open Site Explorer, a product to help SEOs and marketers better see into the web’s link graph, launches. We follow up with a new Keyword Difficulty tool, our SEOmoz toolbar (Chrome version is just a few weeks away, BTW) and improvements to the Linkscape index.

August 2010: The Next Big Thing

Since diagramming a new direction/product for SEOmoz in January 2009, we’ve been working to grow our engineering team, solidify our process and scale our backend to handle something new & exciting. I previously leaked a design mockup at the bottom of this post, but here’s another:

_

Today we are:

• 24 people strong
• Growing at a steady pace
• Profitable
• Shaking with anticipation for our upcoming launch (and working furiously to make sure everything goes right)

I can say without hesistation that the most exciting times are definitely ahead of us.

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As I noted above, I’m happy to answer any questions I can about SEOmoz’s founding, past or growth. Feel free to leave them in the comments below (though I may be a bit slow to respond depending on the timing).

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Posted by laura

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.

My friends, you’ve made it. You’ve sat through over 10,000 words I’ve shoveled into these  SEO Strategy posts (so far), and for that you deserve a serenade.  This serenade calls for a nice glass of wine (preferably a good Tokaji to go with the music) and a comfortable seat while we wrap up our journey together. Got your wine? Ok, now let the exceptionally gifted Sandor Lakatos send some beautiful Hungarian gypsy music through your speakers and let’s begin the end. (PS – If you really like this music I suggest this album)

There are two things you can potentially do here to wrap this up.  The first, prioritization, is optional. The second, summarizing the document in an overview, is pretty important. If you’re not into prioritizing all this stuff you’ve put together then just go right to the Overview section and skip the Prioritize one. Here we go.

 

PRIORITIZE

Well, hello go-getter. Glad to see you’re ready to do some prioritizations. There are two ways I’ve done this before, and at this point I don’t need to tell you again that however you want to go about this is up to you.  Create this document in the manner that seems best for you.

a) Prioritization Summary

After you’ve created your magnum opus of specific recommendations in Step 6 that will make the next big internet sensation out of your client’s product, you may want to take all of those recommendations and wrap them up in a nice (short) summary that says, “this is the most important thing you can do, and these things are very important also”.  Let them know where they can start and what they cannot ignore if they want to see results.  This is different than the overview which we’ll look at later, that will summarize the entire document in a much more broad manner.  This is specific to the recommendations that you’ve listed. You and I know that the more of the recommendations they follow (especially the high-impact ones) the better off they’ll be, but you and I also know that the chances of the client implementing 100% are usually not so great, so make sure you let them know what’s the most important. 

b) Prioritize by Item

This is more time- and labor-intensive, but I’ve found it has really helped for teams who have a lot on their plate. Prioritizing each task that you’ve given your client in Step 6 can help them place your recommendations in their queue along with the 1,000 other things they’re working on, without having a doubt as to what will potentially make the most impact. Without specific prioritizations they might just implement whatever is easiest, and then call you in 4 months when there hasn’t been any change in results.

For example, the template I’ve built has prioritizations to choose from built in, so that I can stick these in wherever necessary. If I have several recommendations under a category (like Specific Content to Build), then each recommendation within that section will get a prioritization. 

 

Feeling even more ambitious? (Might be the sugar in the Tokaji – go with it!)  Note which team each recommendation should be owned by.  For example, recommendations for external linking might be relevant to Design, Web Dev, and/or Biz Dev.  Specific terminology recommendations might be relevant to Writers/Editorial. I’ve learned the more you give them the more they’ll get done, and the better it will look for you – both in presentation and when they start seeing results.

 

SUMMARIZE IN AN OVERVIEW

This is it. This is the big shiny bow on this custom handmade contribution of your unmatched talent and innate inner wisdom that you’re lovingly bestowing upon your client. The crescendo, if you will.

The overview is for the beginning of the document.  Rather than just jumping right into demographics and recommendations, give the client a short summary of the purpose of this document and what they’ll find in it. Here are some of the things you might consider putting in this one or two paragraph overview (I don’t suggest it be much longer than that):

• Summarize why this document has been commissioned – what is the goal they are trying to attain
• Recap the issue(s) the client is having now (the reason they’re seeking your help)
• Explain the potential outcome the client can attain after implementing
• Explain the originality of this document – that it is a custom set of recommendations created specifically to meet the clients individual visibility needs (or something like that). And that it is not a best practices document.

This, by the way, follows the typical steps to persuasion (shown here in my words):

1. Show how awesome life would be if everything was perfect and nothing needed help
2. Show the reality – here is a problem & here’s how its hurting you
3. Let them know you have the solution for them
4. Let them know the solution is attainable if they take action
5. Give them the tools to take that action (this is really the rest of the document)

By the time they’re done reading your overview they’ll be salivating for what’s in this SEO Strategy document. 

And with that we come to a close of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. Thanks for taking this journey with me and I hope some of the info in these 8 steps has given you insights and ideas to make you worth gobs of money. 

So go forth and conquer dearest SEOs, and don’t forget who led you on the path to multi-million-dollar SEO fame when you get rich off of this stuff.  You can find me here (very soon). 

Xo, Laura

 

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Posted by Tom_C

Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow spot those SEO opportunities on your site which were low effort and high value? Well this post gives you a few ways you can do that! Sweet.

I’m going to be digging around in the recently released search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools:

Step 1 – Gathering The Fruit

The first thing we need to do is gather all the fruit (aka keyphrases). So within GWT select search queries and select just "web" queries and in this case I’ve selected "United States" since that’s the main target market for SEOmoz. The more we can narrow this down the better data we get, if we leave image search etc in there and leave countries like Serbia in there the less accurate our data will be:

Once we have filtered the data we then want to download the data to Excel:

Step 2 – Identify The Low Hanging Fruit

Once we have the data in Excel we can do some monkeying around to get some meaningful insights. When you download the data you will be presented with a lot of dummy data like this:

 So I run a find and replace on the following two items:

1. Find "<10" and replace with 1
2. Find "-" and replace with 0

Be sure to only run these over columns B,C,D to avoid stripping out anything from your queries column in A!

Now, once we have this data it will depend on the number of impressions and number of keyphrases how exactly you want to slice the data. Analysing the data for SEOmoz I found that selecting all avg positions that were not equal to 1 and impressions over 200 gave me a sample set of 97 keyphrases to look at which wouldn’t take very long at all to whiz through and look at. If you have more time or if you have more keyphrases you might want to get a longer or shorter list.

As I mentioned this gives me a list of 97 keyphrases for the SEOmoz site. Let’s take a look at what some of those opportunities are!

An Example: SEOmoz’s Low Hanging Fruit

In this post I not only wanted to show you how to get the data but also to give you an insight into what kinds of actions you could take and what sorts of keyphrases you might look at so I ran the above process for the SEOmoz site and found the following low hanging fruit. Bear in mind that there weren’t that many really easy wins in the data since SEOmoz generally has fairly good SEO (unsurprisingly!). Still, it gives you an idea of the thought process.

Keyphrase: SEO   |   Ranking: 9.4   |   Impressions: 49,500   |   Clicks: 590

Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org

Now, I’ve shot myself in the foot a little here by picking a keyphrase which isn’t really a low hanging fruit, it’s actually a highly competitive keyphrase! That said, it’s useful information to have. Without having rank tracking set up for the site it instantly tells me that SEOmoz are highly competitive for this term, especially as some of the sites that rank above them are Google and Wikipedia. That said, there’s room for improvement. Maybe time for some more badge-bait Rand?!

Keyphrase: Social media marketing  |   Ranking: 7.9   |   Impressions: 8,100   |   Clicks: 320

Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

Again, this is a highly competitive keyphrase but one which I feel SEOmoz could perform better for. The current ranking is working ok for them but could certainly improve dramatically if they could shift the ranking from 7.9 into the top 3. Digging around we see that the page is linked internally from every page in the navigation with good anchor text and it has a total of 255 root domains linking to the page so there’s clearly a fair amount of work already done here. That said, I feel like there’s an opportunity waiting since SEOmoz links out to lots of other sites from here and most of those blogs will likely link back to the SEOmoz guide if there was a nicely written email. Incidentally, if you’re looking for a link from SEOmoz and have a top notch guide for one of the sites which doesn’t have any resources attached then get in touch! So long as you link back to the page

Also, BONUS TIP – while researching backlinks in this space I stumbled across the fact that Amazon authors can get links from Amazon.com check out Darren Rowse on Amazon and then compare to Rand Fishkin on Amazon and you’ll see that Rand has missed an opportunity to get blog posts imported and hence get clean followed links from Amazon. Sweet!

Keyphrase: What is seo  |   Ranking: 3.9   |   Impressions: 1,900   |   Clicks: 210

Ranking URL: http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization (Note here that this URL isn’t reported in GWT, it’s the old beginner’s guide URL which now redirects but the same keyphrase stands).

Here, I see the answer being a little easier than the above keyphrases. The term is less competitive and the title of the page doesn’t even mention "what is seo"! My actions would be to reword the title tag to be "What is SEO? The Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz" and to mention "What is SEO" on the page at least once (currently it only mentions "what is search engine optimisation" and although Google knows they’re the same phrase I’d still like to see the exact phrase on the page somewhere). Also, there is no navigation link on the site to the beginner’s guide so slipping a few links into the next few blog posts with the anchor text "what is seo" will help boost the rankings for that phrase.

Keyphrase: Free seo tools  |   Ranking: 4.2   |   Impressions: 480   |   Clicks: 73

Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org/tools

The term "seo tools" is fiercely competitive but the "free seo tools" term seems like it would be a lot easier to go after, in fact SEOmoz is one of only 2 of the top 10 results which doesn’t mention the term free in the title tag of the page. This could be rectified easily and in addition to that the page doesn’t even mention "free seo tools" on the page. Personally, since this is something people search for I’d be tempted to re-design the page to add a "Free SEO Tools" sub-header to differentiate between the free and PRO tools. That way it’s a good user experience and also gets the phrase on the page.

Keyphrase: Keyword research  |   Ranking: 19   |   Impressions: 110   |   Clicks: 12

Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research

Note here that the impression numbers are so low because the page is ranking 2nd page. Not having a page ranking in the top 10 here is a mistake for SEOmoz I think (sorry, I mean opportunity!). The correct page is clearly the page on keyphrase research from the new beginner’s guide and the best way to make that page rank is to throw some more internal links to the page. Currently there are basically no internal links to that page except from other beginner’s guide pages. Linking to it from elsewhere should be able to get that page ranking. One idea to help get internal links to pages of the beginner’s guide would be to automatically link to the keyword research page from any blog post within the keyphrase research category. That way it would essentially get more deep links internally to the individual pages of the beginner’s guide.

A Data Warning

A warning here that I’m still not sure how much I trust this impression and click data. I wrote a post over on Distilled about how the reported numbers are way out from analytics numbers. To be honest, if I was doing SEO full-time for SEOmoz I’d like to think I’d have better resources of keyphrase research, ranking data and visitor numbers but using Google’s webmaster tools search queries report can be a nice quick way to identify keyphrase opportunities for a site which you’re less familiar with or for which you don’t have these things set up.

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Posted by Seoteric

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.

Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work.  Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far.  I have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with link building over the years, and I have really started to be a lot more analytical in how I go about building incoming links.

This love story begins at the beginning of 2006.  I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, but prayerfully enough it turned out to be a large non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma tumor which was treatable. For over six months, I was stuck in a chair and didn’t have the energy to get up an do anything so I spent that time teaching myself about websites and marketing.  I started reading SEO blogs (like SEOmoz and others) to learn what I could.  I figured I might as well put the time to use, right?

Over the coming months, I started my first SEO campaign for my newly built car accessories website.  My target keywords were stupidly competitive – car accessories and aftermarket auto parts and a lot more keywords like them.  I figured if SEO really worked, then I could do it.  I could get ranked for some ridiculously competitive keywords.

I had a good understanding of on-site SEO such as titles, meta tags, content, URLs, and link structure so I built the site to be highly optimized for my keywords.  I found creative ways to get a lot of content on the homepage using ajax and javascript tabs but still keeping the website aesthetically pleasing.  Once the changes were indexed, I made sure that the content in the tabs was indexing properly.  After trying some long tail queries, I found my site’s tabbed content was indexed very well.

The on-site SEO bumped the rankings into the top 100 for car accessories.  It had previously been ranked around 350 or so.  With everything I had done to beef up the on-site SEO, it was still a long way from where I wanted it.  That’s when I started the link building process.  In 2006 I found a lot of info about directory submissions, article marketing, reciprocal linking, buying links, DMOZ, and blogging so I did a little bit of everything.  A little of everything turned into a lot of everything over the next six months, and slowly but surely the rankings began to rise. 

The directory submission process was done with a combination of manual submissions, semi-automated submissions using software, and even some automated submissions.  I used a few directory submitters plus doing a simple Google search for relevant directories and submitted to any and all that didn’t require a payment.  During this process I also started writing how-to articles and submitting them to article directories, blogs, online magazines and journals.  After a few months, the site made it to the first page and traffic started coming in. 

Not long after that I started getting reciprocal link requests, so I exchanged a few links along with way as well.  As traffic picked up, I started getting sales on the website for the first time and my attention was being directed towards sales and customer service instead of SEO.  For about a year, I didn’t do any marketing on the site except write a few articles and syndicate to whoever would publish them.  Sometime in 2008, I checked the rankings and found this.

It had climbed to #1 out of 92,100,000 results. I could not believe it.  Traffic was up over 1000%, and the site was getting literally thousands of unique visitors a month just from this keyword.  I checked the analytics and traffic was up and down and all over the place.  After monitoring this for a few days, I experienced the "Google Dance" with rankings ranging from #1 to #4.  Surprisingly, traffic amounts from positions 2-4 were not even HALF of the amount generated from position #1. 

Jump ahead to June 2010.  The website is ranking between #2 and #5 from day to day for car accessories.  The surprising thing about this case study is that there hasn’t been any additional marketing done to the site since around November 2008.  Even with the low quality nature of directories, article directories, and even some reciprocal incoming links, the ranking has stayed top 5 for a really competitive keyword.   I did take the time to get the website listed in DMOZ, the Google Directory, and a lot of other "good" websites.  Some of the syndicated articles landed on sites like DIY, ehow.com, and other car enthusiasts websites generating some great inbound links.  The site doesn’t get credit for a lot of the low quality links that were acquired early on but I did do a few things right that had some great results.

I mentioned earlier that I am taking a more analytical approach to link building, and after reading a lot of articles, seeing this video about article marketing, and getting a better understanding of how much better Google is at identifying low quality links and websites, I have really changed the way I think about link building.  Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links.  After analyzing my own link building path from 2006 until the present, I came up with a list of best practices to guide my link building moving forward:

• It is well worth the time to write great content as opposed to lots of decent content.  Some of the best articles I wrote are the ones that attracted the most links and landed on good websites, and one or two were even highlighted in a breaking news story that brought a LOT of referral traffic while it was on the site’s homepage.
• If you figure out something cool or unique, like getting Pandora to play through a mono bluetooth headset, write about it and keep the content on your site and create a buzz using social media.  Links will surely come.
• Write content for your own site first.  As Rand points out, you will get the links pointing back at your site for having the original content.
• Here is one of my favorites – syndicate your RSS feed, not your article content.  This is a philosophical change to the approach I used to have in article marketing.  Instead of publishing your duplicate content everywhere, keep the content on your site and ping services like technorati, twitter, facebook, and anywhere you can publish your site’s feed. Get visitors on your site and then give them an opportunity to bookmark or share your content via social media. 
• Quality directories are still valid.  I have still seen good success from getting listed in the top human-edited directories, especially local and regional ones.  Avoid the free-for-all sites and focus on the ones that add value to users.
• Guest Blogging is a new hot-topic which is also worth doing.  As Rand mentioned in this weeks WBF video, finding relevant websites to post content to is a good way to get quality inbound links and brand awareness.  In many cases, you can get content for your site as well if you establish a good partnership with a complementary website or blog.
• Patience is a virtue.  It is hard to not check rankings every day, but there are a lot of other things to do with your valuable time than checking rankings.  I schedule a time once a week to check up on how things are progressing. This keeps me from wasting time each day, and gives me a reason to measure results and dive into analytics at the end of the week.
• Reciprocal links are not all bad.  It is natural for complementary websites to link to one another, so the emphasis is on relevance.  I will exchange links with relevant and complementary websites, but not with just any site.  You want to make sure you are linking to reputable websites too.
• Don’t Spam.  Search engines (like Google) mostly update their algorithms to do one of two things: to increase the relevance of the search results and to battle spam in their index. If you keep things relevant and avoid spam tactics, your rankings should remain intact as long as their isn’t a fundamental shift in how websites and pages are ranked.  Up until the recent "May Day" update, all of our sites have actually improved over the past few years with Google updates (The May Day update gave us about a 14% drop in the number of indexed pages, much like with SEOmoz and others).

Four years later, I have a much different approach to marketing, a different approach to life, and a lot of sites doing well in the search results.  Marketing gives me an outlet for my competitive edge which is why I tend to climb the keyword mountains that I do.  I would like to hear how your link building tactics have changed over the years and see how far we have come.   I plan to keep a student’s approach SEO, which continues to prove itself as one of the most frustrating, rewarding, and elusive things in life.  It is (after all) a love story!

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