Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I’ll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 – Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin – Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users – deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller’s Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand’s humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online – there’d be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced – it’s light and airy, it’s up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in "the cloud") and it even calls out the "sexiness" of the application.

When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they’re more likely to:

• Link
• Share
• Contribute Content
• Participate
• Remain Loyal
• Invest in the Experience
• Browse more Pages

All of these have either first or second-order impacts on SEO in a positive way.

#2 – The Scroll-Triggered Call-to-Action

Sometimes, you don’t want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action… At least, not until you’re fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That’s where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.

Browse any article on the New York Times website and you’ll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you’ve reached the bottom of the current piece:

It’s great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.

In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:

This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid’s flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.

Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for SEO are far greater in quantity than just what’s been shared above).

#3 – User Badges

If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?

For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet from Concept Feedback authored a brilliant piece analyzing this precise behavior and exposing some terrific examples.

We’ve noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it’s spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering SEO:

The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It’s the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts – fans won’t just wear them to bed; they’ll actually show off your brand.

#4 – The Animated HTML Multiheader

I wrote about the multiheader a long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point, Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I’ve screencaptured them elegantly "swooshing" in and out of the headline position:

The advantage is two-fold – more content on the homepage that’s accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it’s a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.

BTW – Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner’s 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you’re seriously missing out.

#5 – Sexy, Embeddable Infographics

Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it’s a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you’re off to the link acquisition races.

Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it’s creation):

And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:

As with badges, the "beauty rule" applies – the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.

#6 – Designing Around Illustration (with CSS)

It used to be that I’d see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their SEO, too.

Google’s "text only" cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot – we’ve come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn’t make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below… errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that’s the one!)

For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:

Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an SEO ask?

#7 – Creative Content Formats Unleashed

Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you’ve seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.

A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:

Above: Grain and Gram Gentleman’s Journal

Above: Sanctuary T Shop (who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)

Above: Heart Directed (a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an SEO example itself)

---

It’s a great time to be on the web, thinking about SEO, design and the brilliant things that can happen when they overlap strategically. Here’s to hoping that more of us who invest in organic search traffic will bolster that task with the power amazing design can bring. It’s not just more links – it’s greater engagement and a higher liklihood that sharing of all kinds will occur. However the search engines evolve, you can be sure this is the type of behavior they’ll seek to reward.

p.s. If design inspires you, I’d recommend checking out Drawar and Six Revisions list of 10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration

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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 richardbaxterseo

Today, we’re going to talk about Microformats, a simple set of extensions to HTML, allowing us to add meaning to certain types of data found in our web pages. As SEOs, Microformats provide us with a wonderful toolbox to enhance our Google search snippets, particularly if you own a site with reviews, recipes, contact details or location data.

In this post we’ll talk about Microformat standards available to webmasters that have events listings data on their websites. Think conferences, festivals, theatre, even opera – they’re all events that can be described with components of the hCalendar Microformat.

What does an Events Based Rich Snippet Look Like?

This result, for "photography exhibitions London" shows an enhanced, hCalendar based rich snippet:

The example ranking is taken from a site that lists things to do in London, and you can see that the events featured on the listings page have been pulled through into Google’s (UK) SERPS.

What is the hCalendar Microformat? [Definition]

Brace yourselves for a mildly techie, but perfectly worded definition, courtesy of Microformats.org:

hCalendar is a simple, open, distributed calendaring and events format, using a 1:1 representation of standard iCalendar (RFC2445) VEVENT properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML. hCalendar is one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar

What Properties Should I be Interested in?

Google looks out for the following elements of the hCalendar Microformat in your web page mark-up. Not all of the elements listed are actually required, but if you have the data it’s probably worth implementing as fully and correctly as you can. Here, Google break down exactly what they’re watching out for:

Property	Description
summary	Required. The name of the event.
url	Link to the event details page.
location	The location or venue of the event. Can optionally be represented by nested organisation data, or nested Address data. Recommended (unless the page containing the markup is a page about the venue, and the location is the same for every event.)
description	A description of the event.
startDate (dtstart)	Required. The starting date and time of the event in ISO date format.
endDate (dtend)	The ending date and time of the event in ISO date format.
duration	The duration of the event in ISO duration format.
eventType (category)	The category of the event, such as "Festival", "Concert", "Lecture".
geo	Specifies the geographical coordinates of the location. Includes two elements: latitude and longitude. Optional.
photo	A link to a photo or image related to the event.

A Before and After Example of an Event Implementation

On Saturday a few of us went to the Wireless festival to have a day in the sun with music and (of course) a few beers. Let’s say you’re describing that event listing on your website.

Your HTML might look a little like this:

<div> <a href="http://www.wirelessfestival.co.uk/lineup/">Wireless 2010</a> <img src="wireless.jpg" />World class acts playing across four stages -  but Wireless is about so much more than just amazing music... When: Saturday 3rd July, 12:00pm - 11:00pm Where: Hyde Park, London Category: Concert <div>

 

Now let’s take a look at that same event, marked-up with our hCalendar elements:

<div class=”vevent”> <a href=”http://www.wireless.co.uk/” class=”url summary”>Wireless 2010</a> <img src=”wireless.jpg” class=”photo” /> <span class=”description”>World class acts playing across four stages -  but Wireless is about so much more than just amazing music</span> When: <span class="dtstart"> July 3rd, 2:00PM<span class="value-title" title="2010-07-03T1200Z00"></span> </span>- <span class="dtend"> ~11:00PM<span class="value-title" title="2010-07-03T2300Z00"></span> </span> Where: <div class="location vcard"> <span class="fn org">Hyde Park</span>, <span class="adr"> <span class="street-address">Hyde Park</span>, <span class="locality">Paddington</span>, <span class="region">London</span> </span> <span class="geo"> <span class="latitude"> <span class="value-title" title="51.50716" ></span> </span> <span class="longitude"> <span class="value-title" title="-0.17066"></span> </span> </span> </div> Category: <span class="category">Concert</span> </div>

This is usually a simple implementation, with only a few changes to the CSS stylesheet required. Have a chat with your web developer to get an idea of how much work it is to implement.

Testing and Go Live

Implementing Microformats can be reasonably easy, provided you already have the event data available on your site. To make using Microformats just a little easier, Google has provided a rich snippets testing tool to help make sure your mark-up is correct.

To get your rich snippets working in Google’s results pages though, takes time and patience. Google are reviewing sites on a case by case basis, so the next step is to fill out this form and wait. Patience is a virtue though, and Google takes the semantic web and structured data very seriously. According to this write up of the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, rich snippets are now available in 40 languages, and enhanced snippet impressions have grown four fold globally since October 2009. Google are planning more support for more formats, such as video, local businesses and shopping in the near future. How exciting!

If you’d like to learn more about Microformats, Joost De Valk has an excellent tutorial on implementing hReview in WordPress. If you’ve got a spare 45 minutes or so, Joost and I recently discussed Microformats and their impact on SEO with Bas van den Beld on the State of Search show on WebmasterRadio.fm. Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

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Posted by jennita

Yabba Dabba Doooo! Ok, I have no idea what the Flintstones has to do with SEO training, but the point is… I’m excited. It’s that time of year again when we open up registration for the PRO Training Series: Tips, Tricks and Tactics. See! Now do you get why I’m so giddy? As with every year, we have a killer lineup of speakers including Tim Ash, Dan Zarella, Laura Lippay, Wil Reynolds, Marshall Simmonds, Will Critchlow. Plus we’ve brought back the highly acclaimed "Ice Cream Break" – you wouldn’t want to miss that.

Rand and Dharmesh Shah having an ice cream treat.

Here’s the deal, last year we sold out quickly and, sadly, had to actually turn away a lot of requests. With a limit of only 310 attendees, the networking alone is going to be amazing. But that also means tickets will go quickly. The sooner you register, the better your chances of learning from top-notch speakers and networking with a unique group of advanced SEOs (Oh… and you get to hang out with JLo. heh.)

So, let’s just jump right into the details… or you can just go register.

Details!

Where: Westin Hotel, Seattle (This is where we had it last year as well, and it rocked!)

When: August 30 – 31, Plus an optional ½ day tools training on September 1 (65 person limit)

Price: $1149 for general attendees
           $649 for PRO Members (that’s $500 off the regular price!)
           Plus $125 for the optional tools training

Speakers!

Remember that killer lineup I mentioned above, well here’s the full list. As you can see the speakers cover a huge spectrum of knowledge an expertise. Plus don’t forget, the tickets are limited, so it’s a lot easier to get one-on-one time with them in this setting.

• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• David Mihm, GetListed.org
• Dan Zarrella, Hubspot
  
• Will Critchlow, Distilled
• Jen Sable Lopez, SEOmoz
• Laura Lippay, NinebyBlue
  
• Ben Hendrickson, SEOmoz
• Lindsay Wassell, Keyphraseology and SEOmoz
• Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive
  
• Wil Reynolds, SEER Interactive
  
• Rob Ousbey, Distilled
• Joanna Lord, SEOmoz
• Marshall Simmonds, Define Search Strategies
  
• Tom Critchlow, Distilled
• Tim Ash, Sitetuners

The Goods!

Check out the agenda for the full two days. We’re covering topics ranging from the Science of Twitter & Google’s Algorithm to Conversion Rate Optimization and Reverse Engineering your Competitors’ Rankings. 

 

Networking!

If you don’t believe me about the amazing networking that happens at the seminar, read How to Network at an SEOmoz Seminar After-Party from audiore. She wrote this after the seminar last year, and it’s a great guide to networking. Plus, where else can you geek out at the computer at a party? (see below)

A group geeking out at the after party

DVDs

If you can’t attend the seminar, or even if you do and just want to relive it forever, you’ll be able to purchase the training on DVD. We’ll have more information about that coming soon.

London Seminar – October 25-26

Don’t worry! If you’re wondering about the London Seminar, sign up below to get on the email list to learn more as soon as details are announced.

Email Address *
First Name
Last Name

What Past Attendees Have Said

Here are a couple great posts from attendees last year, which were submitted to YOUmoz. Go Community!

10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro … from Whitespark

YOUmoz Immersion at the SEOmoz Day Spa from erikellsworth

 

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Posted by randfish

After last week’s Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur, I got several questions about whether paid/spammy links could be used as a weapon to potentially harm someone else’s rankings. In this post, I’ll walk through why this is rarely the case, how you can defend yourself from potential scenarios and why this isn’t a great tactic to employ against your competitors.

Can Paid Links Be Used as Weapons in the SERPs?

The short answer is "almost never." But, as is typical in the SEO world, there’s a lot more in the long version.

In general, it’s very, very hard to bring down a white hat site/page ranking well in the search results. Although Google isn’t perfect at catching spam (e.g. our recent video featuring the success of some very obvious paid links in a well known network), they seem to be surprisingly excellent (almost prescient) at detecting the intent of links. My suspicion is that sites who buy links to prop up their own rankings have very different patterns than those who have competitors buying links to them. These patterns exist on the sites themselves, in other sites registered to the owners, in link footprints and in usage/search behavior.

It could, in fact, be that the "penalties" many SEOs often ascribe to paid links are in fact the result of a much more sophisticated analysis by Google looking at multiple aspects of a site’s presence before making a determination of the link intent. Given that, in nearly 10 years of SEO, I’ve only heard of two reasonably verifiable instances of "Google-bowling" (the process of pointing bad links at a site or page to hurt it’s rankings) working, my guess is that Google’s webspam team has developed some very impressive methods here.

Many SEOs have also suggested that a certain "bar of trust" can be achieved in Google, after which, negative links may be devalued, but likely don’t cause penalties or rankings drops. This makes a lot of sense to me (though it’s nearly impossible to prove), since "Google-bowling" is largely defeated and even good sites who stray into black/gray hat link building will simply find themselves wasting money, rather than being removed from the results (which could, for many popular brands/sites, cause a loss of relevance in the results for users).

Thus, if you are trying to wield paid links as a weapon against your ranking competitors, it’s far more likely to work against the new(ish) site ranking #65 for your keywords rather than those who’ve earned their way to the top spots with white hat techniques.

Defending Yourself from Potential Link Attacks

Have you recently broken the heart of a black hat link broker’s son or daughter? Stepped on a link farmer’s superhero cape? Talked smack about a nefarious panelist at an SEO conference not realizing they were just around the corner? The best defense, in this case, is a good defense (don’t go buying and renting links to others; you’re only enriching the spammers).

Many, many SEOs and webmasters worry a tremendous amount about spammy links pointing to their sites and pages. By and large, this isn’t a concern and it happens to every site on the web. Just look at some of the spamtastic links that point to SEOmoz (via this Yahoo! query):

If you see a collection of scraper sites filled with pharmaceutical, financial, legal, real estate and other questionable links with surprisingly well-optimized anchor text appearing in Google Alerts or your 24-hour reputation monitoring queries (e.g. http://www.google.com/search?as_q=seomoz&as_qdr=d&num=100 - which queries Google for all pages mentioning "seomoz" in the past 24 hours) don’t panic. If you exist on the web, you’re going to attract these types of links and the search engines will not punish you for it, even if you’re a relatively new, untrusted site.

However, if you start acquiring links that look an awful lot like they’re part of an intentional, paid link network (great anchor text, pointing to internal pages on the site, coming from footers and sidebars that contain other irrelevant, anchor-text rich links), there may be some cause for concern. Your best course of action is to submit a spam report to Google from your own, verified, Webmaster Tools account, noting that you have nothing to do with the links and want to make sure Google doesn’t think you’ve created, endorsed or paid for them.

This action is rarely necessary or worthwhile, but if you’re highly concerned about competitive conduct, it’s not a bad route to take. Of course, you’ll want to make sure you don’t actually engage in any black/gray hat activity yourself or it could trigger the wrong kind of review by a webspam team member.

Should I Buy Links to Push Down My Competitors?

Not unless you feel the link brokers of the world are more worthy than your favorite charity.

Seriously, the chances you’ll have a negative impact are far lower than the changes you’ll actually help (again, I refer back to our paid link WB Friday experiment in which the obvious link network had positive effects, even on the brand new site). The money is far better off spent on editorial content, public relations, social media campaigns and white hat SEO efforts for your own stite. Bringing someone else down may seem temporarily, emotionally satisfying, but it’s the wrong way to approach SEO (and life in general, if I may be so bold).

Looking forward to the discussion in the comments and happy to talk through the filtration processes and failsafes (or at least, my speculation) Google may employ.

p.s. The new Beginner’s Guide to SEO has more on understanding + recovering from search spam penalties.

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Posted by Lindsay

When I was an in-house SEO I hired outside SEO consultants. Now as the outside SEO consultant I often work with in-house SEOs. In the comments of my most recent post, an interesting question came up, "…why would a company who has an in-house SEO expert hire an external company?"

Here are 8 excellent reasons why talented in-house SEOs often bring in outside help.

1. Specialized Expertise

Not too long ago, SEO was a niche marketing specialization. I remember when even Internet Marketing was considered a highly niche specialization. In fact, my college marketing instructor tried to talk me out of Internet Marketing because it was too niche and I ran the risk of limiting my prospects down the line.

Times have sure changed. As the search engines have matured and the SEO industry has evolved along with them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be on top of every SEO related factor. Even something as specific as SEO is segmenting into specializations. Experts have emerged in social media promotion, local SEO, mobile SEO, copy-writing for SEO, link-building, and so on.

I like what Duane said about the hiring of external consultants ramping up your program quicker. By knowing and doing what you do best and outsourcing other tasks, you can super-charge your site’s SEO and get closer to your potential traffic level.

If I worked for a national business comprised on thousands of brick-and-mortar locations (think Burger King), I’d definitely look at retaining the services of someone like David Mihm to ensure I had all the right pieces in place. I doubt that many people reading this post are as well versed on the intricacies of Local SEO as David.

How about mobile? You have the choice to either delve into the details yourself or do as other talented in-house SEOs have done and hire someone like Cindy Krum who wrote the book on Mobile Marketing. Literally.

Why bumble around yourself on such specialized niches when you can focus on the pieces you know best and outsource those pieces to a more qualified expert? You don’t need to be everything SEO all the time. Give yourself a break!

2. Too Much to Do. Too Little Time.

Effective SEO is a lot of work. Managing the internal politics can be a full-time job unto itself! Perhaps you are confident that you have the strategy nailed down but you just can’t get your projects through the pipeline fast enough. In order to keep things moving while you consider the next big project it can help to hire an outside consultant.

Once you’ve established what needs to be done, hiring an SEO consultant can help you push through a task list and get closer to your goals.

3. Fresh Perspective

Working on the same website for years on end can get mighty boring. You can only come up with so many interesting articles related to nylons, and if you have to rewrite the homepage title tag one more time you’re going to scream. With boredom comes creative stagnation. Bringing in the right SEO consultant can help get the creative juices flowing again. Fresh eyes bring fresh ideas to help your business grow.

At SEOmoz we used to provide whirlwind audits in our boardroom. The client would bring along their best and brightest SEOs, marketing folks, and development staff. We’d go through their site and point out areas for improvement. One particular client comes to mind; well known brand, important website, talented SEO expertise… They’d blocked an important directory in the robots.txt. Sometimes when you are too close to a problem you can miss little details like a line in your robots.txt or an important redirect.

4. Educational Purposes

At SEOmoz we often sold an educational component along with our site audits. We’d go in with slide decks and teach anywhere from one to dozens of in-house resources some of our knowledge. This empowers the in-house team to move forward on their own, knowing a little more. Training can be formal or otherwise. Topher describes his outsourced project as a learning experience.

5. Validation

SEO enhancements can be expensive to implement and sometimes take months or even years to complete. Based on high level experience across more web properties, an outsourced consultant can help you prioritize your enhancements and validate your project plan to ensure you make the most of the development investment.

At SEOmoz we enjoyed working with strong in-house SEO individuals or teams for our consulting gigs. I suspect that this is true for most SEO consultants that specialize more on strategy and less on implementation.

6. Collaboration

As in-house SEOs, a lot of folks work independently. It can be refreshing and rewarding to expand on the one-man show. Marty describes how he and his employer benefit from expanding his team from time to time to meet a need.

7. Overcome Internal Politics

Of course you know your stuff when it comes to SEO. That is how you got your in-house SEO job, right? Then why do you spend so much of your time selling the value of your projects and negotiating for resources? One challenge that a lot of in-house SEOs face is finding the time to do actual SEO work. External consultants can help pave the way to get home grown ideas implemented.

8. Breadth of Knowledge

As an in-house SEO for a growing business, the challenges you face for the first time have more often than not been considered and successfully addressed by another SEO somewhere out there in cyberspace.

Lets say you’ve inadvertently landed yourself a Google penalty. How do you diagnose the problem, get it fixed, and request forgiveness with a successful outcome? A consultant who has helped other websites work their way out of a penalty situation can be invaluable.

There are plenty of less dramatic examples. How do you implement a WordPress powered blog as a sub-folder of a .Net site? How do you handle millions of constantly expiring pages (as is common with job boards and classified ad sites)? How will you write a compelling link bait piece?

Action Items

The next time you get push back when proposing to hire an SEO consultant, choose from the reasons outlined in this post to support your case.

1. We need specialized expertise.
2. We have too much to do. We’ll get this project moving faster if I can get some help.
3. We can learn a lot from an outside expert.
4. We want to double check our strategies before we get going.
5. We would benefit from collaboration with other SEOs.
6. A consultant can help us work through the concerns of marketing/IT/executives.
7. We need the help of someone who has done (insert complicated initiative) before.

In-house SEOs hire outside assistance for all kinds of things from strategy, implementation, retainer, special projects and more. Are you an in-house SEO that has worked with external SEO experts? I’d love to hear your experience.

Happy optimizing!

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Posted by randfish

This past week during the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, I presented some correlation data alongside Janet Driscoll-Miller, Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing & Matt Cutts of Google. Matt in particular was quite vocal in expressing a desire to see additional data points from our research, primarily around the prominence/visibility of particular elements in the results. This post is intended to help make that available.

I must say that I don’t agree with Matt on the importance of the raw visibility/counts over the ranking correlations. My feeling is that SEOs in these spaces are more interested in answering the question – "what features predict a result will rank higher vs. lower on page 1?" – rather than the more straightforward – "does this feature appear more frequently on page 1 at Google or Bing?" However, I certainly agree that both are relevant and interesting.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around how to understand this prominence/visiblity data vs. our earlier data on the correlation with rankings, here’s how we’d best describe it:

• Correlation w/ rankings data helps to answer the question, "when this feature appears in results on the first page of Google/Bing, who ranks it higher and by what amount?" Those correlation numbers were derived by looking at the liklihood that a result would rank above another when it contained the target attribute.
• Visibility/prominence of an element helps to answer the question, "is this element more likely to appears on the first page of Google’s/Bing’s results?" This simply looks at the number of times we saw a result (or multiple results) ranking on page 1 containing the target attribute.

We’re looking at the latter one in this post, but before we dive in, there are a few critical items to understand:

• This isn’t correlation data and there’s no standard error or deviation numbers here. It’s simply how many times we saw the element in the results we gathered, divided by the total number of results (SERPs or URLs depending on the chart) to get a percentage. 
• This data is from page 1 of results from 11,351 search results, gathered from Google’s AdWords categories. This means the terms and phrases vary somewhat in search quantity (from sub-100 searches per month to tens or hundreds of thousands) but generally have a commercial focus and a intent. They generally don’t include brand names, long tail phrases or vanityname searches. Overall, we picked them because they’re precisely the kinds of queries most SEOs care about when they’re doing competitive SEO for their companies and clients.  We also ignore the second result in a SERP from the same domain to avoid effects of indented results (which was important for our earlier statistics, but not those in this post). 
• The results were collected the week of May 31st and thus, include post-"Mayday" update SERPs and likely results from after the "caffeine" launch as well (though Google did not announce when exactly that rollout occurred – it may not have much bearing as caffeine supposedly is an infrastructure, rather than an algorithmic change).
• Each feature contains two pie charts, one showing the percentage of results that contained at least 1 URL with this feature and another showing the percentage of total URLs in all results (102,296 for Google and 109,966 for Bing – note that some SERPs will fluctuate the quantity of standard web results they show on page 1). These are labeled as "(feature) in SERPs" and "(feature) in URLs," respectively.

In gathering this data, we did not optimize to share it in this fashion. In fact, Ben & I both feel that if we wanted to do it this way, we should gather the first 3-5 pages of results, not just the 1st page.  The way, one could compare the counts on page 1 with the counts on page 2.  However, since we’ve got the data and Matt, Sasi and several other folks expressed interest, we’re sharing anyway. Hopefully in the future we can do more on this front.

Let’s dive in!

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Exact Match Domains

These are domains that precisely matched the keywords in the query – e.g. for the query "dog collars" only a domain that matched *.dogcollars.* would be included.

 

You can see that Bing has slightly more exact match domains appearing in at least one result of the SERPs we collected and in the overall count of results (all the URLs from all the SERPs).

Exact Match .com Domains

Similar to exact match domains, exact match .com domains had to contain the exact query in the domain name and have a .com TLD extension.

Again, Bing showed a slight preference for displaying results from these sites in the SERPs and URLs we observed.

Exact Match .net Domains

As above, but replace ".com" with ".net."

The similarity is much closer in the number of total URLs we saw with .net exact match, but Bing is showing a preference in the SERPs count.

Exact Match .org Domains

In the .org TLDs, we start to see a bit of what we observed in the ranking correlation data:

This is the first exact match domain TLD where Google actually had more SERPs containing a result of this type. Bing, however, had a very tiny amount more URLs with this feature.

Exact Hyphenated Match Domains

One of Matt Cutts’ complaints centered around how Google vs. Bing handled exact hyphenated match domains. When we observed them in ranking correlations, it appeared that, when Google listed them, they would rank them higher than Bing did when they appeared on that first page of results. However…

As I called out in the presentation and the prior post, Bing has quite a few more SERPs where exact match domains appear and somewhat more URLs, too. This is another data point that should make us all think carefully about the fallacy of presuming correlation = causation. Bing might have a preference for exact hyphenated match domains, but the ranking correlations suggest to me there’s more going on here – maybe something to do with anchor text or where those types of sites tend to get links or something else we haven’t considered?

It’s critical to keep in mind that we’re just looking at individual factors here – not trying to explain why they exist or correlate (at least, not in the data).

Results that Include All Keywords in the Domain Name

Here we looked for domains that contained the keyword query in the domain, even if the match wasn’t exact. For example, mydogcollar.com would now match for the phrase "dog collar."

Again, it’s Bing that shows a higher number of these types of domains in their results.

Results that Include All Keywords in the Subdomain Name

We’ve previously shown some data suggesting that subdomains might have some ranking influence, but not as much as root domains (this was done using our rank modeling / machine learning process). Here’s some raw data on the number of times we observed keyword matching subdomains:

Perhaps not surprisingly, Bing again is showing more of these results in their SERPs and individual URLs.

.com Domains

For this feature and all the TLDs below, we’re just looking at any URL that has the domain extension.

It looks like Bing has very slightly more .coms in their results vs. Google.

.org Domains

Let’s see what happens for .org domains, recalling Google’s apparent preference for them in the ranking correlations.

Oddly, Bing again seems to have more .org pages in the SERPs and URLs.

.net Domains

URLs with .net probably won’t surprise you much:

Yet again, Bing is showing a small number more than their Googly competitors.

.edu Domains

Recall how, in the correlation data, the numbers were small(ish) but negatively correlated? Let’s see what the number of results shows: 

True to the stereotype, Google is slightly ahead on number of .edu domains in the SERPs & URLs.

.gov Domains

Given the previous charts, this one likely won’t surprise you:

Google has more .edus and more .govs, too.

Keywords in the Title Element

Not surprisingly, nearly every set of SERPs had at least one result where the title tag contained the keywords:

Bing shows up with more results that contain title tag to keyword matching. One thing that is worth mentioning is that we didn’t observe the titles the engines chose to show, but rather the page titles from the results themselves. Hence, if a result was showing a DMOZ title or a brand title (which Goole will sometimes insert), we ignored those and just saw the title element on the page itself.

Keywords in the URL

This one actually surprised me, if only because there were even fewer results with keywords in the URL than in the title! 

Bing again has more results with keyword-matching URLs, though remember that some of that is probably from keyword matching domains, too.

Keywords in the H1

The ranking correlations suggested that the H1 tag isn’t much of a differentiator, yet lots of people still swear by them:

The results would bear out that this is a much less frequent item than URLs or Titles for those ranking on page 1. Bing seems to show more of them than Google, though.

Keywords in the Alt Attribute

Alt attributes looked interesting last fall when we collected ranking information and once again provde worth a look in the correlation data from SMX Advanced. Let’s see what the raw couts show:

Bing is showing slightly more of these, but if the positive correlation means something, these numbers certanly suggest there’s lots of opportunity left for good alt attribute practices.

Homepages

Who lists homepages vs. deep pages in the results more?

My word! It’s Google by a good margin. Bing’s show of internal pages actually surprises me a bit, though perhaps that’s an old stereotype I need to abolish.

And with that, we’re done!

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One important point to notice is that I’ve not included data on link results, as these would be hard to interpret and likely non-useful. Every page of results had pages with links to them and nearly every individual ranking URL also had links (a good sign for Linkscape’s index, but not super valuable as a data point). There were a few other data pieces like this that wouldn’t make sense here (keyword prominence in the body tag, word tokens in the body tag, domain name length, etc) and have thus been excluded.

I’ve done less analysis on these results in general, as I think the data is a bit less ideal for the purpose, but it’s still interesting and hopefully, illustrative of general prominence. I look forward to seeing your interpretations and discussion!

p.s. If you email Ben at SEOmoz dot org, he will send you a lot of numbers in a TSV which is for each query the metrics for each result that we used in these posts.  You can also find raw results in a public Google spreadsheet doc here. Feel free to play around and let us know if you see anything else cool and interesting.

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I frequent many SEO and Web Marketing forums on a daily basis and every so often there is a debate about the SEO industry and ethics. After being involved in a number of these debates, it has become really obvious that the main problems are the facts that no two SEO companies are alike and there is no unified methodology. It’s very hard to make statements about the industry as a whole because it’s debatable what exactly ‘SEO’ is. Mix in the fact that most SEO companies keep their methodology and campaign strategies secret and we have a situation where every company is totally different with very different results.

Fact 1 : There is no unified SEO methodology. SEO is actually defined by wikipedia as a process of improving traffic from SERPs to a site. Of course, HOW they do that is the real question and causes the debates.

Fact 2 : The effectiveness of an SEO campaign depends on the site structure, site content, keywords, methodology used, and how popular the site is. A site cannot just rank for any random keyword. SEO is also not voodoo. It is logic, problem solving, and Web marketing mixed together. If your site provides no value to users, it probably won’t rank.

Fact 3 : Some ‘SEOs’ do search engine optimization and some do search engine manipulation. Of course, it is all marketed as SEO. Unethical optimization provides results at any cost and is always short term (usually ends in a banned domain name). Ethical optimization opens up the site to the search engines and provides long term benefits.

Fact 4 : Most SEO companies get paid whether or not your site gets any rankings. Unfortunately, this is the case with the industry. Most SEO companies implement A, B, and C and move on to the next client. Hopefully, the site ranks. If it doesn’t, they always have more clients.

Fact 5 : Most SEO companies use both ethical and unethical inbound linking strategies.To maximize profits, it is very common for SEO companies to buy bulk links from India, links on spam/scraper web sites, or sell large directory submission packages. It is also common for SEO companies to place huge amounts of the contract into inbound linking to make up for the poor quality of the site optimization.

I don’t think it is fair to characterize the industry as a whole without figuring out what is wrong with it and how SEO companies can overcome it. So how exactly do we determine what is good and bad about the industry? I have now been involved with the Web for over 10 years and, specifically, with the SEO industry for almost 4 years and I’ve seen the inner workings of major SEO companies and worked with clients who had been burned by their previous SEO campaigns. Combined with numerous Web postings and forum debates talking about the same basic problems, I’ve compiled a list of the most common issues.

Problem 1: Responsibility for Results

It’s no secret that the vast majority of SEO companies take no responsibility for results. It is a fact that no SEO company can guarantee results (and if they do, they are lying to you). It is also a fact that the client is taking a risk by spending money with an SEO company that basically says ‘We’ll do what we can’. SEO companies simply guarantee they’ll do the work to ‘optimize’ the site, but without full disclosure of their methodology, what exactly is the client paying for? No other industry sells a product with no guarantees and no specific list of work that will be completed. Of course, SEO work is basically the sales of information and keeping the specifics of a methodology is important, but the combination of secrecy and no responsibility for results really makes SEO campaigns risky. So, how can an SEO company reduce the risk for the client and provide the best grade of service?

Answer 1: Incentive Based Pricing

The only real way to reduce the financial risk of the client is to share the risk. Through incentive-based pricing, the SEO company can charge a certain percentage of the total contract (say 70%) to cover their intellectual property and time while placing the rest of the contract price (remaining 30%) in incentives for success. Of course, incentives and their percentage of the contract would be totally relative depending on the campaign. This first step into sharing in the risk provides both reassurance to the client that the company believes in its methodology and places some of the financial burden of the campaign on the SEO company. At the moment, however, very few SEO companies are willing to share in the risk and charge the same price whether the client gets top rankings or no rankings at all (or possibly even lower rankings).

Problem 2: Unethical Optimization

Unfortunately, unethical (or blackhat) optimization is still very prominent on the Web. It’s also unfortunate that ‘SEO’ has been mistakenly confused with ‘Blackhat SEO’. This is still the biggest problem for SEO companies. Saying that all SEO companies deal in blackhat optimization is like saying everyone who emails is a spammer. Blackhat optimization is not optimization at all…it is search engine manipulation. Because there is so much money tied to top rankings, there will always be a market for unethical SEO and search engine spam. Until companies realize what is ethical and unethical and stop supporting those blackhat SEO companies, they will continue to thrive. This makes the industry as a whole look bad and does not reflect the ethics of good SEO companies. Blackhat provides fast, short term results, but is never a good option in the long run.

Answer 2: Ethical Optimization

There is no quick and easy solution to blackhat optimization’s stain on the SEO industry. I would suggest that all marketing departments research optimization techniques and educate themselves on what techniques are unethical. No SEO company is going to say they do unethical optimization. It’s also not a good idea to immediately trust a company or product based simply on their rankings. Unethical optimization DOES provide rankings…just not for the long run.

It would also be helpful if the major search engines would be more open and accessible to SEO companies. Currently, the major search engines and SEO companies do not deal with each other and have formed a sort of love-hate relationship. Because of this, many ethical SEOs have slowly moved into dark territory. Ethical optimization seeks to make sites more easily accessible to the engines and help to improve the engine’s search results. The problem is that the search engines mainly clump all SEO companies together the same way as uninformed users do: search engine manipulation. This is just not the case. Search engines do not want to reveal what they consider unethical because it would basically be providing a list of holes in their algorithms that blackhat SEOs would be able to manipulate further, but a defined list of ‘what not to do’ would provide a definitive list for businesses looking for an SEO company.

Basic Rules of Ethical Optimization

Any campaign that does not abide by the following rules is dealing in unethical optimization techniques and should be avoided.

1.) What the user sees and what the search engine sees should be exactly the same. Do not hide anything.

2.) Your keywords (and the resulting optimization) should exactly reflect the content of the page.Keywords should always reflect what your site is about.

3.) Do not build out pages exclusively for search engines. The site should always cater to both audiences (users and search engines). Catering to only users is why optimization is necessary. Catering only to search engines is optimization gone too far into blackhat.

4.) Do not participate in manipulative inbound linking schemes like link farms, bulk links, triangle linking, or any other unethical manipulation of your Google PageRank or link authority. Inbound links should be relevant to the content of your site and you should always know who is linking to you and where your links come from.

Problem 3: Assembly Line / Software SEO

With the growth of the SEO industry has also come the automation of SEO. The absolute first thing any prospective SEO client should know is that all effective SEO campaigns are custom. There is no checklist of items that will work exactly the same on every site. If the SEO company claims there is, then they are not doing full optimization and the campaign is minimal. A good optimization campaign optimizes the site architecture, text content, and code of the site. Assembly line SEO does not take into consideration the unique needs/design of the site and may even deal in blackhat optimization. SEO software especially should be looked at closely. There are really only two things SEO software could do that would work for any site: doorway pages (showing engines one thing and users a different thing; which is unethical) or a system of pages build exclusively for search engines (often called info or information pages and linked in an out of the way part of the page). Doorway pages are 100% unethical and info pages are deep in the gray area. Neither of those two methods address the architecture of the site, proper keyword analysis, or effective text content. The following links are examples of automated SEO software freely available on the Web. All links contain ‘nofollow’ to prevent the sites from getting inbound link credit from our site. These sites are NOT recommended by TreeHouse SEM.

http://doorwaypagemaker.com/ – Doorway page system; UNETHICAL

http://www.doorway-wizard.com/ – Doorway page system; UNETHICAL

Answer 3: Custom Campaign and Assessment

‘SEO Software’ may be cheap and affordable, but you get what you pay for. Any campaign that is going to slap on additional pages are simply sell you links is NOT an effective SEO campaign. Any SEO effort that simply has you add a few ‘optimized’ pages to your site is not going to be optimal. If you wanted to convert a street car into a race car, you don’t simply add racing strips to it. Don’t think that dumping a few pages on your site targeted to some random keywords is the same as a real SEO campaign.

If your SEO company will not sit down and talk about the layout, architecture, and aim of your site, then it is not providing a top-end service. Remember that the vast majority of ‘SEO software’ either is for building doorway/landing pages or simply providing you with data about your site (data that is already free to everyone on the Web). Good SEO campaigns take into account both the user and the search engines…not one or the other. An SEO company should have a commanding understanding of user experience and search engine optimization and use these in combination to create a campaign that will provide the best ROI. The end goal should always be leads/sales. Bringing in piles of non-targeted traffic often leads to extremely high turn over rates and very low lead conversion.

Conclusion

Do your research. Find out what you want from an optimization campaign and then ask the right questions. Make sure that the sales representative you talk to knows what they are selling. If they do not, they are definitely not the person to get information from. A lot of SEO companies use hard sale tactics and the reps are less than knowledgeable about what they are selling. Ask the following questions and see what they have to say.

1.) How do you assess keywords? If an SEO company simply optimizes for whatever keywords are sent to them by the client, the SEO campaign starts off on very shaky ground. Keyword analysis should be performed that takes into account the number of searches in all the major search engines and the relative competition for those terms. The site should also be compared to the keywords to see if they support each other.

2.) Do you plan on building out pages specifically to house keywords? Landing pages and doorway pages are not effective long term SEO options. SEO companies like them because they do not have to touch the rest of the site and it’s very easy to simply add band aids instead of performing surgery.

3.) Will my SEO campaign also help improve the user experience of the site? Proper architecture and usability goes hand in hand with SEO and helps increase ROI. You should want to bring in new traffic and convert it.

4.) Does my revenue model affect my keyword selection and the optimization as a whole? Any SEO company that does not optimize based on the target audience is NOT providing the most effective campaign. An ecommerce site marketing to comparative shoppers will want to optimize heavily for product names and model numbers. An online magazine wanting to bring in recurring traffic will want to optimize for article topics and specific themes. Local companies will want to optimize for geo-targeted keywords.

5.) I want to optimize my site, but do not want to change any of the existing content or layout…how would you go about this? Any SEO company that says they will simply add on landing pages or hide text is selling blackhat. This goes back to the earlier analogy. You are really saying that you have a car that you want to modify to be very fast, but do not want to modify the engine and the mechanic simply adds racking stripes and charges you full price.

Thank you for reading TreeHouse SEM articles. If you would like to know more about any of these topics, feel free to contact us.

About the Author: Steve comes from a rich Web background where he has worked on the design, development, and marketing aspects of hundreds of Web sites. Formerly from Mississippi where he attended Ole Miss, Steve moved to San Diego to pursue further challenges in the Web marketing arena.

To compete in the rapidly growing marketplace of SEM, Treehouse immediately set itself apart by placing Chief Technology Officer DeVries at the helm, who is one of the most coveted experts in the industry today. DeVries was previously a lead technical consultant at a competing local firm, achieving top rankings for major clients such as Entrepreneur, Vegas.com, Viacom, Workopolis, and Ziff Davis Media. DeVries’ experience has brought him much industry attention and placed him in high demand as a speaker at industry events by those looking to pick his brain.

Author: Steve Devries
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Low-volume PCB Assembly

Google’s Matt Cutts always offers helpful advice, and our conversation with him at Google I/O was no exception. Cutts catches us up on a variety of search items including Google Squared, PageRank, and the recent redesign to Google’s search results page.

Google Squared is a new tool that puts search results into a spreadsheet-like list. It essentially organizes the results into facts, so users don’t have to click on multiples sites to find what they need. Cutts refers to it as a “sideways query” and points out that it could provide new information for users that they would not have previously found using traditional search.

When we spoke with Cutts earlier this year, he mentioned the growing obsession that SEOs and webmasters have with PageRank. We asked him about it in the above video, and while he did say it was important, he was quick to point out that it was only one of the more than 200 signals Google takes into consideration. He says content, title, url, and proximity are a few of the factors that have additional influence.

Users have also probably noticed the new redesign to the search results page. Cutts says the left-handed navigation was present for a while before the company decided to surface it for all search results.

Interestingly enough, the options are different based on each query. A search for Tom Cruise, for example, would probably return image results in the navigation. On the other hand, a search for President Obama would return real-time results and updates. Cutts says it creates more opportunities for webmasters and SEOs.

Lastly, Cutts did say that Caffeine was coming along nicely and indicated that there would be some announcements regarding it coming soon. Keep watching WebProNews for all the latest details on it.

Posted by Tom_C

Howdy mozzers. Since a lot of people in the search space are geeks, it naturally follows that there are plenty of single SEO guys and gals. Therefore this post is for you! Actually, it’s more of a collection of random SEO tips and tricks I’ve picked up recently that I decided to hang together by applying the tips to online dating at the same time!

Disclaimer: I’m going to reference OKCupid throughout this post. They are not a client, I have no alliegnece with them but they’re like the Google of online dating. Their blog is an A+ example of how to write engaging content which gets links. I reference it all the time when talking to clients.

5 Ways Being an SEO Makes You Better At Online Dating

1) Add Trust

This is something I learned from doing Conversion Rate Optimisation. Getting users to convert almost always isn’t about changing the colour of buttons or the position of images. It’s about getting the right message across to your users. You want to find out what makes them tick and then give them what they want. This can sometimes be as simple as changing the text of a header on a page.

Top Dating Tip: Mention things like "good at cooking", "sporty" – people respond well to these kinds of hints that you’re an awesome person.

Top SEO Tip: Make sure the language and message used on your site fits your users. I wrote a post on using natural language for CRO which contains a nice little case study you might want to check out.

2) Be Efficient

Effective SEOs are efficient people (and efficient people are also effective SEOs I imagine?). Rand wrote a fantastic post on using outsourcing to get things done which highlights the different tasks that you might be able to outsource and Will wrote a fantastic post on automating tasks (with a followup cheatsheet full of APIs). Anytime you find yourself doing the same task over and over again you should really stop and think about how you can do it more effectively. Can you outsource? Can you automate?

Top Dating Tip: Write an "opening message" – full of humour and intelligence and wit (outsource this if you find it hard) which you can use to woo potential suitors. Online dating is a long slow process (at least for guys) and you’ll need to message lots and lots of people in order to get dates (at least if you’re as ugly as I am) so take the pain out of this process by automating the opening email. Of course, with all good email marketing you need to make it look like it’s not automated. Include references to specifics from their profile and get their name right!

Top SEO Tip: Automate automate automate. Did you see recently that you can now run scripts from within Google Products? Kind of like Google Apps only stupidly easy to use. It lets you send emails, access calendars and even create Google sites. The programming language is kind of like Visual Basic but includes powerful tools like sending emails and fetching web pages. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine the possibilities here!

3) Research

Research is integral to strong SEO. You need to research rankings, links, site owners, potential link opportunities and a whole host of other things. The internet lends itself to researching and gathering data and sometimes you need to employ some of the SEO tricks you’ve learned to use Google effectively or to track down an errant webmaster. There was a scary email conversation between distilled and SEOmoz staff following a Q&A where we discussed how to find the individual behind a social media profile. The amount of data you can gather from a simple digg profile is terrifying. Within a few minutes we had his real name, family members, wife’s name, address and phone number. So next time you think you’re posting something "anonomously" think again!

Top Dating Tip: Users will often use the same photo to sign up to loads of different sites. So use a service like TinEye to do a reverse image search on potential suitor’s profile photos. What people write on social media profiles and what they write on their personal blog are two very different things!

Top SEO Tip: Following the image theme, I recently picked up a really neat trick you can use to find people who are hotlinking your images. Simply use the imagesearch: command in Google Images like this: imagesite:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org (make sure you’re searching google image search!)

I’d like to think that you’d use this list of sites as a list of places to get links from rather than a list of sites to goatse but each to their own… (hat tip for this imagesite search query goes to Andre who I met at A4uexpo in Munich).

4) Stay Fresh

The idea that having "fresh content" would help you rank was one of the myths Rand recently addressed and I certainly don’t think it carries much weight. That said, for fresh queries, fresh data is essential. Rand recently talked about how twitters of a URL may help them rank for QDF-style queries. Certainly QDF is one area of SEO that a lot of people overlook.

Top Dating Tip: Having a fresh profile helps get dates. If your join date is 2 years ago or your last login date was over a month ago then chances are you’re not interested. So make sure that you keep things up to date. I also think that some of the ranking algorithms at sites like OKCupid favour fresh profiles over stale ones.

Top SEO Tip: Think about which queries are triggering QDF algorithms in your industry. Are they worth chasing? Is your site set up to publish content fast? Is your content team set up to publish content fast?! Some SEOs I’ve talked to recently still didn’t even know there was such a thing as QDF so if you’re in this space make the most of it and think about twitters of your URL like Rand says. Here’s a good beginners QDF video (oldie but goodie)

5) Test Test Test

Testing is crucial to online success. Whether it’s testing process changes, or multivariate testing using Google Website Optimizer it’s important to keep testing things. Karl from Conversion Rate Experts gave a fantastic presentation in Munich at A4uexpo where he really demonstrated why testing radical changes is much better than changing little changes. Unfortunately I can’t link to his slides but I’m assured he has a post in the works so keep your eyes peeled for that soon.

Top Dating Tip: Test which profile picture will get you most dates by using the My Best Face feature. It lets you see which profile image works better for you and gives you lovely graphical breakdowns of the data to show you which demographic your image works best for. It’s like CRO for online dating!

Top SEO Tip: Try segmenting your website optimiser tests. Will wrote a post on how to segment your tests which you should check out.

I hope you enjoyed this – look out for my next installment entitled "5 ways being an SEO doesn’t  help you get dates online" which will mainly feature images of SEOs looking geeky and having poor social skills.

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