Posted by caseyhen

Earlier this year, jtkaczuk wrote a YOUmoz post about “Using Twitter as a Sitemap”.  After reading it I began to think about the power of Twitter and if using Twitter more can help indexation.  Many Twitter users will tweet about new post or products on their account hoping to draw attention and links from their followers.  What if this process can also help with getting more pages indexed and indexed faster?  I was surprised with the results of this quick little experiment that I threw together in a few months.

• Twitter Links Only – 48 hours with no internal links and 1 tweet only from the orginal account
• Site Architecture Links Only – No tweets about product or post, only internal links and sitemaps generated
• Both Twitter & Site Architecture Links – Both tweets, internal links, and sitemaps to post or product

• Twitter Only Launch
  • GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 78 seconds of the first tweet.
  • Tweets with more than 3 RTs were indexed 325% faster, along with 125% more of its products and post indexed than tweets with no RTs.
  • Average indexation of the post or product was different depending on number of RTs
    • 3 or more RTs had an average indexation time of 8 hours, with 86% indexed.
    • 1 or no RTs had an average indexation time of 26 hours, with 69% indexed.
• Internal Links Only Launch
  • GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 2.5 hours of the first internal link on the site.
  • Average indexation of the post or product was 8.5 hours, with 85% indexed.
• Both Internal Links and Twitter Launch
  • GoogleBot averaged its first visit within 82 seconds of being launched.
  • Average indexation of the post or product was again different depending of the number of RTs the Twitter updated received.
    • 3 or more RTs had an average indexation time of 4.25 hours, with 88% indexed.
    • 1 or no RTs had an average indexation time of 5 hours, with 79% indexed.

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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.

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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I asked this question over on Twitter on the weekend and it was fascinating to hear the answers and see some of the thinking behind what different people do.

I thought I’d run it as a poll and open it up for some wider discussion here on the blog.

I’d love to get your comments on this topic. Why do you do the number of tweets that you do? Why don’t you do more/less? Do you use any tolls/automation to manage it – if so which ones?

Here’s some of the responses to my tweet asking the question:

“I only tweet a link to it once. I’ll tweet a second time if theres something interesting in the comment section.” – JadeCraven

“One. Sometimes two. Three if it really rocks. But I post daily and don’t want my Twitter to be an endless ME ME ME feed.” – CatherineCaine

“I tweet my new blog posts only once…to me, more is spammy, even tho I know not everyone will see it the 1st time…” – QuipsAndTips

“I always tweet a link straight after I post.Then maybe the next day depending on the post time, for those who may have missed it” – CptTremendous

“I space it out over days/times. Maybe btw 5-8 over a weeks time.” – MyMelange

“I usually retweet about three times, one in a.m., one in afternoon, one at night. Covers time zones.” – docudramaqueen

“Depends on importance and global relevance. If really important to me & relevant also to US audience, I may tweet twice in Aus..” – divinewrite

“Once. More than once is spam and makes followers unfollow and complain.” – Shuttlecock

See a full list of the responses to my original tweet here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How Many Times Do You Tweet Links to New Blog Posts? [POLL]

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Posted by randfish

A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer (one of my Art of SEO coauthors) authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

SEO is a field where reputation is a huge part of your ability to perform well. Because the search engines don’t publish comprehensive guidelines (or even guidelines that cover 1/10th of the material necessary for good SEO work), businesses rely on the savvy of individual consultants, contractors and employees. If your boss reads Stephan’s article and sees him contradicting advice that you’ve been giving for years, faith erodes and with it, job security. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), there’s probably 5-10 articles you can find on the web that support your side of the story, many from quality, trusted sources.

The lack of standards sucks. But, it’s also the reason our industry is so exciting. New experiments & experiences can reveal critical data about search engine operations. The ability to become an expert is open to anyone with the skills and perseverance to see it through. But, no matter how hard you try, it’s hard to overcome some of the persistent myths of the SEO field – I’ve been caught in plenty of them myself (and who knows, maybe still am today).

This post is going to look at some of those nagging, lingering falsehoods that continue to thwart good SEO efforts, specifically those that Stephan called out and faced strong resistance. As always, this is my opinion, based on my experience (see the moz disclaimer) except in cases where research and data exists, in which case it’s my opinion that the research cited is good enough to warrant that opinion

How Significantly Does Personalization Affect Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.

Comments Include:

I’m not sure I agree with your statement under #5 that personalization changes are “relatively minor”. I’ve been seeing some drastic rank changes due to personalization. I just posted about it at http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/49-are-google-serp-personalizations-relatively-minor.whtml While there are still “absolute rankings” that display most of the time, your site can be ranked much higher or lower, based on personalization.

My Opinion – They’re both right. Personalization seems to primarily affect areas in which we devote tons of time, energy and repeated queries. This means for many/most "discovery" and early funnel searches, we’re going to get very standardized search results. It’s true that it can influence some searches significantly, but it’s also true that, at least in my experience, 90%+ of queries I perform are unaffected (and that goes for what I hear/see from other SEOs, too). The linked-to post above actually helps to validate this, showing that while rankings changes can be dramatic, they only happen when there’s substantive query volume from a user around a specific topic.

Do We Need to Update Our Homepages Every Day to Maintain Rankings?

Stephan Says:

"It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.)" This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.

Comments Include:

It actually is important. Sure, a stale home page might rank, but Google definitely takes freshness into account in rankings. I’ve seen rankings boosts whenever I post new content.

This varies from niche to niche, of course a site can rank well whilst remaining static, it may also have a considerable number of links pointing to it. In a competitive niche where the link volume/quality is pretty even, then regular updates to the home page, and other pages within the site can make all the difference – to describe this as a fallacy is a fallacy itself.

My Opinion - There was a time when I was pretty convinced this was true. I did lots of testing around it for my clients sites and would put in time each day making sure new content appeared on their homepages. Today, I’m much less of a believer. Stephan is certainly correct that plenty (if not the overwhelming majority) of homepages and, indeed, web pages that rank well for many queries are static. I do think it’s a great idea to continually have new content linked-to from homepages – by linking to the latest blog posts, YOUmoz posts and marketplace postings, the SEOmoz homepage helps drives spiders to revisit frequently and crawl these new posts (though RSS pings may make that obsolete).

Overall, I wouldn’t advise updating pages just for the sake of possibly getting a "fresh content" boost. QDF operates on unique, fresh, individual pages (or older pages that are earning newly fresh links). I’d have serious doubts as to whether anything in Google’s ranking system rewards pages that simply change frequently – it doesn’t pass my smell test.

How is Google Treating "Reciprocal" Links?

Stephan Says:

Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.

Comments Include:

Google places less weight on reciprocal links that they used to, but they still count. I’ve done numerous link exchange campaigns for websites, and seen huge boosts in rankings. At the end of the day, would you rather have a reciprocal link from another site in your niche, or no link at all? The answer is obvious.

Reciprocal links aren’t necessarily of dubious value. Consider this example:

I’m a news site. I link to CNN because it’s CNN and they have news. One day, CNN links to me (huzzah). Technically, this is a reciprocal link, but no way in hell is Google going to discount the value of the link because the sites are linking to each other. So now you have to determine intent — and how do you do that?

In many niches, every authority site links to every other. Not only is it natural, but these are the most relevant possible links. So what you seem to be saying is that Google lowers the value of a site’s most relevant links — thereby increasing the relative value of irrelevant or off-topic ones. That makes sense how?

My Opinion - This one really depends on how we’re defining "reciprocal links."

The post you’re reading links to Stephan’s SELand article. Would Stephan updating that post with a link here potentially hurt both our rankings? No.

However, if SEOmoz built a link directory on our site (ironically humorous because, as long time readers may recall, we used to have one) and promoted linking to your site if you reciprocated with a link back here, I’d be more concerned. This is essentially link graph manipulation and while it’s a fine line to tread, plenty of folks have crossed it in the past and, as Stephan notes, unnatural reciprocal link behavior is remarkably easy to spot on a link graph.

I wouldn’t be concerned at all with a technically "reciprocated" link, but I would watch out for schemes and directories that leverage this logic to earn their own links and promise value back to your site in exchange. Also – watch out for those who’ve evolved to build "three-way" or "four-way" reciprocal directories such that you link to them and they’ll link to you from a separate site – it’s still attempted manipulation and there’s so many relevant directories out there; why bother!?

Keyword Density is Not Used – How Many Times Do We Have to Say It?

Stephan Says:

Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.

Comments Include:

Folly? Hardly. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you want to make sure you use it a few times on a page. That’s just common sense. Of course, you don’t want to overuse a keyword, or it might come across as spammy. Any smart SEO pays attention to KW density.

My Opinion - Again, we’re likely coming down to semantics. The formula for keyword density – a percentage of the total number of words on the page that are the target phrase – is indeed folly. IR scientists discredited this methodology for relevance decades ago. Early search engines and information retrieval systems already leveraged TF*IDF as a far more accurate and valuable methodology.

In my opinion, the reason the myth persists is that sometimes, optimizing towards a keyword density can actually improve your relevance and targeting of TF*IDF. I’ll make an analogy – let’s say you believe flight is accomplished not by lift, thrust, drag and weight, but rather by reaching a particular velocity in a bird-shaped device. It’s entirely possible that you might stumble upon flight, or flight-like elements even without understanding the physics. That said, could you honestly call yourself an aeronautics engineer?

If we’re going to call ourselves professional SEOs, we should bother to learn the science. Yes, adding additional instances of a keyword term or phrase to a page might indeed help your rankings (usually not massively and almost never in highly competitive spaces), but that does not mean that the keyword density average you’ve been using is accurate or that engines leverage the metric. Spreading this ignorance of math and science does little to further the SEO field’s reputation - let’s end it. 

Do Hyphens in Domain Names Really Suck for SEO?

Stephan Says:

Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.

Comments Include:

Hyphens in domain names are less than ideal for flagship businesses because they’re hard to communicate, but you better believe Google ranks domains with keywords in them highly, even if they contain hyphens. Again, it’s less than ideal (a hyphen-less .org or .net is preferable to a hyphenated .com), but if the top choices aren’t available, a domain that includes a hyphen can be a decent substitute.

Don’t make a blanket statement that having hyphens in your domain hurts your potential. This is just fallacy. Yes, hyphens suck for direct traffic, as the domain is more likely to spelled incorrectly. But when it comes to search, domains with hyphens in them do just fine.

My Opinion – They suck. Yes, I realize that technically, they may not have a formal algorithmic component (though I’m guessing part of Google’s spam filter early warning system does look at hyphens, particularly when there’s more than one in a domain name). But, they certainly correlate with worse branding value, which means fewer links and citations, less reputation in the eyes of visitors and potential business partners, less viral spread through word-of-mouth and, as the comments note, lower type-in traffic.

All of those are going to have a 2nd-order impact on rankings through metrics like inbound links, social mentions and usage data (to whatever degree you believe that mya be a signal). Thus, hyphens in domain names do, indeed, suck for SEO (and lots of other stuff). I’ve never liked SEO practices that operated in a vaccum or didn’t consider usability, virality, positioning, branding or other basic marketing techniques. Going back to the analogy above, it’s like the aeronautics engineer who doesn’t consider seats a necessity. Sure, it flies, but who exactly will pay for a ride?

Does Click-Through Rate Matter?

Stephan Says:

The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.

Comments Include:

Don’t assume that clickthrough rates don’t matter just because of some potential abuse that would happen if absolutely zero logic were built in.

In regards to CTR influencing rankings, there are a number of things that lead me to suspect that user behavior does affect search results.

I’m sure you are familiar with the so-called google \honeymoon period\ that seems to occur when a new site launches. The site will rank highly for a few weeks, and then see a dramatic drop in SERPs. I’ve launched over a dozen sites in the past year, and have noticed this pattern.

I believe this goes beyond QDF, it’s a site-wide phenomenon. The hypothesis is that Google will temporarily rank a new site highly, to see how users perceive the site. If people visit the site, and then immediately hit the back button to return to the SERPs, that’s a good signal that the site did not meet the needs of the user, and that google should not rank it as highly.

I am on the fence, I could literally flip a coin whether it is myth, magic, or the CTR really does make a difference. If it does it is such a small difference it’s nothing I would ever focus on for success.

My Opinion – I’ve written and spoken about this extensively in the past and it doesn’t need a great deal of re-hashing. I will, however, say that should any SEO ever discover that it substantively impacts rankings, we’re going to be faced with an army of zombie botnets trying to take over our computers not to send email spam, but to click on links through our "reputable" Google accounts. Just look at the hacks of Facebook, Twitter & Wordpress over the past few weeks and ask yourself – if any spammer could show any financial incentive or ability of clicks to influence Google, would we really have as (organic) click-fraud free a world as we do today? 

We do have one data point from Google that suggests they look at some kinds of less manipulate-able click data. A Googler speaking at the first SMX East show in New York mentioned during his session that Google will record searches that are performed frequently with no clicks, followed by query refinement or abandonment, as potential searches that need work (because it seems no one likes the results). If this is what you mean when referring to click-data being used in the engines, I think that’s completely reasonable.

Do H1 Tags Help with Rankings?

Stephan Says:

H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.

Comments Include:

H1 tags are very important, I’ve seen pages rank well for targeted keywords once the tag has been tweaked to be more targeted, not spammy or purely for SEO, but well written. Ok, in some cases it may not be “crucial” but after the title tag I think it’s up there as one of the most important on site factors.

My Opinion - Covario’s research is spot on; I got to listen to and speak with their chief scientist, Dr. Matthias Blume, at a conference in Silicon Valley. It also matches up to our correlation and rankings model data. You’re invited to repeat on-page keyword prominence testing and check the results for yourself (more on search engine testing methodologies here). H1 tags are very slightly better than Bold/Strong tags for keyword usage and both are barely better than simply using the keyword on the page (in any text format).

In every instance I’ve seen a report of H1s improving rankings, it’s been because the keyword phrase was now included as some of the first text on the page and provided an additional instance of the target term and title element in the on-page copy. As Stephan recommends in the comments, try taking a site with H1s and replacing them with CSS styles that mimic the text formatting. You may see tiny fluctuations in a few close rankings, but likely little else.

All that said, H1s are still a best practice. If you’re building a site from scratch today, you should certainly use them for headlines, and they do provide some (albeit quite tiny) benefits for SEO. However, I feel incredibly guilty about the many times in my SEO consulting career I pushed hard for engineering and development teams to get H1s right in the markup when it generated such tiny results. That time would have been far better spent on dozens of other projects. If I can, I’d love to save you that same embarassment and disappointment. H1s may fit with SEO stereotypes, but that doesn’t make them a high priority, high value activity. If you don’t believe the research of others, do your own, then listen to the results.

Can Linking to Other Sites Help You Perform Better?

Stephan Says:

Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.

Comments Include:

Not true. Matt Cutts has said that linking out to high quality websites is one of the many factors that they use to evaluate a site. NOTE: the comment references the below copied text below from this post by Matt Cutts (on Google’s webspam team):

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

My Opinion – I suspect there may be some small, positive effects of linking out to relevant, quality sites and pages for SEO. However, Stephan’s likely correct in his assertion that just linking to a "high Domain Authority" or "high PageRank" site won’t normally help. He’s also right to say that hoarding link juice is likely a very bad move. You can listen to the NYTimes’ SEO, Marshall Simmonds, talk about how adding external links to articles on the site had a noticeable positive impact on the Times’ rankings and traffic.

I don’t have correlation or ranking models data on this, nor have we experimented internally to the degree that I’d feel comfortable calling this a settled debate. My instincts say Google probably considers outbound links in some form or fashion, but I doubt it’s a huge ranking factor. It might be more important than H1s, though

PageRank is a Good Predictor of Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.

Comments Include:

Come on now. It’s true that a lot of people place too much emphasis on PR, but let’s not take it to the opposite extreme and say it’s irrelevant. PR is not the be-all-end-all of rankings, but it still matters. Having a high PR homepage clearly means *something*.

I probably couldn’t disagree with anything more than this one. I guarantee a website that has homepage PageRank 6 and then 2 page deep pages having PageRank 5 and trailing off into 4’s and 3’s get’s WAY more traffic than the one with PageRank 3 and trails off into 2’s and 1’s. PageRank is not 100% accurate, but it’s an extremely good indicator, it’s not just make believe or useless non-sense that authoritative sites have PageRank; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

My Opinion - They’re both right (though the "guarantee of traffic on the PR6 vs. 5 site" sounds like a bet this commenter’s opponent could win many, many times over). Our data on PageRank correlation is very solid and suggests that yes, PR is positively correlated with rankings on Google.com (though much less so in Google.co.uk – sorry Brits!). However, the degree of correlation is not overwhelming and there are far better single metrics if rankings correlation is your goal.

I would strongly get behind Stephan’s statement that what the toolbar server reports is not what Google uses internally. They’ve messaged this many times. It’s also very true that PageRank is only one of a plethora of ranking signals, and plenty of PageRank 3 pages outrank PageRank 6 or 7 pages for given queries.

Does Great Content Equal Great Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

Comments Include:

I see no one is criticizing "Great content = great rankings." This is job number one.

My Opinion – I think the commenter may have missed Stephan’s intended sarcasm. I am in full agreement that great content ≠ great rankings. This is no more true than the statement: "the way to win elections is to propose the best legislative ideas."

Marketing, promotion, networking, partnerships, virality, incentives and hundreds of others feed into the inputs for a site’s success on the web. Unless you believe that links are meaningless and Google’s content analysis systems can read and rank content like a human (e.g. Google thinks the Times’ article on Brown’s stepping down was more adroitly perceptive than the Post’s), the ability to draw in links, which is not and likely never will be about the "best content" will have an overwhelming impact on rankings.

The future likely holds greater usage of data from social media and social web interaction, but even this depends on far more than the content’s quality. Those brands and sites that have early-adopting, viral-sharing, people-connecting, idea-distributing users invested in promoting their work are likely to be long term winners with little regard for comparative levels of content quality. 

There’s lots more fun and interesting discussion on the SearchEngineLand post, but hopefully these will spark some interesting chats in the comments here as well.

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While at SXSW, WebProNews caught up with Kyle Mulka of Congo Labs. Mulka is currently working on a Twitter application called Twilk that is quickly gaining popularity.

Twilk is a Twitter background generator that takes a user’s followers on Twitter to create a photo collage out of their icons. The application sorts followers based on how much the user tweets about them and gives prominent placement to the people tweeted about the most.

Many people are using Twilk as a way to reward their followers for following them. Others just like seeing their friends’ faces on their background. For businesses that use the application, Twilk allows them to exclude certain people such as competitors and other people that they do not want to show up.

Mulka told WPN that they would like to develop the background to the point that it is clickable. For more information on Twilk, visit their site.

This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts). – Darren

Every week, we’re using the trending topics from Regator to show you what bloggers are writing about most during the previous seven days. Click any trend to see posts about that story. So far, we’ve used the trends to illustrate how you can break out of the echo chamber and solve problems for your readers.

This week, we’ll focus on crafting effective post titles/headlines. You can delve into the ProBlogger archives to find some great posts by Darren on this topic: “How to Craft Post Titles That Draw Readers Into Your Blog” is a must read for every blogger and “15 Ways to Rework Your Next Blog Title” is a useful follow-up. For this post, we’ll focus solely on the effectiveness the headlines, but as you blog, remember to deliver on what you promise–some of the posts behind these headlines do that better than others. Let’s see how a few bloggers handled the headlines for this week’s top stories:

1. Twitter – Between buying Tweetie, archiving tweets in the Library of Congress, holding its developer conference, and unveiling promoted tweets, the service could not be ignored. The title of Gizmodo’s “Inside America’s Secret Historical Tweet Vault” is almost as tough to ignore. As Darren points out, there are “power words” that, when used with care, can make your titles nearly irresistible. He lists words like: secret (used here) free, stunning, discover, and easy. There are plenty of others: exclusive,  shocking, new, etc.
2. Goldman Sachs – “How to” titles are effective because they follow Darren’s #1 headline rule: Communicate a benefit. The Money Game’s “How to Trade the Goldman Panic Right Now” does this well. My most widely read post ever was a “how to” post: “Seven Ways Social Media Is Ruining Your Life–And How to Fix It.” In large part, I credit the headline for that post’s popularity.
3. Supreme Court – Personalizing titles by using “you” helps readers feel connected to the story. Queerty’s “The 3 Supreme Court Cases Obama’s New Pick Will Decide for You” takes a larger story and makes the reader feel that it’s relevant to him or her.
4. President Obama – Creating a keyword-heavy headline not only gives your readers a clear indication of what to expect, it also makes it easy for them to find your content in search engines or aggregators. Sometimes a straightforward, keyword-heavy headline is your best bet. i09’s “Obama’s Plans for NASA: Mars by 2030, $6 Billion Budget Increase Today” is long but will be easy to find in a search. CMT Blog’s “Garth Brooks Is Just Like Barack Obama” is even more effective. It has keywords but also draws on reader curiosity.
5. Pulitzer Prize – Asking a question in your post’s title draws both readers who want to see how others answer and readers who are interested in sharing their own viewpoints. You might find that using this technique also helps you get more comments. “Sure, Online Journalism Nets Its First Pulitzer But Will a Blog Ever Win?” from Techdirt is a great example of a headline that provokes strong opinions and encourages discussion.
6. Tea Party – Creating controversy with your headlines is one way to attract readers if you’re prepared for the consequences. Many bloggers enjoy igniting heated discussions. If you don’t mind disagreement, try stating a strong, polarizing opinion in your headline like AlterNet has in its post “The Tea Party Crowd Needs to Wake Up to Who the Real Villains Are.”
7. Conan O’Brien – You’ve heard it before but I can’t do a post about titles without mentioning that people adore lists. Absolutely love ‘em. Lists quantify benefits and let readers know they’ll take away seven, 10 or even 99 new facts, tips, or tidbits. Take, for example, Vulture’s “Seven Things Conan Can Do on Cable That He Couldn’t on NBC.”
8. Record Store Day – If you’re covering something you have a very deep knowledge of, consider creating a “guide” style post. These posts are making a big promise to your reader–”guide” implies that you’ll be telling them all they need to know–so be sure to deliver. “Pitchfork Guide to Record Store Day” and “Flavorpill’s Guide to Record Store Day 2010“ both went that route.
9. Pope – WSJ’s Law Blog chose to ask a hot-button question that would incite reader participation with its post “The Pope Can’t Be Sued Abroad…Is That a Good Thing?” and managed to elicit some comments nearly as detailed and lengthy as the original post.
10. Iceland – Using humor in headlines is a tricky thing but, when done well, can result in clicks aplenty. City Room’s “Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels” and HuffPo’s “Volcanic Ash Cloud Turns Out to Be Finale of Lost” both managed to make me smile…and get me to click to read the full post.

One last non-trend-related tip I’ll give from my own experience. Magazine editors labor for longer than you may think to craft the perfect cover line that’ll make you drop your hard-earned cash on their products. As a whole, they’re pretty good at it and the same principles apply to blog post titles. I’ve found that spending half an hour at a bookstore reading cover lines can be a great way to get inspired.

What makes you want to read a story? Please tell us about “power words” that have worked for you, humorous headlines you’ve crafted, question headlines that have elicited huge reader responses, or other techniques you’ve found to be effective. What works for your blog?

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com and Regator for iPhone as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blogosphere Trends – What Bloggers Are Writing About This Week

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I think most people worked out that my last post (ProBlogger Acquired by Google) was an April Fools Joke – however I wanted to make sure.

It was an April Fools joke!

It’s been two years since my last April Fools Day prank – last time (in 2008) I issued a press release announcing that I was starting a new company – Pay Per Tweet. Of course back then the idea of sponsored Tweets had not happened and it caused some outrage – all I can say is that I hope this year’s prank comes true too!

The idea for this year’s joke started with a dream – a real dream where Google actually did buy ProBlogger for a new blogging platform for professional bloggers. I tweeted the dream and it got such a good reception (including from a few people who work at Google/Blogger) that I filed it away as an idea for April Fools Day.

Yesterday I decided to go for it and wrote the press release announcing the acquisition. I even went so far as to register a domain for my next business venture – FoolsMedia.com and setup a twitter account for it (funnily enough that Twitter account is already getting followers and is featured on at least a couple of Twitter lists).

Of course running an April Fools Day post on your blog has some benefits and risks.

On the negative side – some people fall for it, and fall for it hard. Today I’ve had a lot of emails, DMs, comments and even a few phone calls congratulating me on the ‘acquisition’ (and a few accusing me of selling out). I even took a call from a family member (who was very happy for me) and another from a reporter (who wanted to run a story of me selling my blog). I’ve had to follow up with a few people to make sure that they realized it was a joke – although I have to say most got it.

On the up side – the joke was a lot of fun, caused a nice ‘buzz’, was retweeted a lot (actually I think most people who were fooled were on Twitter where people just saw the headline and started RT’ing like crazy without reading the post) and even got a few incoming links from other sites who pointed it out.

A big thanks to a few people for making this possible. Firstly to Google/Blogger for their inactive part in it (although guys…. if you ever want to buy a blog about blogging…. you know where I am), secondly to Lara who had to moderate the comments when my last post went up… and lastly to everyone who read and responded to the post (whether you were fooled or not) – thanks for playing.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Google Aquisition of ProBlogger – April Fools Day Recap

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A Guest Post by Elle from Couple Money.

I’ve been blogging for a couple years now and I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. Couple Money is not my first blog, but it is the first one I created with a specific goal in mind. I wanted to share how we’re building our net income while creating a mobile income from our passions and create a community of like minded couples.

My other sites started off as personal blogs and haphazardly morphed as I gained readers. Without a particular goal or process, the blogs’ growth tapered off. I wanted to change this with Couple Money and I knew I needed to get it done sooner rather than later.

I’ve been a reader of Problogger and after reading the 31 Day Challenge that Darren presented, I knew this is something I need to improve my site. I completed my Challenge last weekend and I wanted to share some tips I’ve done to maximize the Challenge for my blog.

Promoting Your Blog Post Effectively

One of the first tasks in the challenge is promoting a blog post. I’ve been guilty of promoting my blog posts to the annoyance of other readers and bloggers when I first started a couple of years ago. I had thought the best way was to keep posting updates on new posts. I learned the hard way that method does not work. When I receive constant direct messages on Twitter to promote posts, I feel less inclined to help, even if they’re good posts.

I was happy to see what I could do to promote my posts without seeming spammy. I tend to promote my posts through Twitter and I mixed them up with posts from other bloggers that I’ve found very informative. Since I work during the day, I try to batch my tweets as I review sites in the evening. While that’s great for me and my schedule, it wasn’t too effective.

I found that releasing them around the same time does no one any good. Not too many people clicked to read my posts or other people’s posts because they felt overwhelmed. I decided to make it a win-win situation. I now use Su.pr to schedule my tweets and spread out some community promotion through out the work day.

The Seesmic app is my buddy on my phone to keep in touch. I check replies and messages on my Samsung Moment during breaks and lunch during the day to communicate with my network. I also try and take the time to thank everyone who retweeted my posts. I think that appreciation and gratitude goes a long way with effective promotion.

Interlinking Old Posts Quickly and Easily

Writing posts that can grab readers’ attention is great, but it’s only part of getting a community started. I realized I needed to get my visitors to dig deep and become readers. The best way to help them is presenting them relevant links within the posts they’re interested in enough to read. In addition to helping readers, including relevant links can improve your site’s SEO strategy.

Darren suggests making interlinking a routine part if your blogging activities. To maximize my relevant links and minimize my time doing it, I use CrossLinker and Insight. These two plugins have helped me to quickly create links to my pillar posts and my best content. Crosslinker allows me to focus readers to my pillar posts and choose which keywords to link to it with. Insight is very helpful as I’m writing my post, as I can search for my posts and other blogs for helpful and resourceful links.

I’ve noticed that completing this task has improved my incoming search traffic for certain keywords. I’m starting to get on the first page of results for my relatively young blog. As I continue making interlinking to older posts a habit, I’m hoping to get even more improvement.

Find Some Blog Buddies to Turbo Charge Each Other

If you want to build a community, you have to be a part of one. Day 15’s task was to find a partner to help encourage each other to improve. I checked out some tips on finding blogging buddies and decided to join a small band of bloggers with the Yakezie Challenge. It’s the perfect combination of camaraderie and friendly competition that I needed. As a reader of Financial Samurai, I noticed his challenge to other bloggers to improve their sites by using Alexa as a gauge.

I compare it to someone who’s looking to get in shape by joining a neighbourhood sports team. You’re working hard to improve your game, but the teamwork makes it seem more like fun instead of just fitness.

So if you’re looking at finding a blogging buddy, my suggestion is to look around your niche and find some bloggers who are hungry and have a specific goal you share. Being a part of your niche’s forums is definitely important, but having a competition really focuses you on getting your work done.

Breathe Life Into an Old Post

As I noticed more search traffic for my blog (loving the results of this challenge!), I saw the need to follow Day 21’s task advice on going back and improving my old blog posts. My problem was that I didn’t have a large block of time to research what I needed to do to make it more resourceful and while still keeping up with current posts.

I decided to beef up posts based on my first time reader review (Day 17) and from analytic tools: Google Analytics and WebMaster Tools. My goal was to make sure older posts were providing information that my readers were looking for. I checked several statistics to see what I needed to focus my attention on:

• Popular Posts: Since time was limited I focused on posts that were already getting some attention and just needed a bit more to help them stand out.
• Search Terms Used: I wanted to see how readers were finding these posts and if there were any specific questions they were asking. I can either adjust a post with an answer to that question or write a new posts and link to my older posts.
• Heat Map: On my homepage, I include links to some of my older posts. I look and see which ones are popular and try and figure out why.

I recommend doing this on a monthly basis with your older posts and just focus on what your readers want to read more of. After all, if you’re looking to build a community, it can’t always be about you. Looking at older posts can be a bit easier to see objectively and you can address your readers’ needs more effectively.

What’s The Plan Now?

I have to admit I was really sad to see the challenge over. It was really easy to follow along a daily blogging schedule and having a specific goal to achieve. Having a framework to write and work from helped me to be more productive.

I decided I’m going to use the 31 Day Challenge as my guide for the rest of the year. Instead of going through the guide in the traditional 31 days, I’m going to focus each week on one of the daily tasks. I’ve seen how the guide has improved the quality of my content and the community so I want to really dig deep and focus on all the activities I can do with each task.

How about you? How have you maximized the 31 days to Build a Better Blog Challenge with your site?

Elle has been blogging over at Couple Money on how she and her family handles their finances. To follow Elle you can chat with her on twitter (@Elle_CM) or subscribe to her blog.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Tips for Doing the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge

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Posted by great scott!

Test, test, test! That’s the mantra these days. Conversion Rate Optimization is the buzzword on everybody’s lips (and tweets). So why are we telling you NOT to test?  Well, we’re not, we’re just saying to be smart about it.

People often get a testing platform ready to roll and then start obsessing over just how intricate they can get with multi-variate tests…it’s a walk before you crawl scenario. Start with the big picture: A/B tests of major page layouts, even MVTs on major design changes. Those things can yield MAJOR uplifts in conversions and they’re the things you need to focus on before you worry about what color font you use in your H1 tag and the 0.0001% lift you get from it.

We’re not saying small changes and new recipes from complex MVTs can’t yield meaningful results, we’re just saying to start with the big picture and work on the details later.

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Posted by neopunisher

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.

After Nick announced the free Linkscape API, I decided to write a SEO extension for chrome. I wanted to focus on all aspects of SEO and not just linking (like some other extensions) as well as a fast clean UI. I organized data from the page and external signals into 5 categories: External Page Data, Page Elements, Social Media, Page Terms, Server / Domain Info, and Suggestions as well as enhancing some common SEO related sites like Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Analytics 

Install the SEO SIte Tools extention and see for yourself… it’s only one click and you won’t be disappointed.

External Page Data shows domain metrics link links and rank

• Linking to page and domain from Yahoo
• Page Authority, Domain Authority and links from SEOmoz
• Alexa popularity (with graph) links
• Google index date and PageRank along with domain trends
• Dmoz listing and compete.com data

 Social Media pulls shares and bookmarks from a number of places

• Page Diggs and Domain Diggs
• Recent tweets about the page along with total number of tweets
• Facebook shares, likes and comments
• Reddit points
• Delicious bookmarks

 Page Terms displays relevant page elements to SEO

• Meta Robots
• Meta Description
• Anchor tags and follow attribute)
• Header tags (H1-H5)
• Bold/Strong
• I/Em
• Meta Keywords

Server / Domain Info checks the domain’s IP and country and displays it on a map along with registrar information and WhoIs info 

Suggestions gives helpful on-page SEO suggestions about title tag, links on page, meta description, meta keywords (hey it can’t hurt) 

Page Terms (still a work in progress) performs term extraction and lets you do keyword research with Google’s keyword research tool 

It also has ability to enhance Google Webmaster Tools with links anchor text, if they are followed links and mozRank (or PageRank) of linking pages 

Adds Social media reactions to Google Analytics page details with Facebook shares, likes and comments as well as Delicious bookmarks and Diggs 

It also adds the link and anchor text info to Yahoo Site Explorer with mozRank (or PageRank) 

It is still being developed so I would love any feedback you could give me on it…

Some future plans are:

• Keyword search volume in Webmaster Tools
• Indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Improved keyword research tools
• More site suggestion information
• StumbleUpon share data 

Get the SEO Site Tools Extention Now

Get in touch with me on twitter I’m @cartercole and follow me for updates of new releases (but if you install the plug-in it will automatically update) [highly recommended]

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