Posted by Dr. Pete

Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google’s argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?

Unraveling Search Intent

One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It’s nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.

Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":

1. "itunes"
2. "facebook"
3. "youtube"
4. "apple"
5. "best buy"
6. "apple store"
7. "google"
8. "craigslist"
9. "itunes download"

Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn’t get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don’t succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there’s also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.

Bing Search Funnel

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:

Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:

1. "bestbuy"
2. "ebay"
3. "ipod"
4. "dell"
5. "appleipod"
6. "circuitcity"
7. "apple vacations"
8. "apple.com"
9. "sony"
10. "target"

Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.

The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown’s Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn’t want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

What Do We Want?

Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there’s a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it’s obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.

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Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?

At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.

How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they’re on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.

But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn’t only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.

This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let’s see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.

Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn’t send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.

These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!

2. Don’t forget about mobile

My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.

Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!

I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools.

That’s 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.

3.    “UGC is content that rocks”

That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.

Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.

In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.

Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!

The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions.

The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!

4.    Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people

This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.

For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.

There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.

Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there’s no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let’s motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.

Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we’re currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?

5.    Public Relations, the other PR

Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!

She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you’ve optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:

• Use a social media newsroom like PRESSfeed
• Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
• Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
• Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
• Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
• Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
• Look at LinkedIn and Facebook

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn’t spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the… what?!

One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I’m stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.

This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?

Final Takeaways and Actions

1. Don’t forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
2. What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can’t?
3. UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
4. Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
5. Public Relations is social now, so get on it.

This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we’re completely sold out!

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you.  Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building.  This is for two reasons -

1. You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
2. You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience

We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection.  I often like to talk about improving your link building conversion rate, if you can do this then you are making your life a lot easier.  This post is designed to help improve your link building conversion rate by reaching out to the right people.

Here is a quick visual to show you the basic process of what you are doing:

This is the process I like to work to when getting links from specific targets.  It is very simple but from experience, many people struggle with finding the right people to get links from.   Here are some specific ways you can find these people.  I’ll probably cover the other areas in more detail in a subsequent post.

Getting Inspiration

I like to start the process by brainstorming a few ideas of what type of people are interested in my topic, luckily I’ve got some great colleagues to bounce ideas off and help with this process.  If you tend to struggle with this process, Spezify is quite a nice tool for visualizing a topic and seeing what is happening online related to that topic.  This can often give you some links to places you may not have previously thought of to reach out to.

Find Influential Tweeters

Although strictly speaking, Twitter is not good for building links,  finding people on Twitter who have a large number of followers and have a lot of influence can be very useful in spreading the word for you.  These people usually have their own websites outside of Twitter too that may be of help to you for traditional link building.

So how do you find people on Twitter who are influential?

WeFollow is a nice little tool for this, a quick test of "SEO" as a keyword proves to be pretty accurate to me:

You now have a list of influential people from within your industry.  What next?

• Follow them
• Make a note of what they like to tweet about
• Check their personal websites for more info
• Look at what type of stuff they retweet
• Retweet their stuff
• Interact with them constructively
• Ask for their opinion on something

By doing all of these things, you are building a relationship with this person and finding out what it takes to get their attention.  You are also learning about what interests them and what type of content you need to create to get them to tweet about it.  You are also opening a channel of communication with them which you can use to push your own content when the time is right.  Once you have built up a rapport with this person, you are in a good position to send them a link to your content and ask for their opinion on it.

Find Local People

This is something that I’ve found to work very well when doing outreach.  If you’re fortunate enough to live quite close to someone who you can get a link from, mention it when you contact them.  This works very well if you are a small local business who is trying to get some attention and help from local people.  It can be a little difficult to find these type of people but here are a couple of ideas -

Search Twitter Local

You can find people who are tweeting about your topic within a certain number of miles of your location.  Just head over to Twitter Advanced Search and look for this section:

Local Directories

Dmoz has section dedicated to listing websites because they are based in a certain area.  For example, if I’d just launched a website which was for my music DJ service in Stratford-upon-Avon, I may want to contact a few people on this page to let them know about it.

There are literally tons of local directories where you can find people to contact, here is a UK list and here is a US list.  These lists were originally designed as places for you to get links from, but there is nothing to stop you getting creative and getting links from the places on these directories too!

Foursquare

Whilst you are following influential people on Twitter, you may notice that they are using Foursquare to check-in to various places.  If these places just happen to be in your local area, then there is the possibility of contacting them and seeing if they want to meet for a coffee.  This is probably more useful for finding business contacts and networking as it is for link building but it is worth mentioning as a method of finding people who are local to you.  Even if you don’t meet someone, you can still get an indicator of what area they are in and use this as a hook in your opening email or phone call.

Survey your Customers

I’m a big fan of getting your customers to help you with link building.  The idea in relation to this post is to find out from your customers who they follow in your industry and what sites they visit for information.

This is incredibly easy to setup and can provide you with real, actionable data.  If your website has a big Twitter following, you can even ask the question in a Tweet or send out an email to previous customers.  You only need to ask a couple of questions along the lines of -

• Are you active on Twitter?  If so, who do you follow for information about your topic here?
• Do you frequently visit blogs and websites on your topic here, if so which are your favorite?
• Are you a member of any forums on your topic here, if so which ones?

You can get all of the replies together and see which sites or tweeters or mentioned the most.  Then you have a quality, targeted list of people to go after to get links.

Forums

Noooo!  Forums are no good for link building I hear you shout.  For the record, they can be good for link building, but thats a discussion for another day   What we are interested in is what makes a forum active and who the key leaders and influencers are.  There are ways you can use this information to your advantage and get links from places outside of the forum.

First of all how to find the forums which are active.  We just use a couple of simple Google search tools:

All I’ve done is searched for my keyword which is link building, clicked on discussions on the left hand side, then selected from the past 24 hours.  Nice and simple and I’ve now ended up with 50k + results.

Now where this helps us for link building is being able to find which people on these forums are moderators and ones which are active contributors.  This is the equivalent of finding people who are influential on Twitter which I described above.  Most forums will have this easily accessible although you may need to register.  You are looking for a list of "Top Posters" or "Top Contributors".

Once you have found these people, see if their profiles or footers contain links to their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or personal blog.  Then you can see if they may be interested in your website, hopefully they are which makes them a primary candidate to get a link from!

The one big advantage of this approach is that if they talk about you on their blog, its perfectly reasonable for you to ask them to mention it on the forum which means even more exposure (and links) for you.

Facebook

I love this one!  Using the Facebook Ads system, you can carry out research into the likes and interests of the gazillions (ok millions) of Facebook users.  So within a few minutes you can have a list of people who you know are interested in a certain topic.  From here, you have a couple of options -

• You could then start a PPC campaign on Facebook which aims to grab their details in exchange for some kind of incentive, for example you could try and target users who have their own blogs.  You can ask them to submit a story, blog about a topic, upload a picture, loads of stuff to try and capture this type of user
• Join the group with the other members and interact with them and the admins of the group.  This is a similar approach as you’d take in forums to try and work out who may be in a position to help you push your content on the group and external sites

Advanced Search Operators

We are getting more into "traditional" SEO here as opposed to market research but this is another favourite of mine but with a bit of a twist.  Firstly though I’d advise you to go take a look at the SEOmoz Guide on Advanced Search Operators.

Another great place to start is the SEOmoz Link Acquisition Assistant (PRO Only).  This tool does a lot of the hard work for you and can find lots of places to get links from as well as making you think a bit more about how you can tweak the operators to your own needs.

Here are a few of my personal favourites when it comes to advanced queries.

This will restrict results to only UK Universities which mention blogs.  If you are in the US, just swap out .ac.uk and put in .edu:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk +blogs

Same as above but this will only show results with blogs in the URL:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk inurl:blogs

This one is designed to help you find blogs which are active, therefore giving you a better chance of getting a link.  This query only shows me results which have published posts in July 2010.  This isn’t perfect as all blogs work differently but you will still get some good results.

keyword here inurl:2010/07

My best advice here is to just go and experiment and keep tweaking queries until they give you the results you need.  By doing this you are filtering out all the websites which are not right for you and therefore improving your efficiency and link building conversion rate.  Here is a useful reference guide for a ton of Google advanced operators.

The Twist…

Don’t do what everyone else does and start at page 1 of the search results.  These guys get link requests all day long!

Start at page 10 of results.  These guys are less likely to get link requests if they are not always at the top of Google, so you could have a better chance of getting their attention and getting the link you want.  The websites may be of a lower quality but as long as you use your due diligence and analysis, you will still get some good quality sites and valuable links.

Bonus Random Tip

I’m often asked about finding people who can guest blog for you on a particular subject.  This advanced search query may help a little to find these people.

keyword here inurl:author

Because of the way that some blogs work, they often put "author" in the URL of pages which contain all the posts by a writer as well as contact details.  Here is an example using Danny’s page at SEOmoz.

As always I welcome your feedback and additional ideas in the comments below.  I’ll do my best to reply to any questions.

This also seems like a good time to shamelessly plug the Distilled & SEOmoz Pro SEO Seminar in London.  I attended this event last year, before I joined Distilled.  Of the conferences I went to, it was one of the best in terms of actionable tips and quality of the talks.  I’d highly advise you to take a look if you are looking for some advanced SEO strategies.

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Facebook, Twitter, and Instant Messaging have become natural parts of our everyday life. They also play key roles in many businesses. But is there a downside? Can they dominate too much time?

We all know that each of these platforms can be extremely valuable to business. However, many businesses do not allow their employees to use them due to a lack of productivity. For this reason, WebProNews would like to extend a challenge to you to see how long you can go without Facebook, Twitter, and Instant Messaging.

We are, by no means, suggesting that you drop these platforms entirely. Instead, we would like to see if you notice any changes to your personal well-being, your business, and your level of productivity.

For starters, you could try going without the 3 mentioned platforms, or any other technologies that consume vast amounts of your time, for 1-2 hours each day. When you turn everything off for the first time, it will probably seem way too quiet. In addition, you will likely struggle with the urge to share something.

Once these instincts pass, chances are, you will develop a stronger focus. Not only could you dedicate more time and energy toward one project, but you could also generate a greater appreciation for what you do. What’s more, you may find yourself developing new ideas and strategies that could take your business to the next level.

So, are you up for the challenge? How long can you go without Facebook, Twitter, and Instant Messaging? And, are you more productive for doing so?

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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Social media is all about engaging with people whether it be clients, friends, or relatives. As Li Evans of Serengeti Communications explains, “Everybody likes to share, and they like to share a story.”

She goes on to tell WebProNews that businesses are just now grasping how they can use social media. If they create valuable content, she says people will share it, which will expand their reach.

Contrary to some beliefs, effective social media marketing is a lot more than simply having a Facebook page. Evans says businesses need to, first of all, understand where their audience is. Although Facebook and Twitter have exploded in popularity, it doesn’t mean that your audience is there. If this is the case, these platforms will not be effective for your business.

It could be that message boards and forums are where your audience is. Although these areas have been around since before the term social media was even coined, Evans believes they are still very powerful, have a large reach, and rank in search engines. Other effective platforms include ratings and review services and location-based sites.

Secondly, businesses need to understand what their resources are. It is important to realize what you are capable of doing before you jump in. Otherwise, you could quickly get overwhelmed, which could lead to failure.

Thirdly, businesses have to listen to what their audience is saying. Just as businesses need to understand their resources before embracing social, they need to do a lot of listening too. If not, Evans says it could be compared to petting a shark. Businesses should know what is acceptable and what is not before they embark on a social media campaign.

Once a business applies these 3 steps, she says it can build a social media strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m often asked about the “ideal length” for a blog post. I’ve heard answers ranging from 200 to 800 words, but my answer is always the same: Enough to tell the story and not one word more. Writing short is actually considerably more difficult than writing long because every word has to truly pull its weight. There is no room for filler.

Challenge yourself: Try writing a post, going for a little walk to let it breathe, then coming back and cutting your word count by at least 10 (preferably closer to 15) percent. Impossible? Not at all. Start by ditching unnecessary adjectives and adverbs (why say “really big” when “huge” conveys the same?). Find places where you can replace an adverb and a verb with a stronger verb (e.g., “devoured” or “gobbled” rather than “ate quickly”). These steps alone will strengthen your post by making your writing more concise and your word choice more precise. Once you’ve done that, replace passive constructions with active ones wherever possible (“a pirate rode the unicorn” rather than “the unicorn was ridden by a pirate”) and get rid of wordy phrases (e.g., “can” instead of “is able to,” “before” instead of “prior to,” “about” instead of “with regard to,” etc.). You’ve probably cut quite a few words by this point. Continue looking for places to tighten (e.g., change “the opinion of the blogger” to “the blogger’s opinion”). Wordy constructions are sneaky; there are more of them than you think. I think the best thing about Twitter is that it encourages people to be more concise in their communications…that’s not to say you should start using “b4” and “urself” on your blog.

Let’s say you’ve chopped as much as you can from your post and it’s still long. You have three options: (a) Publish it as is and risk having distractible readers (that’s almost all of them) get click happy and leave your blog (b) Break it up into a series (c) use some of the methods below to make the post more scannable and digestible. We’re going to focus on option (c). Here are the top ten most-blogged-about stories of the week, as provided by Regator, and some examples of well-formatted but lengthy posts about each:

1. LeBron James ­– “Did LeBron James Really Hurt His Brand?” is 778 words long, but thanks to careful formatting, it reads quickly and is not intimidating to readers. In addition to subheadings and bolded text, which we’ll discuss, SportsBiz uses a large pull quote to break up the text and generate interest. Pull quotes are less common online than they are in the print world, but a good pull quote can pique reader curiosity and serve to break up large blocks of text.
2. World Cup – Weighing in at 1,241 words, Bleacher Report’s “2010 FIFA World Cup Final: How Spain Won It” would likely send readers running if it weren’t for its effective use of subheads. The title clearly conveys the post’s purpose and the subheads deliver to that end by providing an easy-to-scan list. Subheadings are important for longer posts because they provide the reader with multiple entry points. Not interested in Spain’s passing play? Perhaps the section on Cesc Fabregas will interest you. Subheads give readers that option.
3. George Steinbrenner ­– Both LAist’s “Dodgers Reaction to Steinbrenner’s Death” and Gothamist’s “Players, Politicians Remember George Steinbrenner” use quotations to break up longer posts but comparing the two shows the importance of formatting. While neither seems overwhelming, The LAist post’s consistent use of bold to introduce the quotes’ sources enhances its readability significantly.
4. Mel Gibson – World of Psychology’s 719-word “Mel Gibson, Bipolar Disorder and Alcohol” is broken up into five distinct, numbered points. We’ve talked in the past about the scan-ability of list posts, and this is no exception. The bolded subheads are complete sentences that give a clear indication of what that section will address.
5. Gulf of Mexico – The First Post’s “BP oil spill: the conspiracy theories” was broken into two separate pages to disguise its nearly 1,300-word length. Tricky but effective. This is an example of a post that could have been broken into multiple posts with teasers for future parts and links to previous parts in each post.
6. Bristol Palin ­– While not excessively long to begin with, at only 500 words, TV Squad’s “Bristol Palin’s Reality Show: If It Happens, Here Are 5 Things We Want to See” seems like an even quicker, easier read thanks to its combination of bolded subheads, a medium-sized photo, and short paragraphs. Keeping each paragraph short helps you avoid large blocks of text that the attention-span-challenged may find off-putting.
7. Harvey Pekar ­– Comics Alliance’s 937-word “Harvey Pekar: A Timeline of a Comic Book Icon” could have tried to recap Pekar’s life in plain text, but it’s unlikely anyone but the most die-hard fans would’ve made it past his first issue of American Splendor. Instead, the blogger broke the story up using an engaging timeline format. It, along with the images and short paragraphs, makes this long post more palatable.
8. Roman Polanski – Jezebel’s “Roman Polanski Runs Free Once Again” isn’t long enough to require subheads, but does make use (like many of this blog’s posts) of prominent red links that, when scanned, provide a useful glimpse of the story (“not to extradite Roman Polanski,” “where he’s been since December,” etc.) as well as multiple entry points.
9. Consumer Reports – At 909 words, Mashable’s “What Apple Must Do to Stop the Bleeding” uses many of the aforementioned techniques, including colored links, photos, and short paragraphs but also adds video within the post and oversized subheads with light grey lines around them to further divide the text.
10. Old Spice – In addition to using video, photos, bold subheads, quotes, and colored links, ReadWriteWeb’s “How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made” is an excellent example of tight, concise writing that uses all of its 1,065 words to maximum effect.

How do you handle long posts? Please share your techniques in the comments.

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 + Handling High Word Counts

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Unfortunately, most companies do not realize how much content can be optimized as news. According to Lisa Buyer of The Buyer Group, press releases, blogs, social media profiles, tweets, Facebook posts, and more can all be included in news results.

To do this, she suggests that marketers, first of all, optimize press releases for news search. She also recommends using tools such as PitchEngine. This tool provides an additional place for marketers to post press releases. Buyer says this effective tool practically guarantees that users will show up on the first page of Google’s search results. Although it does not always stay in the top spot, it does provide instant gratification.

She also points out the importance of interacting with media, especially through Twitter. Specifically, she tells WebProNews that “#journchat” is a great way to do this. The chat takes place weekly and brings journalists, bloggers, and professionals together.

Additionally, Buyer offers advice in regards to promoting content. She says one of the keys to successful promotion is avoiding spammy and pitchy messages. Although it’s easy to take the headline and tweet it out, it is not the most effective approach. Instead, Buyer advocates more creative methods such as using quotes, statistics, questions, or other interesting nuggets of information that will draw traffic back to the release.

Are you utilizing these opportunities to show up in news results?

As marketers, what goals do you have with social media? Most marketers use social for efforts such as branding, promotion, and visibility. Interestingly, marketers do not usually consider the benefits that search and social provide together.

According to Rebecca Lieb of Econsultancy, most marketers aren’t aware of how closely the two are tied. For instance, when a user signs into Google and searches for a query, he can see real-time social search results in addition to the other results. Specifically, he can see a live Twitter feed and anything that people within his social circle are saying, related to his query.

While still talking about social media, Lieb brings up two areas that marketers have not fully grasped. They are: strategy and execution. So many marketers are jumping on the social media bandwagon with a Facebook page or Twitter account to simply keep up with the times. However, this is not the way that people succeed in social media.

As part of a social media strategy, marketers need to know what they want to accomplish, who they are trying to reach, how they are going to communicate with the target, and more. Many people perceive social as something that is free, but as Lieb points out, nothing is free.

To be truthful, social media takes lots of time and resources. If marketers calculate these factors into their strategy, their chances for social success will increase.

On a different note, Lieb also tells WebProNews that she is encouraged by current developments taking place regarding net neutrality.  She believes the U.S. is on the right track to improve the necessity of high-speed and open Web access.