Posted by great scott!

Sure, you use Twitter as a social media tool, but have you ever considered it as an SEO research tool? No? Well watch and learn this week to find out how you can harness it in a whole new way.

Now that social signals (particularly Twitter) are becoming more important in the engines, they can help you pinpoint when a keyword is going to trip the ‘Query Deserves Freshness’ switch. If you can figure that out, you can gain a big competitive advantage by publishing fresh content in a targeted, timely manner.

Rand mentions a couple of tools for using Twitter to target and time your content. One is Trendistic, which helps you see trends in Twitter; another is our very own Blogscape Social Media Monitoring prototype (inside PRO Labs), which monitors and analyzes a few million key content providers across the fresh web, including over 250,000 influential Twitter accounts.

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Posted by great scott!

This week, we’ve got a couple of newcomers to Whiteboard Studios! Our very own Jen Lopez and Danny Dover (whom you should know well thanks to Jen’s Meet the Mozzers post) are pinch-hitting for our globe-trotting CEO. Let’s all give them a big welcome.

We did a PRO Site Review Webinar last week and noticed a few SEO issues that are all-too-common. So, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen and Danny will walk you through five common areas where people often make mistakes, and explain quick fixes that can help you improve, including bot blocking, courting the Linkerati, identifying problems using Top Pages, analyzing conversion rate, and addressing canonicalization.

Here are the charts Danny referenced in the video:

     
                                                                                       Courtesy of WebsiteOptimization.com

Also, if you’d like to learn more about tracking first-touch attribution in your analytics, Whiteboard Friday alumnus, Will Critchlow, wrote about it here.

Addition: Rand wrote a more in-depth post about the use of robots.txt vs. meta noindex, follow here, which can help shed some light on the subject.

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Posted by willcritchlow

The good news is that tomorrow (Wednesday 24th Feb), at 8.30am PST (11.30am EST / 4.30pm GMT), I am going to be joined on the next Distilled conference call by Richard Baxter as we discuss "how to get the most from your SEO". The even better news is that it is totally free (as long as you register in time).

If you would like to join us on the call, simply register on the Distilled site and you will be sent instructions to join the conference (which will be handled by gotomeeting / gotowebinar).

Previous calls have been more technical and have been essentially presentations that I have delivered with a slide-deck. I did one on SEOmoz tools and one on how to be an Excel ninja – both videos are available on the Distilled site.

This one is going to be a little different. Rich should need little introduction. With a strong background in in-house travel SEO followed by founding his agency, SEOgadget, he is not only a true guru of keyword research and large site architecture, but also has experience on both sides of the client / agency relationship. He also spoke at the London PRO training seminar last October (thanks to foliovision for the photo):

Rich and I plan to let you into a relaxed chat. We might pull up the occasional website or slide but fundamentally, it’ll be a little like sitting in on a live whiteboard Friday (on a Wednesday, without a whiteboard, or Rand!).

The conversation is likely to be pretty free-flowing – in many ways it will lead on from my WBF conversation with Rand about choosing an SEO consultant – but I can’t guarantee exactly what we will talk about! We are intending to cover:

• the best tasks to keep in-house vs. outsource
• combining SEO effectively with PPC, PR and marketing
• integrating SEO into other processes (e.g. development, business development)
• how to get the most from your agency
• how to keep an eye on your agency and avoid bans and penalties
• how to be a great SEO client and get even more out of your agency

We hope to have you there. We will be taking questions – both on Twitter (hashtag: #optimalSEO) and via the chat interface in gotowebinar, but if you have anything you’d specifically like us to cover, feel free to use the comments below to chime in.

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Posted by great scott!

This week we take a look at how shifts in the engines over the last year have made it more important than ever to really pay attention to brand-based marketing.

A year or so ago, the engines started giving more weight to established brands, but things have become more interesting: With enhanced attention to personalized search, click patterns, and brand preferences emerging through individual search history, having an identifiable brand is a huge asset.  Throw in the new aspect of social search–wherein the influences and preferences of your social network are used to influence inform your decisions, and creating an identifiable brand becomes even more powerful.

Watch this week’s video to learn even more about how branding can help you accomplish big things…

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Posted by willcritchlow

It’s time for a quick mid-week geek-out – I wanted to collect together a bunch of resources I have written on first touch tracking in Google Analytics including (for the first time that I’m aware of), the technical implementation details:

• Following a Whiteboard Friday recorded when I was in Seattle a month ago or so
• I hurriedly wrote a post explaining general principles of how to get past last touch attribution in Google Analytics
• which it turned out was (quite reasonably) not enough for some of our readers (and I really wasn’t happy with the level of detail)
• so I have done my best to go above and beyond with detailed instructions on How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics
• while digging around in GA and JavaScript to put this all together (a combination I probably shouldn’t have been doing) I discovered an interesting difficulty if you are going to migrate from the now-deprecated _setVar to _setCustomVar and wrote a post about it over on Search Engine Land.

If you’re the kind of person that unwraps your birthday presents early, you can skip to the punchline, grab the code you need to get first touch tracking working from Google code (don’t forget to read the instructions!). Here’s the meat from my detailed post:

Include following code anywhere above the Google Analytics code script in your page code:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://attributiontrackingga.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/distilled.FirstTouch.js">
</script>

Move your GA code above any Website Optimizer code or anything from Google that might write a visitor (__utma) cookie and look for:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");

pageTracker._trackPageview();

In between those two lines, you want to put the following line:

distilledFirstTouch(pageTracker);

Oh, and don’t forget all of this is provided as is, with no warranty. I hope it will help you out, but only you are responsible for changes you make to your website and tracking code. Be extremely careful with live profiles and remember that you will need to do something different if you already use custom variables.

That’s all for now folks. Enjoy your analytics, don’t forget to drop comments with improvements, tips, tricks, abuse for writing such a short post etc. and if you need a primer on Excel to make the most of your new-found data, you can check out the recording of my conference call on how to be an Excel ninja (sign up for future calls here).

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To distract you from this spectacularly short post, here are some really big things found on the internet this week:

Check out the depth of the ocean:

As well as the size of the earth:

I also recommend watching this one.

Technorati Tags

analytics, ga, firsttouch, google, javascript, code

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Posted by great scott!

This week Rand discusses recent changes that seem to signal the coming of another big shift in how the engines determine results. With the incorporation of social networks into results, increased personalized search, and even Google Buzz, the social graph is clearly becoming a more and more important factor for the engines. What will these changes mean for online marketers and how can you take advantage of them? Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday and find out…

And here, for your browsing pleasure, are some of the resources Rand mentioned in the video…

• Video intro to Google Buzz:

• Royal Pingdom says Twitter now processing more than one billion tweets per month.

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Posted by great scott!

Will Critchlow of Distilled (who recently took over SEOmoz’s consulting business) is back in Whiteboard studios to help Rand discuss how to Choose an SEO consultant–or any consultant for that matter.

Whether you’re a consultant yourself, you frequently work with consultants, or you’re thinking of outsourcing some work for the very first time, you’ll find this week’s video worthwhile.  Knowing beforehand how the engagement needs to be structured, what you expect to get, where to find good recommendations and/or sources of consultants, and how to determine whether they have the skills and expertise you require are all critical steps to a successful and relationship (and making sure you get what you paid for). Join Rand and Will as they help you figure out how to get the best results for your consulting dollar.

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Posted by great scott!

This week we’re pleased to welcome Marshall Simmonds, CEO of Define Search Strategies and Chief Strategist for the New York Times, to Whiteboard Studios. Whether or not to use topic pages–and how to use them effectively–is a topic of some debate in the SEO world. Well, who better to ask about it than the guy in charge of SEO strategy for the NYT and About.com, two of the topic page-iest sites on the web?

If you’re using a topic page strategy, or you’ve considered it, watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday. Marshall breaks down how and when they can be effective, pros and cons, as well as expenses and advantages to the strategy.

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Posted by great scott!

This week we’ve got a special Whiteboard Friday double feature! As you’ve probably heard, we launched our new link checker and backlink analysis tool, Open Site Explorer, this week and it makes use of some exciting new metrics: Domain Authority and Page Authority. We asked our old chum, Will Critchlow, to talk to Rand about these metrics to help everyone understand what they are, what goes into them, how to use them, and why we created them.

In Part One, Will and Rand discuss how to use these metrics to gain insight and intelligence on your (and your competitors’) pages, domains, and link profiles, as well as why these metrics can be a better predictor of ranking success than others that you may have used in the past.

In Part Two, the guys dive into detail about what exactly goes into Domain Authority & Page Authority: how they were modeled, how they compare to actual search results, why your DA & PA scores may change over time, and lots of other details to help you better understand how these metrics work.

Both videos are viewable below, simply select the one you’d like to watch from the playlist on the right of the player. I’d recommend watching them in order, but it’s not necessary.

These new metrics have already been quite popular among users of Open Site Explorer, and one of the big questions is, "When can I get them in the SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar?!"  Well, surprise, surprise, we’re on top of it! They’ll be available in the new toolbar update coming out next month…here’s a sneak peek

 

New scores, new features and much more are on their way in the February version of the mozbar

If you’ve got questions about Domain or Page Authority, please leave us feedback below. We’re trying to make these metrics as useful and valuable as possible and would love your suggestions.

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Posted by great scott!

This week Will Critchlow is back to help Rand talk about best practices for keeping your clients (and yourself) happy during consulting contracts.  It’s important to start early (setting expectations, contracting, agreeing on KPIs), maintain good communication, and follow through on deliverables. Happy clients mean more business, improved reputation, higher demand and more success for you.  Check out this Whiteboard Friday to get some ideas about where you might be able to improve your process and leave your clients so happy they’ll sing your praises to everyone they know.

PS – As mentioned in the video here are links to some of Sarah’s great posts pertaining to SEO contracts:

• Does Your SEO Consulting Contract Have a Clause Limiting Your Liability?
• Manage Risk By Including an Indemnification Clause in Your SEO Consulting Contracts
• Why You Should Give Yourself the "Opportunity to Cure" in Your SEO Consulting Contracts
• Manage Client Expectations And Reduce Your Risk By Including A Warranty Disclaimer In Your Client Contracts

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