Mobile SERPS & Usability
Posted by Suzzicks
So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.
All One Index Soon?
Why does this happen?
Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.
Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?
Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content – like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a ‘one index’ solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….
Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones
But I have gone astray – We were talking about ‘mobile’. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google’s ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!
As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.
There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.
You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like ’site:’ and ‘link:’ work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search – a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes.
Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines
The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.
If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer, and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.
Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!
You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.
Mobile Usability Options:
- Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages Only: One set of pages that has two or more style sheets – One for traditional web rendering, usually called ‘screen,’ and one (or more) for mobile web rendering, usually called ‘handheld.’ An important note is that the iPhone will automatically pull the ‘screen’ stylesheet, unless you give other instructions. Since looking at a traditional website on an iPhone is really not a great user experience, I recommend creating a specific stylesheet that can be pulled by the iPhone. You can get very granular with this, and create separate style sheets for all different kinds of phones. You would then simply have them called in based on the screen size of the device that they target.
_ - Traditional Pages for Computer and Mobile Pages for all Phones: Two sets of pages – one to be shown on traditional computers and one to be shown on mobile phones. The file structure of the mobile pages should be an exact replica of the traditional pages, with the addition of the ‘.m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection should deliver feature phone users and smart phone users to the mobile pages automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering – This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone.
_ - Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages for Traditional and SmartPhone, Mobile Specific Pages for Feature Phones: Two sets of pages; one set of pages that are the mobile/traditional hybrid pages that use separate external stylesheets to be rendered on traditional computer screens and smart phones. The second set of pages are mobile specific pages, hosted on an ‘m.’ or a ‘/m’. The file structure should be an exact replica of the traditional file structure, with the addition of the ‘m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page while they are on a feature phone.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering – This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone.
_ - Traditional Pages for Computers, Graphical Mobile Pages for Smart Phones, Text Mobile Pages for Feature Phones: Three sets of pages. Traditional pages for traditional computers, touch-optimized pages for smart phones with touch screens, and mobile-optimized pages for feature phones and smart phones without touch screens. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users with touch screens to the touch-screen pages if they click on a link while they are on a touch-screen phone. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users on feature phones and smart phones that don’t have a touch-screen to the mobile-optimized pages if they click on a link while they are on one of those types of phones. In this scenario, you will need two mobile-specific subdomains or subdirectories. I recommend using ‘touch.’ or /’touch’ for the touch-screen pages, and ‘m.’ or /m’ for the mobile-optimized pages.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. All sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering – This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on either version of the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead. It can also be used to send FeaturePhone or SmartPhone users to the version of the site that is best suited for their phone.
September 5, 2010
Tags: &, Mobile, SERPS, Usability
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
LDA – Is On-Page Optimization the SEO Secret?
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
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.
How do I recap the SEOmoz PRO Seminar session on Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO? The title is so attractive that it produces Pavlonian symptoms as we salivate at the thought of uncovering a hidden SEO treasure. Ben Hendrickson of SEOmoz presented a model which appears to show how Google may assigning relevance to keyword terms based on context – topical relevance.
Is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that hidden jackpot?
1st – LDA is not new nor something SEOmoz invented. The Information Retrieval model has been around for 7 or 8 years, and IR geeks have talked about it before. There are a number of resources, as well as nay saying, about LDA and Google’s possible use of it.
2nd – What is new is SEOmoz’s LDA Topics Tool that produces a relevancy score based off a query (search term). It enables one to play with words that may increase a page’s relevancy in the eyes of Google. It shows words that help Google determine how relevant the page is to a user’s search query.
Game Changer?
Kyle Stone tweeted that the LDA tool is a game changer, and many retweeted.
Is SEOmoz’s LDA tool a game changer? That’s yet to be seen. The goal is to report Ben’s research as presented at the Mozinar and how a layman (myself) interprets such. Rand is going to do a follow-up post to explain more.
Why all the hype?
The SEO Challenge
SEOs face the continual challenge of figuring out Google’s hidden ranking algorithms. How do we rank higher? Which signals are the most important? We know search engines are "learning models" that attempt to understand "context” of words. Google has said for years that webmasters should concentrate most on providing good relevant (contextual) content.
There are ways to rank higher. Is it as easy as 1, 2, 3?
- Create quality copy with keyword(s) on the page along with associated anchor text links.
- Get good links.
- What Ben talked about in this session.
LDA – Topic Modeling & Analysis
Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in layman’s terms, translates to "topic modeling." In search geek terms, LDA is the following formula:
(Did you digest that? Don’t worry; Mozzers groaned and laughed at the same time. PLUS: Scientist Hendrickson delivered this session after lunch!)
LDA Simplified – Here is Ben’s way of explaining topic modeling:
(Okay, I was once proud that I got an A in Logic and Combinatorics – discrete math/set theory. However, that computer science class now feels like basic math compared to this formula.)
It made more sense when Rand Fishkin joined Ben on stage and when Todd Freisen moderated and deciphered during Q&A. (Manuela Sanches of Brazil was sitting next to me and said that Ben’s "presentation needed subtitles!")
The objective of LDA, from my deciphering of Greek, is to understand how Google is using semantic contextual analysis combined with other signals, to define topics/concepts. It’s how Google analyzes the words on a page to determine the "set" to which a word belongs – how relevant a search query is to pages in its database.
For example: How does Google assign relevance to the word "orange" on a page? They determine orange is related to the fruit set or to the color set by page context.
LDA Defined:
"Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al, 2003) is a powerful learning algorithm for automatically and jointly clustering words into "topics" and documents into mixtures of topics. It has been successfully applied to model change in scientific fields over time (Griffiths and Steyver, 2004; Hall, et al. 2008).
A topic model is, roughly, a hierarchical Bayesian model that associates with each document a probability distribution over "topics", which are in turn distributions over words."
Bayesian – ah, a term I recognize!! Bayesian spam filtering is a method used to detect spam. It draws off a database and learns the meaning of words. It’s "trained" by us when we mark an email as spam. It looks at incoming emails and calculates the probability that the content of an email is contextually spammy.
I found a PowerPoint presentation about Bayesian Inference Techniques by Microsoft Research from 2004 that presents the possibility of using LDA. Go to slide 54 and read:
"Can we build a general-purpose inference engine which automates these procedures?"
Microsoft has been looking at LDA models. Do search engines use it as one of their primary methods?
Ben sampled over 8 million documents with approx. 1,000 queries. He believes Google is using LDA topic modeling to determine (learn) what words mean by their associations with, relevance to, other words on the page. (Other factors are included.) Ben called the results a "co-occurrence explanation" that use a "cosine similarity."
SEO Takeaway:
- Results that are higher in Google SERPs, in general, have more topical content.
- Search engines do APPEAR to apply semantic analysis… when indexing a page and determining the intent of the words on the page.
Rand tweeted an explanation (in 140 x 4) as follows:
Dana’s LDA Catwalk Metaphor for Topic Modeling:
Imagine the words on your page as walking down the fashion runway in Paris. Your keyword phrase is "dressed" in semantic accessories, words that correlate to and dress up your topic. Associated words bring meaning to and highlight the fashion model’s outfit. Adjectives, modifiers and synonyms are like jewelry, hats, and shoes. The combination can transform your base layers (your target terms) from casual or conservative business attire into a sexy night-on-the-town ensemble.
Combinations and permutations of words on a page "dress" your skinny or curvy fashion model. Relevant words provide Google with an image of what she is wearing and the catwalk upon which she struts. LDA refers back to what Google already knows about these "accessories" (words) and their previous association with the topic terms related to fashion.
Enter Topical Ambiguity – I just broke the "rules" for context with the catwalk metaphor by referring to modeling in two contexts on this page:
- I used "modeling" terms that relate to the "fashion industry" set.
- The catwalk metaphor is irrelevant content that is off-topic for discussing "LDA topic modeling."
Google Algorithm Exposed?
Ben clearly said that LDA is an ATTEMPT to explain the SERPs. His scenario, a quote from his presentation slides, follows:
One of us needs to implement it so we can:
1) See how it applies to pages
2) See if it helps explain SERPs
One-two-three-not-it.
LDA is not LSI.
There were some tweets claiming SEOmoz was bringing back LSI or snakeoil. Ben clarified that LDA is not LSI, which deals more with keyword density. He explained that he is NOT talking about loading keywords on a page but about the relevance of the topics within the page. He said that:
"LSI doesn’t have the same bias toward simple explanations. LSI breaks down as you try to scale up the number of topics."
The LDA tool deals with context, semantic relevancy, not density – in addition to some other random factors. Example:
If SEOmoz has a page all about "SEO" and "tools," and there is another word on the page that can be explained by a word that is more related to SEO topic, then the related word would be used. Meaning, "seo tools" doesn’t have to be repeated over and over, and the related word would be interpreted by Google as being relevant.
Ben, who appears to have the brain of a search engine, noted that it "appears" LDA is what Google is heading for in the near future. He said (paraphrased):
If they are not doing it, they seem to be doing something that has the same output. They are probably already using it.
Rand deciphered:
It’s a super weird coincidence if Google is not using it.
Are On-Page Signals Stronger than Links?
Are we heading toward more emphasis of on-page topic modeling? I’m not an IR geek, but I do plan to spend more energy focusing on understanding how search engines retrieve informaton. We are dealing with a semantic Web. LDA may indicate that good old on-page optimization sends stronger signals than links.
SEOmoz’s LDA tool attempts to show how relevant content is to a chosen keyword. It computes relevance of queries.
The following shows how relevant SEOmoz’s Tools page is to Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Tools page.
The score at the top is an indicator of how relevant the content on that page is according to LDA.
- Aaron’s content is 72%* relevant for the query "seo tools."
- SEOmoz’s tools page is 40%* relevant.
*NOTE: (I inserted the logos.) You can run the same pages and get different results. The results are similar in that SEO Book always scored as more topically relevant, but the percentage varies. Is this the random Monte Carlo algorithm at work? Ben?
Mozinar Question:
"How do we execute this for SEO?"
Ben’s Answer:
"I don’t actually do SEO. I write code."
That’s up to us, the SEOs, to play and test in our Google playground.
Use the tool to decide if you can win with LDA to optimize your on-page signals.
- Use the LDA Topics Tool to return words that could be used on a page for a query.
- Then determine who is ranking for that term.
- Simply write content that is highly on-topic based off the findings you observe.
If you are not performing that well in the SERPs, think about classic on-page optimization. In the example above, rather than putting another instance of "seo tools" on the page, LDA shows there are better ways to tell Google that you are about that topic. The tool provides a way to measure that.
IMPORTANT: There is a threshold at which too many related words will appear as too spammy. LDA is not something to be used to game Google.
Test the LDA Tool out for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
***
DISCLAIMER: I’m not claiming this methodology has uncovered hidden SEO treasures. Time, testing and playing around with a new SEOmoz tool while observing the SERPs will reveal the answer. In the meantime, I’m going to dress up my pages and accessorize them with relevant terms that make them dazzle so they look good climbing the Google catwalk.
September 4, 2010
Tags: OnPage, Optimization, Secret
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
Four Creative Link Building Tactics – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Aaron Wheeler
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven’t heard about. Given the importance of link building to SEO, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p)
Video Transcription
Hey, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the SEO sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site.
Let’s start with number one up here, giving testimonials. I know this sounds a little odd. You’re thinking to yourself, "Wait, I’m a marketer. I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company." But in fact, give and you shall receive.
So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service. I enjoy using it. If you’d like to use this as a testimonial, feel free." You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of SEOmoz." When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site.
So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you. I would definitely not do this disingenuously. Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend. It will come back and bite you otherwise. But if you do this, you can get those great links too.
The second one, design galleries. This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops. If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing. I don’t even know why I put so many boxes and lines. I am sure there was a reason. You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery. If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great.
Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired. See what makes it. See what is hot right now. Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users. Using CSS properly means that you’re loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate. It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well. Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship. As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site. They’ll find you more credible. They’ll want to show you off. They’ll want to share. This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future.
Number three. This is sort of an interesting one. Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is. Can we interview you, show off your business?" Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well. When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link.
Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story. I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don’t always do great things with that data. They’ll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways. It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research. If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means. I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what’s happening. I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source. When I combine those, I have great link and media bait. The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that’s interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you.
A good example of this, check out www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts and you’ll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we’ve combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data. We didn’t even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we’re going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that." Now when they do, they link back to SEOmoz and have the source in there. We’ll always say what the original source is too. But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links.
All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today. I look forward to the discussion in the comments. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.
September 3, 2010
Tags: Building, Creative, Four, Friday, Link, Tactics, Whiteboard
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
A New Day, A New SEOmoz
Posted by randfish
It’s been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.
If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu, don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. We’re the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let’s walk through it together, shall we?
Big Improvements to PRO Membership
It’s a good day to be PRO; we’ve just released:
• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that’s designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it’s part of PRO, you’ll find it in the Dashboard.
• The web app has made some big improvements and we’re now announcing a full public beta – campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There’s also some cool new functionality I’ll cover below.
• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.
• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.
If you’ve been curious about what’s in PRO membership, there’s a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also – the last chance to get PRO at /month and be locked into the rate before it rises to is now – after Friday, the price change goes into effect.
Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website
Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We’ve done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:
• A new home to Learn SEO. I’ve recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we’ve made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)
• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We’ve re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we’ve kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we’re planning to do even more with it in the future.
• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)
There’s lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.
The Web App is Now in Public Beta
Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.
We’ve also added a brand new feature – one of our most requested – exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.
As always, we welcome feedback – your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we’re feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.
Still Ironing Out Some Kinks
There’s a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner’s Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you’ve already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we’ve also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post – that should be back soon.
I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we’re expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we’re hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.
We Love Your Feedback
If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we’d love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.
Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well…. let’s just say you ain’t seen nothing yet 
September 2, 2010
Tags: SEOmoz
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
If Internet Marketing Was a Football Team: Position-by-Position Breakdown
College Football is back tonight with Utah vs. Pittsburgh. Other local games this weekend include BYU vs. Washington and Utah State vs. Oklahoma. Everything is right in the world again.
In honor of college football’s return, here are the position-by-position starters if Internet marketing strategies made up a football team:
Head Coach – Analytics and A/B Testing
The head coach analyzes everything and makes changes to improve. Analytics and testing gives you the stats, tells you what is working, where people are coming from, how long they’ve been on the site, what is bringing traffic and what converts best. Through analytics and testing, you can tweak strategies to be more successful.
Assistant Coach – Competitive Analysis
The assistant coach often scouts out the competition to know how to beat the bad guys. A detailed competitive analysis will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors so you can know how and where to strike.
Offensive Starters – Building the Brand, Getting Exposure and Outbound Marketing
Quarterback – SEO
Arguably, the quarterback position is the most important position on the field. Top quarterbacks win games despite weaknesses in other areas of the team. If you get top rankings for the right keywords, you will get more website traffic and sales. All-Pro SEO services will almost instantly make you a major player in your industry. Quarterbacks are also the face of a team. Similarly, organic natural results act as the face of your company
Running Back – Conversion Optimization
There are crucial times in any football game where a team needs 1 yard for a first down or a few inches to score a touchdown. A dependable running back will get that extra yardage almost every time. Conversion optimization plays that role for your website. Once you get that extra website traffic, you need dependable website conversion principles to take that visitor into the end zone.
Fullback – Web Design
Fullbacks are often the lead blocker that clears the way for the running back to get that extra yard. Good SEO Web design clears the way for everything else to work right.
Wide Receiver — Social Media Marketing
Fast wide receivers can change the game with one quick-striking score. Good social media marketing using viral video, infographics, blog posts, etc., can quickly send a lot of traffic and create a ton of exposure in a short period of time. Social media can be a game changer just like a flashy wide receiver that blows past the defense.
Tight End – Online Public Relations
Tight ends are instrumental in blocking for the quarterback and running backs. But they also consistently score touchdowns and get first downs in tight situations. Tight ends are critical in clutch moments whether it’s a run or pass play. Online public relations have the same dependability. Online PR doesn’t always results in a home run, but it does consistently bring good traffic quality links. And sometimes online PR scores a touchdown by getting the attention of big blogs and publications. Online PR is the go-to weapon in tight situations when you need good links, and more traffic and exposure.
Offensive Line – Keyword Research
The offensive line is the foundation of every football team. They give the quarterback time to throw and open holes for the running backs. Games are won and lost in the trenches, and they are similar won and lost with the right or wrong keyword research. Every search strategy revolves around picking the right keywords to target. Targeting the right keywords will make you a lot of money. The wrong keywords will keep you guessing and will lose you money.
Defensive Starters, Protecting Your Online Brand
Defensive Line – Reputation Management
The defensive line is the literally first line of defense. Any offense will roll over a team with a pansy D-line. For online marketing, this is similar to reputation management. It’s the foundation to defending your brand online.
Line Backer – Link Building
I chose this mostly because linebackers and link building have the same abbreviation: LB. So, you can come up with your own analogy on this one.
Corner Back – Social Media Profiles
Corner backs protect the pass and are sometimes the secret weapon on a corner blitz to reach the quarterback. I compare this to social media profiles. An active profile that provides valuable information and brings in fans, is a big part of protecting your brand and company. Social profiles are usually found high in the search engines for a company’s name. Plus, social media is all the buzz right now. In the sports world, corner backs are usually the guys with all the hype.
Safety – PPC
The Safety position is self-explanatory. The Safety has a lot of roles, but is there to basically defend wherever things break down. That’s what PPC is for. A good mix of PPC with your SEO will make sure you get the right exposure and traffic while you work on getting your SEO rankings where you want them.
Kicker/Punter – Local Search and Maps Optimization
A good kicker can nail a field goal in clutch situations or pin a team near the end zone on a good punt. Local Internet marketing places your website in the right spot for local shoppers to find your business and buy your products.
September 2, 2010
Tags: Breakdown, Football, Internet, Marketing, PositionbyPosition, Team
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
Day 1 at the SEOmoz Training Raceway
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
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.
I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.
Presentation Off
Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).
Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:
- Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
- You pitch SEO before that.
- Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
- Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
- He showed the Mozzers how to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
- He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.
Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>
Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:
Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO
- Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
- In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.
Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI – showing the value of their traffic:
<If you’re taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet…>
Then explain search growth over time – meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.
“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."
Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:
- Show competitors in SERPs.
- Match it with yeyword demand.
- Show how they are doing, side-by-side.
And the winner of the Presentation Off is … Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.
OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.
Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”
She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:
1. What is your website trying to do?
2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?
3. What is the biggest threat to your success?
You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)
Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:
- Social Network Filters – combine
- Google Image Search – Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
- Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.
Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables – 2 hands raised.
MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().
Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”
Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics
Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:
- Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
- Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
- Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
- Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
- Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
- Show the action items (not the data) to your company
- Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.
Whew… surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no… more typing at high speeds:
Marshall Simmonds – Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO
Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:
High Priority Tactics:
- Sitemaps
- Education
- 301s
- Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
- Rel=canonical
- Rewriting urls
- How much it will make? What’s the cost/traffic potential
Low Priority Tactics:
- Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
- URLs
- Link Flow
- Video SEO
- Duplicate content
- CMS Overhaul
- W3C compliance
Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don’t budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn’t have an end point.
Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:
Optimize all assets!
Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.
Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:
- rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
- Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
- Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
- Title is the most important element.
- Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
- Omniture – over reports search referrers
- Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
- Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.
Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.
Tom Critchlow
Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:
- Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
- Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
- Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
- QDF = Query Deserves Freshness
- QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links.
- Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!
Keyword harvesting tools:
- Google Search Suggest
- Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific
- Google Related Searches
- Mozenda + API = WIN
- Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool.
- Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
- Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
- Look at how people tag stories on Delicious
The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)
Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)
Build an SEO friendly CMS:
Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:
Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:
- Delicious tags – todo, toread (API)
- Foursquare top checkins (API)
- Local events calendar (API)
- Yahoo Answers (API)
- Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish)
- No API? – Mozenda ftw!
- More: proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.
Thank you, Tom!
Lindsay Wassell – Constructing Effective SEO Audits
Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.
Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.
The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:
She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:
Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.
She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.
Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization
The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.
Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.
Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:
How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users …
Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:
- Unclear call-to-action
- Too many choices
- Asking for too much info
- Too much text
- Not keeping your promises
- Visual distractions
- Lack of trust
We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.
September 1, 2010
Tags: Raceway, SEOmoz, Training
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
SEO for eCommerce Part Two: Poor Site Structure
You have been waiting for it all summer and now it is finally here! My follow up post to SEO for eCommerce Part One: Content Woes. Before I go into details on the next biggest problem with eCommerce sites and search indexing, I will take a few minutes to reply to some of the questions that were asked after the last post.
Question: Can you copy website content and then edit it?
Yes you can copy website content and edit it. If you edit the content that was copied enough, then it will become unique content and can be used on your website.
Question: What do I recommend for link building to eCommerce sites that don’t have real linkable content?
The trick to getting links is to generate content that is “linkable.†Content can be generated through blogs, articles, buyer’s guides and knowledge bases. These types of features on eCommerce sites are great for building “linkable†content and they can also help you stand out as the expert in your industry.
Question: How different do the descriptions have to be?
Sometimes all it takes is some rewording of a couple of sentences to make product descriptions unique enough. One easy way to get unique content is to read the manufacturer’s description and then write it from your memory. In most cases you will not be able to remember everything word for word and your version will be different enough from the manufacturer’s.
Thank you everyone for your questions and comments. Now I am going to describe the next problem that occurs frequently with eCommerce websites: poor site structure.
Poor Site Structure
The problem of poor site structure occurs with eCommerce sites when the navigation of the site makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to find the product pages of the website. Standard eCommerce website designs will employ a category and subcategory system that helps the visitor to browse by narrowing their options until they find what they are looking for. The flaw in such a system is that it requires that a search engine crawler travel too deep into the site to find the product pages.
How do You Know if a Crawler is Traveling too Deep?
One indicator is the Page Rank score of the page. You can find the Page Rank score of any page on a website by simply visiting the page with the Google toolbar installed on your browser. Pages that are not too deep will usually have a Page Rank score. There are other factors that could cause a page to not have a Page Rank score so this indicator isn’t 100% reliable. My rule of thumb for determining if a page is too deep is to count how many pages I have to visit before getting to the product page. If it is more than three pages deep then it is too deep for the search engine crawler.
How do You Correct the Site Structure?
The simple answer to the question about correcting the site structure is to tell you to make your product pages no more than 3 pages deep. But I know that this isn’t always a simple fix. Some websites are huge with millions of products. Creating a site structure that consists of one level of categories and then the products would create pages with thousands of links. This is where it will require a carefully planned link structure.
- Code the main site navigation using SEO friendly CSS so that you can include expanding sub-navigation menus.
- Include featured product links on the homepage and main category pages of the site to promote better indexing of popular products.
- Use blog posts, articles and buyer’s guides to link to specific product pages.
- Add a quick bookmarking widget to your product pages so they can easily be bookmarked and shared on social networking sites.
- Include an HTML sitemap (or multiple sitemaps depending on the size of the website).
The main thing to remember with site structure is that you want to make it easy for both a search engine crawler and a customer to find any product you sell on your website. Go through your site and see how easy it is for you to find your products. Ask friends and other family members to do the same. They can give you good feedback and help you find places you could change to make your eCommerce site both user and search engine friendly.
September 1, 2010
Tags: ECommerce, Part, Poor, Site, Structure
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
From Clicks to Conversions at the SEOmoz Training Raceway
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
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.
Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled – beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.
Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that’s why they call Todd, "Oilman."
When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn’t realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.
Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it’s produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.
From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between
1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."
The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:
- You have to be seen as a brand.
- You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.
- You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.
Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.
- Image results don’t always match image SERP’s order, i.e. images for the artist "manet."
- Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.
- Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.
The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image
Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."
Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we’ll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:
Image Pixel Size – If you go smaller than 400×300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.
So you don’t have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.
Video SERPs
It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:
Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages
Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos
Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit
Step #4: PROFIT $$$See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.
Rand’s foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:
"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."
2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:
Straight from Google’s mouth:
Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it’s not 100%, it’s close.)
Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:
- Craigslist
- Citysearch
- Google Products
- Mobile devices
- Garmin GPS
- Wikipedia
- Virtual Augmented Reality
Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:
- Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites.
- Local SEO is about optimizing locations.
Takeaway:
"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."
"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin’ 7-pack!"
Resources to claim your listings:
"The Big Three" major data providers:
Citations – David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder
Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.
3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter … many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.
Dan’s takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:
Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.
Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!
Takeaway: Try to stay positive.
If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.
Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.
Don’t "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.
Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:
Timing for retweets:Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.
Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?
- Put a bit.ly link in the browser.
- Type a plus sign after it;
- Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.
- Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.
Alright … one more Twitter insight before we close …
He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan’s numbers confirm it.)
Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan’s presentation alone. But I’m concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.
Check out Dan’s set of social media tools.
4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.
I’ll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.
August 31, 2010
Tags: Clicks, Conversions, from, Raceway, SEOmoz, Training
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
5 Ways Clients Trip Up Their Own SEO
One the largest hurdles in getting a website to rank well and make money for a client, can be the client themselves. It is hard to watch a well-meaning client get in their own way and not know it. For that reason I am writing this post to help them understand what they can do (and not do) to make sure that they get the most out of their money when they hire an seo firm.
Choosing the right keywords
One of the most common mistakes that I see clients make when working with an seo company, or doing their own search engine optimization, is picking the wrong keywords. It is easy to become blinded by massive projected traffic numbers instead of focusing on the real number that matters – sales.
I have seen this happen repeatedly. Let me set this up for you. Here is a mock phone conversation after the SEO company has done some keyword research and recommended the appropriate keywords to the client:
Client: “I would like to target keywords x,y,z.â€
SEO Company: “While the research does show that those will bring traffic, I am not sure those are the right keywords to target for sales.â€
Client: “I know my industry and those are the keywords I need to show up for.â€
SEO Company: “Okay.â€â€¦After months of hard work that has resulted in top rankings for the client’s given keywords:
Client: “I am not seeing a good enough return on my investment with you to justify continuing. My sales have not increased significantly and it certainly is not enough to cover my contract with you, let alone make money. You have been working on this for several months now and I am not seeing how search engine optimization has helped me at all.â€
SEO Company: “Well, we have gotten the top rankings for the keywords you asked for and your traffic has increased, but perhaps we should look at now optimizing for the other keywords that we recommended.â€
Client: “No, I don’t think that will help.â€The mistake clients make with keywords is demanding that the SEO marketing company target their efforts on broad keywords that will not translate into sales. A better strategy is to start with a list of longer tail keywords to target. These keywords are the ones that will have a much higher conversion rate and they almost always are easier to rank for. You are much more likely to see a positive ROI by using this strategy.
Not making the Recommended Changes To Their SiteThere will always need to be changes made to a site for optimization purposes. One of the ways that a client gets in their own way is in their refusal or slow implementation of those changes. It is important that once some recommendations have been made, the changes are made as soon as possible. The longer it takes to make the changes the slower the rankings will come and the longer it will be to see a return on the investment.
Resist Adding Content
In order to get rankings for certain keywords it is necessary to have content that revolves around the keywords that you are trying to rank for. Often there will be recommendations to add or alter content to the site. If content is recommended as part of an SEO campaign, it is important to add it. if some alterations are recommended, then make those. If you are concerned with the recommendation, discuss it and come to some compromise that will work for you and the SEO firm, but do not resist the change all together.
Communication
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! One of the most frustrating things for an Internet marketing company is to have a client’s campaign slowed or stopped due to a lack of response from a client. Understand that if you are not answering their emails and phone calls, then they are likely at a standstill on your SEO campaign.
On the other hand, some clients are a little too eager to communicate. As a client, you should feel comfortable to call or email them whenever you need to. But remember they only have a certain amount of time each day to do the work, and the more hours they spend on the phone with you or replying to your emails, the less time they will have to get the work done.
Micromanaging
It is important to understand the strategy that your SEO company is using, but if you are a client that must approve every little move, then you are getting in the way. Remember that they are the experts and they have done this more than once.
By micromanaging you may cause delays because they are waiting for your approval. You have a business to run. Do your due diligence before hiring any Internet marketing company and then trust that the company you have hired knows what they are doing and can get you the results that you are seeking. Discuss with them what kinds of things you want to approve and then let them do their job.
August 31, 2010
Tags: Clients, Their, Trip, Ways
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
7 Different Visualisations of Link Profiles
Posted by Tom_C
We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let’s mash those two things together. In this post I’ve collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained……
Which Are My Top Folders
The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I’ve been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:
Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.
Creating Geo Link Maps
Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled’s backlinks:
Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep’s wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic…. I can but dream
Pretty Tag clouds
Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website….
These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.
html which let’s you make the pretty pictures. Visualising Directory Links
When quickly scanning a site’s backlink profile there’s a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It’s not that the non-quality links don’t work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:
=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")
This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn’t catch everything I’ve found that it get’s you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:
Venn Diagrams
Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor’s links that looks a bit like this:
Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.
Broken Links
I know this tool has been written about before and it’s not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole’s chrome extension "SEO site tools":
Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it’s useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:
I like this view, especially when I’m looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.
SEOmoz Labs
While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:
Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.
August 30, 2010
Tags: Different, Link, Profiles, Visualisations
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
SEO.com Launches Local Search Service with Boostability.com Partnership; on Track for Record Year
SEO.com teams up with Boostability.com to offer small and medium-sized businesses the services and technology to efficiently leverage local SEO services that drive top rankings, increase website traffic and significantly boosts sales.
SALT LAKE CITY — Up until now, SEO.com’s clientele was mostly made up of larger corporations and businesses with a bigger marketing budget. With one partnership, that’s all changed.SEO.com has partnered with Boostability.com, a local Internet marketing firm with a proprietary SEO platform, to offer clients Google maps optimization and other local Internet marketing services.
“We’ve been seeking out a partner that could be a service provider for small, local accounts,” said Chris Knudsen, vice president of marketing. “We’ve found that in Boostability. They have great software, an equally great background in search, and a management team and product that will deliver results.”
The affiliation comes after SEO.com experienced multiple years of rapid growth and is on track for a record year. In the last two years, the SEO company increased its monthly revenue by 600 percent and went from 12 employees to nearly 70 – and is still aggressively hiring.
This April, SEO.com was named the No. 2 SEO firm by Website Magazine. The SEO company has been listed among the top 10 SEO firms in the country by PromotionWorld, and one of the top 25 fastest growing companies in Utah by the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum two years running, including No. 6 in 2010. SEO.com also has been named among the Emerging Elite by MountainWest Capital Network.
Through this partnership, SEO.com is now offering local search services (including local SEO and maps optimization) ranging from 0 to 00 a month, in combination with its proven enterprise offerings. Boostability will fulfill the service for SEO.com and will greatly benefit from the addition of many new clients every year.
“Given our incredible lead flow and reputation, we will now be able to service thousands of new accounts though this partnership,” said Nelson James, president of SEO.com. “We are pleased about being able to provide the value and benefit that comes from SEO to even more businesses in need.”
“We’re excited to be a part of what SEO.com is doing, and to help both sides continue to grow,” said Travis Thorpe, CEO of Boostability. “They will be able to leverage our proprietary technology and we’ll benefit by getting more customers as a part of their brand.”
About Boostability.com
Boostability provides SEO technology and fulfillment services for agencies, media companies, and phone book (yellow pages) providers. Using proprietary technology it delivers cost-effective and scalable SEO solutions.About SEO.com
SEO.com is a search marketing firm that delivers a big ROI for its clients by driving traffic to their websites through aggressive search engine optimization, pay per click management, and social media marketing. SEO.com then turns those visitors into sales through search-optimized Web design and conversion optimization. Clients range from small startups to Fortune 100 companies.August 30, 2010
Tags: Boostability.com, Launches, Local, Partnership, Record, Search, SEO.com, Service, Track, Year
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
The Muddled World of Mobile Carrier Search Results
Posted by Suzzicks
When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer. You can click on a phone number to place a phone call, click on a map to get walking directions, click on a song to buy it or play it, and you can even click on an app to download it directly to your phone from the search results.
Interactive and fun, but so far, it is hard to predict when you will get a certain type of Universal Result and when you won’t, and there have been lots of major algorithm tweaks with little attention or fanfare. For example, I have screen shots taken in the past year comparing the search ‘Britney Spears’ on an iPhone and a traditional computer. The traditional computer had music downloads near the very top of the page, but the iPhone didn’t. Why? The results weren’t iTunes results, so they wouldn’t have worked on the phone – so there was no need to rank them. (Kind’a cool!)
Last week, the Verizon/Google coalition got lots of press about a proposal that appears to fly in the face of basic Network Neutrality tenants that Google has supported for a long time. Believe it or not, this has been something on my mind for a long time, because the carriers are in-fact impacting search results, and have been for a long time (2008 interview about Mobile Network Neutrality – starting at 3:30 m:s). All of the major mobile carriers have mobile portals that they use as ‘start’ pages for web access on the phones that they sell. These ‘start’ pages of-course, include a search box, and it usually includes a logo of one of the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. It is definitely much smaller in scale, but to me, this has always seemed a bit … less than neutral, and possibly even … ‘evil.’ Search engines broker deals directly with carriers and handset manufacturers to secure pre-loaded placement on phones.
Carriers Universal Search Results:
I like to say that the Universal Triggers in mobile search seem to be more erratic, and sometimes on a hair-trigger. It is rare that there will be just one type of Universal Result in a mobile SERP – it appears to usually be an all or nothing proposition.But, speaking of propositions, did you know that Google is doing deals with carriers to provide their on-deck search? It is true that there are financial agreements between search engines (not just Google) and both mobile phone carrier companies (ex: T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) and handset manufacturers (ex: Samsung , LG, iPhone, etc.) The search engine agrees to provide a search engine for the default web home page included on the phone. These are generally branded with the name & logo of the search engine, so most people would think that they provide the same results as if they were searching from Google.com or Google.com/m but THEY DON’T. While the results appear to be based on the existing algorithm, searches performed from these start-pages will give different results that appear to preference content from the carrier or handset manufacturer.
To see how this works, go to T-mobile’s start page – http://home.web2go.com and search for ‘poker.’ This is a very competitive search in the traditional and mobile SEO space, but you will find that, instead of the gaming websites and news sites, one of the top ranking results Lady Gaga ring tones for the song ‘PokerFace from T-mobile. (This test works on an iPhone too, as long as you start from the web2go home page). Other than that, the results are largely the same as normal mobile web search that starts from Google.com or Google.com/m. (This has been happening with the carriers for a long time – you just might have missed it!)
If you knew that, (I’m guessing you didn’t), here is something you probably didn’t know: T-mobile sets a cookie, SO now that you have done a search that started from http://home.web2go.com, any time T-Mobile has a universal result that they would like included in your SERP, it will be, unless you clear your cookies, even if you just start from Google.com or Google.com/m. (Those jerks!) You can see this passed in the search string.
When the cookie is there, it looks like this: http://www.google.com/m/search?client=ms-hms-tmobile-wow-us&channel=portal&q=Poker
When the cookie is not there, it looks like this: http://www.google.com/m/search?q=poker&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
Carriers Impacting Mobile SEO
In reality, many people will assign new home pages on their phones, and eventually clear their cookies, but not everyone. Many people are still not web-savvy enough to change their ‘start’ page on a computer, much less a mobile phone. The carrier and Carrier Universal Search Results are a new variable that most SEO’s have never had to deal with. But they have the same impact as any other type of Universal search result; pushing other listings down below the fold. It will be hard to anticipate how many people are getting the carrier-specific Universal results in their search results, and how much mobile traffic those results will take from our listings.
This, like personalization and localization, makes predicting mobile search results accurately almost impossible. None of the search engines have been particularly open about the carrier-deals that they have established, and the carriers are rarely clear or opened about how to get content indexed on their portals. The one thing you can be sure about though, is that these deals were not made for free, and the carriers are paying to have their content indexed and included differently than other organic results.
August 29, 2010
Tags: Carrier, Mobile, Muddled, Results, Search, World
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
E-Commerce SEO: Making Product Pages into Great Content – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Danny Dover
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Today we’re talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them
unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural
links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites –
it doesn’t matter what you’re selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example — you’ve got a big
problem in that people just don’t want to naturally link to those pages.
The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to
change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the
same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product,
your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think
this can be a big, big positive.So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example.
Here’s Acme Store. They’ve got the standard manufacturer’s picture that
the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing
data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly.
Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the
description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add
to Cart" button.You haven’t added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I
don’t know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not
exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see
that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it
uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price.
But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web
is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I
have some vested interest. The search engines don’t like to count those
kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight
from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to
every other ecommerce provider.Let’s take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here
I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I’m going to
walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much
more exciting, and they’re not that much additional effort. Right? To some
degree, but that’s what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page,
everyone would be doing it and you couldn’t have the competitive advantage.Here I’ve got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I’ve sort
of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there.
But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they
essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are
searching for it, you probably don’t want to change up the title
dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might
consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure,
maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at
what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and
add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don’t have to do this. I could
just keep the standard title if that’s what it takes, and I can add
uniqueness in other places.Let’s start with the images. If you just take the one image that the
manufacturer suggests, you’re really losing out. A great example of this
story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They
make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single
angle. They’ve got the shoe. They’ve got the side of the shoe. They’ve
got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom.
They’ve done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The
great part about this isn’t just that these images are now yours and yours
alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say,
"Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do
use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page.
You’ve got tons of opportunity.I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and
different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people
the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger
version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images.
Sometimes you’ll see websites where you click a different one of these and
the URL changes. You don’t want that unless it’s in a hashtag, because it
will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at
companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A
unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well.
It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so
compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people,
who weren’t interested in the products at all and probably never bought
something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and
read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that
were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different
products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got
a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we’re
aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If
this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who
are passionate about it, you’re going to get such better content there.Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit
with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the
popularity in a specific category. I think that’s a good one. It lets
people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write
books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on
Amazon, they can see how well they’re performing in the category. Other
people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about
this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You
could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do
people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they
buy them at the end of summer? I don’t know. Let’s see. Those sales
trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this
and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they
also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product.
Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data
points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your
customer database, that are anonymous. It won’t be sharing privacy issues,
but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link
to it and make this page more unique and valuable.Number five, I love the comparisons. If you’ve ever been to a site like
CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell
phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against
each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn’t
have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are
a real unique value proposition, because now you’re not just the source for
where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can
do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are
also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they’ll
buy from you.Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be
done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You
can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There
can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don’t Like." The
comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out
like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or
not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What’s your
experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or
five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you
have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we’re an
office supply store. Let’ see if we can get everyone to rate the usability
of this, whether it’s travel worthy versus whether it’s rugged and durable
versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different
aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites
from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don’t know. We’ll see how
long it takes to develop. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this edition of
Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
August 28, 2010
Tags: Content, ECommerce, Friday, Great, Into, Making, Pages, Product, Whiteboard
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
Linkscape’s August Update: Better Domain Authority Numbers, New Partners and More
Posted by randfish
Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve just updated Linkscape’s web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we’ve found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner’s Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.
50% Improvement to Domain Authority
You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page’s importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We’ve been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved Domain Authority.
Thus, you’ll generally find that sites that perform better in Google’s rankings will have higher DA, while those that don’t do tremendously well are much lower. We also noted that a lot of the "bunching" of DA scores in the 60-65 range is now considerably better, with a lot more even distribution for "mid-performing" domains between 35-55.
This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn’t have time to make an updated chart)
_We plan to keep improving and hope to have even better numbers and overall index improvements by the end of the year. You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.
New Partnerships
Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge’s enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they’ve shared a few screenshots with us:
Like our beta web app, Brightedge’s software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations – customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).
They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you’re getting). This isn’t yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!
You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" – something we haven’t done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.
We’re also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:
- Flippa – the web’s leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
- Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
- Raven Tools – an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section
We’ve previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you’re interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.
Improvements to Anchor Text
If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:
We’ve gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape’s API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:
- SEO
- Seo
- seo
Following tonight’s update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier.
Index Stats
This month, as always, we’ve got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:
- 41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
- 366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
- 96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
- 409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links
Some other interesting numbers this month include:
- 5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical – the highest yet!
- 3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
- 2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
- 84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
- 87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses
Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year’s end.
And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you’ve got!
p.s. We’re taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:
August 27, 2010
Tags: August, Authority, Better, domain, Linkscape's, More, Numbers, Partners, Update
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
4 Reasons Why the 301 is a Must
Debate Follow-up: The Necessity of the 301
Photo by B Tal on flickr
Thank you to everyone that participated in my debate. It’s always fun to have people discuss some of the basics.
For those who missed the first post, here is the debate: Are 301 redirects of the non-www version of the site needed, or still considered best practice? If not, what do you recommend? Is the Canonical replacing the need for the 301?
After reading the responses and looking further into the situation, I’m going to share 4 reasons the 301 redirect of the www/non-www is a must.
Get robots to the right address
One of the fundamental elements in search engine optimization is making the indexation of a website as easy as possible. That is why we create the Robots.txt file and the XML sitemap. I think the 301 redirect of the non-www to the www or visa-versa, is on the same level of creating ease for the search engines.
Many expressed this, and I agree that the search engines are getting smarter and don’t need the redirect in place to understand what is going on. However, I am a believer that you are rewarded for making their job easier. There are other ways to help the Google and Bing know which version of the site is correct — Webmaster Tools being one. However, nothing is more telling to the search engine then the 301 redirect. Why make the search engines guess?
Links to the Right Address
There are many who worry about not getting the full link juice of redirected anchor text links. However, I think Kris Roadruck hit the nail on the head in his comment when he said, “Doing [the redirect] can help would-be linkers know which is the proper address to use when linking.â€
Many times when I build a link for my blog or for a client, I simply copy and paste the URL straight out of the address bar. If the 301 redirect isn’t in place, there is know way to tell if you should build links to the www or non-www version of the site. Even if you believe the link juice doesn’t get divided between the different versions of the site, getting the right link from the beginning is still ideal and should prove to be more beneficial.
Where the Link Juice Flows
Having the canonical in place is not a good enough solution to simply replace the 301. If you are skeptical of the link juice being passed through a 301, than I would think that you would be even more skeptical of the link juice that passes through a canonical tag.
The canonical makes for a good safety net overall — if you forget to redirect the /index.html or something to the home page, for example. But when it comes to how the search engines treat a canonical, I tend to be just as leery as Ian Lurie. For one, the canonical tag is newer to search. Not all engines are treating the canonical equally. Sure Google says its almost equal to a 301, but that isn’t how Bing sees it.
And Quick Note on Branding
This may not relate exactly to the debate, but since I received a comment about it from Bill French I thought I would talk about the topic of branding. Although Bill may be correct that the non-www version of the site is cleaner, and the www is no longer necessary, I really believe that having the www in place will be more beneficial for link building purposes.
This is why: like I said before, I copy and paste almost all of my URLs from the address bar. However, when it is a top level domain, and I’m pretty confident in its spelling, I’ll type them out. I am so ingrained in typing the www into the hyperlink, I rarely go back to check if it is right or not. Once again link juice aside, you probably have a better chance of getting exact links to the site when you use the www.
En Fin
Overall, the 301 is such a simple thing to implement, that I can’t see why anyone would not put it in place. Overall, I think the pros of redirecting the non-www version of the site to the www out weigh the cons.
Special Thank You
I wanted to give a special thanks to all those that participated in the debate (Nothing says thank you like a link):
Kris Roadruck
Ash Buckles
Rick Hardman
Matt Siltala
Andy (Didn’t provide me a link)
Jill Whalen
Hugo from Zetaq
David Leonhardt
Sam McRoberts
Jacob Stoops
Kelly Hammer
Bill French
John Andrews
knutselen
Michael @ Email MarketingAugust 27, 2010
Tags: Must, Reasons
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
No Comments
TechNetSource on Facebook
![[Valid RSS]](http://blog.technetsource.com/images/valid-rss-rogers.png "Validate my RSS feed")
My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don’t make sense for you and anticipate we’ll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.