seomoz

Posted by randfish

Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy!

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Video Transcription Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"

We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.

So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Designbysoap Ltd

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.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an on-site SEO consultant, a link-building specialist or an all-round ‘internet marketer’, content creation should be particularly high on your list of priorities. We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘content is king’ for years now, but given Google’s recent de-indexation of low-quality blog networks, the Panda updates and the new algorithm burning across the horizon, it seems it’s never been more true than in 2012.

It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult.

So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content?

To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns.

Click for a full size version if you'd like to print it.

Research

Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it.

Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages.

Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites).

To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal;

Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news

Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest

Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts

Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing

These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research.

This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer - suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage.

Ideas

Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information.

The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry?

Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc).

An excellent example is SEOmoz's own Google Algorithm Change History; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they've provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change).

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes:

Infographic section via PlayVille

You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event - a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn't necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic.

Infographic section via Autoblog

Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in.

Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion.

If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production.

Placement

Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed.

Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage.

It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers.

Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else.

When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces.

Creation

So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content.

Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics.

Infographics

Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience.

Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you.

Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic -- there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!):

Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog

Infographic section via Volvo

Infographic section via HotelshopUK

Infographic section via Geekosystem

When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’.

Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished.

My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it).

Blog Posts

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can.

Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading).

Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts.

Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org. Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing.

You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this, tell them how to do it.

Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal.

Publish

So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails.

I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content.

Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved.

Promote

It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage.

It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can.

You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post, this list of infographic distribution sites, this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites.

You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people.

So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below.

Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd.

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Posted by Dr. Pete

I spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in Q&A is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

6. Check Your Headers

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

7. Use Basic Tools Well

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

8. Learn When to Be Patient

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

DO THE FUCKING WORK.

The most frequent excuse I hear in Q&A is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

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Posted by Carson Ward

If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam.

It's become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the "danger zone" in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus.

I was only partially correct, as the majority of cases appear to be devalued links rather than penalties. Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they're doing doesn't look like a type of link spam. Google's response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone.

1. Cleansing Domains

While not technically a form of link building, 301 "cleansing" domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers just cut the trouble redirected domains loose like anchors, and float on into the night with whatever treasure they've gathered. 

When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight.

Link building through redirects should be easy to catch, as new links to a domain that is currently redirecting is hardly natural behavior. To anyone watching, it's like shooting up a flare that says, "I'm probably manipulating links." The fact that search engines aren't watching closely right now is no guarantee of future success, so I'd avoid this and similar behavior if future success is a goal.

2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

I've already covered the potential risks of blog networks in depth here. Google hates blog networks - fake blogs that members pay or contribute content to in order to get links back to their or their clients' sites. Guest blogging and other forms of contributing content to legitimate sites is a much whiter tactic, but consider that a strategy that relies heavily on low-quality guest blogging looks a lot like blog network spam.

With blog networks, each blog has content with a constant ratio of words to links. It posts externally to a random sites multiple times, and with a lot of "inorganic" anchor text for commercially valuable terms. Almost all backlinks to blog networks are also spam. 

I cringe when I see low-quality blogs with questionable backlinks accepting guest blog posts that meet rigid word length and external link guidelines. Quality blogs tend not to care if the post is 400-500 words with two links in the bio, and quality writers tend not to ruin the post with excessive linking. Most of us see guest blogging as a white-hat tactic, but a backlink profile filled with low-quality guest posts looks remarkably similar to the profile of a site using automated blog networks.

I'd obviously steer clear of blog networks, but I'd be just as wary of low-quality inorganic guest blogs that look unnatural. Guest blog on sites with high quality standards and legitimate backlink profiles of their own.

3. Article Marketing Spam

Article link addiction is still a real thing for new SEOs. You get one or two links with anchor text of your choice, and your rankings rise. You're not on the first page, but you do it again and get closer. The articles are easy and cheap, and they take no creativity or mental effort. You realize that you're reaching diminishing returns on the articles, but your solution isn't to stop - you just need to do more articles. Before you know it, you're searching for lists of the top article sites that give followed links and looking for automated solutions to build low-quality links to your low-quality links.

Most articles are made for the sole purpose of getting a link, and essentially all followed links are self-generated rather than endorsements. Google has accordingly made article links count for very little, and has hammered article sites for their low-quality content. 

Maybe you're wondering how to get a piece of that awesome trend, but hopefully you'll join me in accepting that article directories aren't coming back. Because they can theoretically be legitimate, article links are generally devalued rather than penalized. As with all link spam, your risk of receiving more harsh punishment rises proportionate to the percentage of similar links in your profile. 

4. Single-Post Blogs

Ironically named "Web 2.0 Blogs" by some spam peddlers, these two-page blogs on Tumblr and Wordpress sub-domains never see the light of day. After setting up the free content hub with an article or two, the site is then "infused" with link juice, generally from social bookmarking links (discussed below).

Despite their prevalence, these sites don't do much for rankings. Links with no weight come in, and links with no impact go out. They persist because with a decent free template, clients can be shown a link on a page that doesn't look bad. Google doesn't need to do much to weed these out, because they're already doing nothing.

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

Site-wide footer links used to be all the rage. Google crippled their link-juice-passing power because most footer links pointing to external sites are either Google Bombs or paid links. Where else would you put a site-wide link that you don't want your users to click?

To my point of avoiding the appearance of spam, Penguin slammed a number of sites with a high proportion of site-wide (footer) links that many would not have considered manipulative. Almost every free Wordpress theme that I've seen links back to the creator's page with choice anchor text, and now a lot of Wordpress themes are desperately pushing updates to alter or remove the link. Penguin didn't care if you got crazy with a plugin link, designed a web site, or hacked a template; the over-use of anchor text hit everyone. This goes to show that widespread industry practices aren't inherently safe.

6. Paid Links in Content

There will never be a foolproof way to detect every paid link. That said it's easier than you think to leave a footprint when you do it in bulk. You have to trust your sellers not to make it obvious, and the other buyers to keep unwanted attention off their own sites. If one buyer that you have no relationship to buys links recklessly, the scrutiny can trickle down through the sites they're buying from and eventually back to you. 

If you do buy links, knowing what you're doing isn't enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they're doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

Speaking of footprints, I believe it's possible to build a machine learning model to start with a profile of known links violating guidelines, which you can acquire from paid link sites and link wheel middlemen with nothing more than an email address. You can then assess a probability of a site being linked to in that manner, corroborating potential buyers and sellers with a link graph of similar profiles. I have no idea what kind of computing/programming power this would take, but the footprint is anomalous enough that it should be possible.

Exchanging links through link schemes requires a lot more faith in a bunch of strangers than I can muster. In a link wheel, you're only as strong and subtle as your "weakest links." My opinion is that if you're smart enough to avoid getting caught, you're probably smart enough to build or write something awesome that will have superior results and lower risk than link wheels.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

High-quality syndication and wire services possess a few unattractive attributes for spammers: there are editorial guidelines, costs, and even fact checking. Low-quality syndication services will send almost anything through to any site that will take it. You'll end up with a bunch of links, but not many that get indexed, and even fewer that get counted.

My experience has been that press releases have rapidly diminishing returns on syndication only, and the only way to see ROI is to generate actual, real coverage. I still see link-packed press releases all over the web that don't have a chance of getting coverage - really, your site redesign is not news-worthy. I'm not sure whether to attribute this to bad PR, bad SEO, or both.

9. Linkbait and Switch

In this context, we're talking about creating a real piece of linkbait for credible links, and later replacing the content with something more financially beneficial. Tricking people into linking to content is clearly not something Google would be ok with. I don't see linkbait and switch done very often, but I die a little every time I see it. If you're able to create and spread viral content, there's no need to risk upsetting link partners and search engines. Instead, make the best of it with smart links on the viral URL, repeat success, and become a known source for great content.

10. Directories

Directories have been discussed to death. The summary is that Google wants to devalue links from directories with no true standards. Here's a Matt Cutts video and blog post on the topic. Directory links often suffer from a high out/in linking ratio, but those worth getting are those that are actually used for local businesses (think Yelp) and any trafficked industry directories.

1. Would I pay money for a listing here?
2. Are the majority of current listings quality sites?
3. Do listings link with the business or site name?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, don't bother with a link. This immediately excludes all but a handful of RSS or blog feed directories, which are mostly used to report higher quantities of links. When I was trained as an SEO, I was taught that directories would never hurt, but they might help a tiny bit, so I should go get thousands of them in the cheapest way possible. Recent experience has taught us that poor directory links can be a liability.

Even as I was in the process of writing this post, it appears that Google began deindexing low-quality directories. The effect seems small so far - perhaps testifying to their minimal impact on improving rankings in the first place - but we'll have to wait and see.

11. Link Farms and Networks

I honestly can't speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.

"I'm telling you right now, the engines are very very smart about this kind of thing, and they've seen link farming over and over and over again in every different permutation. Granted, you might find the one permutation - the one system - that works for you today, but guess what? It's not going to work tomorrow; it's not going to work in the long run." - Rand in 2009

My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites

Links from the majority of social bookmarking sites carry no value. Pointing a dozen of them at a page might not even be enough to get the page crawled. Any quality links that go in have their equity immediately torn a million different directions if links are followed. The prevalence of spam-filled and abandoned social bookmarking sites tells me that site builders seriously over-estimated how much we would care about other people's bookmarks.

Sites focusing on user-generated links and content have their own ways of handling trash. Active sites with good spam control and user involvement will filter spam on their own while placing the best content prominently. If you'd like to test this, just submit a commercial link to any front-page sub-Reddit and time how long it takes to get the link banned. Social sites with low spam control stop getting visitors and incoming links while being overrun by low quality external links. Just ask Digg.

13. Forum Spam

Forum spam may never die, though it is already dead. About a year ago, we faced a question about a forum signature link that was in literally thousands of posts on a popular online forum. When we removed the signature links, the change was similar to effect of most forum links: zero. It doesn't even matter if you nofollow all links. Much like social sites, forums that can't manage the spam quickly turn into a cesspool of garbled phrases and anchor text links. Bing's webmaster forums are a depressing example.

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

From time to time you'll hear of a new way someone found to get a link on an authoritative site. Examples I have seen include links in bios, "workout journals" that the site let users keep, wish lists, and uploaded files. Sometimes these exploits (for lack of a better term) go viral, and everyone can't wait to fill out their bio on a DA 90+ site. 

In rare instances, this kind of link spam works - until the hole is plugged. I can't help but shake my head when I see someone talking about how you can upload a random file or fill out a bio somewhere. This isn't the sort of thing to base your SEO strategy around. It's not long-term, and it's not high-impact. 

15. Profile Spam

While similar to unintended followed links on authority domains, profile spam deserves its own discussion due to their abundance. It would be difficult for Google to take any harsh action on profiles, as there is a legitimate reason for reserving massive numbers of profiles to prevent squatters and imitators from using a brand name. 

What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn't match your site or brand name. 

"The name's Insurance. Car Insurance"

When profile links are followed and indexed, Google usually interprets the page as a user page and values it accordingly. Obviously Google's system for devaluing profile links is not perfect right now. I know it's sometimes satisfying just to get an easy link somewhere, but profile link spam is a great example of running without moving.

16. Comment Spam

If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments. I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.

I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn't. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:

Let's pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you? Maybe I'm missing something here, because I can't imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let's just hope you didn't build anchor text into those comments.

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

Buying domains for their link juice is an old classic, but I don't think I have anything to add beyond what Danny Sullivan wrote on the matter. I'm also a fan of Rand's suggestion to buy blogs and run them rather than pulling out the fangs and sucking every ounce of life out of a once-thriving blog.

Domain buying still works disgustingly well in the (rare) cases where done correctly. I would imagine that dozens of redirected domains will eventually bring some unwelcome traffic to your site directly from Mountain View, but fighting spam has historically been much easier in my imagination than in reality.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble. 

Spam Links: Not Worth It

I have very deliberately written about what spam links "look like." If you do believe that black hat SEO is wrong, immoral, or in any way unsavory that's fine - just make sure your white hat links don't look like black hat links. If you think that white hat SEOs are sheep, or pawns of Google, the same still applies: your links shouldn't look manipulative.

I'm advising against the tactics above because the potential benefits don't outweigh the risks. If your questionable link building does fall apart and your links are devalued, there's a significant cost of time wasted building links that don't count. There's also the opportunity cost - what could you have been doing instead? Finally, clearing up a manual penalty can take insane amounts of effort and remove Google's revenue stream in the meantime.

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Posted by Lindsay

Friends and I were recently debating the finer points of serving a 410 versus a 404 response code when a brick and mortar retail analogy was born. I hope you'll have half as much fun reading through these amateur comics as I've had putting them together. You might also come away with an extra line of lingo when explaining HTTP Response Codes to clients or colleagues. 

What are Response Codes?

When a search engine or website visitor makes a request to a web server, a three digit HTTP Response Status Code is returned. This code indicates what is about to happen. A response code of 200 means "OK, here is the content you were asking for." A 301 says, "Gotcha. That page has moved, so I'll send you there now." And so on. 

Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough." It is in this spirit that I present to you my brick-and-mortar retail store analogy.

A man walks into a store looking for a particular model water gun. In each scenario, he is greeted by a different Sales Associate (our response codes).

200 OK

A 200 is the most common type of response code, and the one we experience most of the time when browsing the web. We asked to see a web page, and it was presented to us without any trouble.

301 Moved Permanently

We were expecting to find a web page in a particular location, but it has been moved. No worries though, the web server has sent us to the new location. Most users won't notice that this has happened unless they watch the URL change.

302 Found (Moved Temporarily)

You're in the right place, but the page has moved temporarily to a new location. Just like a 301 the user doesn't usually notice anything because the web server seemlessly moves them to the new URL.

Important SEO Implication: A 302 isn't a permanent move. Any SEO strength that the original page had won't be granted to the new URL.

401 Unauthorized

We've requested a page, but a username and password are required to access it. We're presented with a way to login. 

Important SEO Implication: Search engines won't submit a username and password for entry. If you have content hidden behind a login, it won't show up in the search results. 

403 Forbidden

We've requested a page that we don't have permission to access at all. This page isn't for us.

404 Not Found

We've requested a page, but the web server doesn't recognize our request. The page can't be shown because the server doesn't know what it is.

Important SEO Implication: Most default 404 pages are a dead end for users and search engines. Look at using a custom 404 for these cases.

410 Gone

We've requested a page and the web server knows what we're asking for, but the page is gone.

Important SEO Implication: There is some debate in the SEO world as to the advantage (if any) of using a 410 over a 404 in certain cases. This post by Barry Schwartz is a good place to start your own research. 

I prefer to use a 410 when removing unfavorable (perhaps penalized) content from a website. Perhaps the website has some bad links pointing to a bad neighborhood within an otherwise quality site. I'd use a 410 to say, "We know what you're asking for, but we've deliberately removed it from the site, permanently."

500 Internal Server Error

We've requested a page, and in return, we get a generic error message. No information is given. It is like looking a sales associate in the eye, asking a question, and recieving a blank stare in return. 

503 Service Unavailable

We asked for a page, but are told that it is temporarily unavailable. Something is wrong. Perhaps the website is down for maintenance.

Status Code Readers & Additional Reading

If you're like me, you came to SEO out of an interest and background in Marketing, rather than approaching it from a start on the Techology side. I understood the meaning of the basic response codes for SEO (301, 302, 404) long before I understood what was technically happening. I needed to see it before I really got it. If you're feeling the same way, you can use a browser plugin to watch the communication between the your browser and a website behind the scenes as you browse the web.

Try these:

• Chrome: HTTP Headers
• Firefox: HttpFox
• Explorer: HTTP Analyzer ($)

There are a number of excellent resources available to help you better understand HTTP Status Codes and determine when to use them to your best advantage for user experience and SEO.

• Here at SEOmoz there is a nice summary and infographic that breaks down the impact on users and search engines in each scenario.
• Ian Lurie placed a solid post on SearchEngineLand that covers .NET and IIS solutions nicely.
• Another way to look at the information is SEOgadget's infographic parralell with London's Tube. Just click the link. You'll see. :)

Happy optimizing!

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Posted by Tom Critchlow

So here's the truth - I used to suck at project management. But over the years I've determinedly turned myself into a half-decent project manager. Why? What was the driving force?

Project Management Is A Tool For Effecting Change

At the end of the day, I never have and still don't care that much for project management. But what I do care deeply about is effecting change. Driving action and results instead of talk and documentation. You can see my drive for getting things done in this whiteboard friday:

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(Note, if you have thoughts about this video you'd do well to read my follow-up comment about the difference between reports and reportings.)

Although there are many ways of affecting change, project management is a crucial part of it. Below I'm going to outline a bunch of tools, tips, and tricks that we've discovered and implemented over the years at Distilled to get better at project management:

Project Collaboration - Trello

Personally I'm not a fan of clutter, either physical or virtual, and so I love technology that gets out of the way while you get on with getting shit done. I've tried lots of different project management solutions, and Trello is the first one I've fallen in love with. For those that saw the whiteboard friday I did with Jamie about a year ago it models the real life post-it note system very well:

I'm going to let Will explain why he likes it so much:

And I'm going to let Paddy break down the details in his blog post Using Trello to Manage SEO Projects.

Project Collaboration - Google Docs

A lot of you will already be familiar with Google Docs. Of course. But only recently have I come to realize the extreme power behind the collaboration elements. I've always hated track changes in Word and finally Google Docs has something better to offer. This video, although cutsey, actually demonstrates the power of real time collaboration:

In particular, two features that are really making me excited are in-line comments (with easy replies and notifications) and revision history (which allows you to see when, how, and who edited a document).

We use Google Docs extensively within Distilled to craft and send around documents even if ultimately we deliver the final report as a .PDF or some other format. After all, some large corporations still like the smell of .PDFs in the morning....

Inbox Zero Methodology

(image credit)

I can't explain how much of a life changing experience the inbox zero methodology is. For the modern day information worker, inbox zero is fundamental to happiness and productivity. If you're not using the inbox zero system then please trust me when I say it'll change your life. Here's Merlin Mann talking about the original system at Google:

When new employees start at Distilled, we coach them in the ancient ways of Inbox Zero. Although it's a personal revelation for many (myself included), the real power comes when you have an entire organization that is GOOD WITH EMAIL. Having seen a peek inside companies that are not so efficient with email the difference is night and day.

Our Consultants Work On-site Where Possible

Life is organized chaos. Sometimes not so organized either. Project management is similar in that it's often more chaos than management. There's only so much you can really and truly work to get things done without being in the thick of it.

So, where possible, our consultants aim to spend some time on-site with our clients. The increase in results is striking. Not only are we better able to communicate our ideas, but we are also better placed to understand how the client's business works - not just the business model and mechanics, but communication, project management, hopes, and fears.

The best substitute for this if you're not able to get face-to-face with the client is to at least communicate often with many different points of contact within the client's organization. This improves the chances that you'll understand the real needs of the client as well as ensure that as many people as possible like you which is important for getting things done!

Communication Solves All Problems

We have various memes within Distilled; you can read more about them in a post I wrote for Dharmesh a little while back called Startup Culture Memes - Do You Have A Duck Of Awesomeness. One of the ones I'm most proud of is the mantra "communication solves all problems". I'm constantly amazed at the ability to solve problems by communicating effectively. Either talking to other members of the team or talking directly with the client - just having some real interaction (face to face or on the phone ideally) and explaining the situation clearly solves 99.9% of all problems.

This mantra has infiltrated all parts of Distilled, but I see two key ways that this affects project management on every project.

At the start of any project, we have a kick-off meeting which has two clear outcomes; the first is a top to bottom understanding of the client's business, and the second is a detailed understanding of what the project is going to look like. Mark wrote up our project kick-off process in a little bit more detail here: How To Kick Start SEO Projects.

Secondly, I drill into people here that it's okay to miss deadlines. Really. It is. Do people really care if you deliver something on Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon? The answer is that yes, they care very much if you don't let them know. If you let them know that you will deliver it Monday instead of Friday, then in 99% of cases, they could care less. Why is this so powerful? Because a single missed deadline without communication tarnishes your perception in the client's eyes. So long as the communication is strong, the actual dates rarely matter.

PPT Pitches

PPT? As a project management tool? Well yes. Let me explain - there are broadly speaking three types of work that you do when you're consulting and there are three different tools you use for these tasks as follows:

Activity Tool Research and analysis Excel Deliverables and specifications Word Pitching ideas and strategy PowerPoint

Although this seems like a no-brainer, it's actually a very powerful mental model. Want to take a guess where setting the project vision and goals comes in? Yep - PPT. Although you won't keep track of a project in PowerPoint, you should be crafting and creating the vision and goals for the project in PPT. Without strong vision and goals, projects will fail.

So persuading a consultant to put together PPTs at the start of projects is a powerful tool to ensure we have a clear idea of where we're going, and importantly, the client is on board.

Monthly Industry Updates

As part of our monthly reporting communication, we provide a letter from Will to our clients. This is a value add that allows our clients to keep abreast of industry news and changes. I've included a sample of the letter (and supporting links) for April here:

Why is this important? Well not all of our clients are SEO junkies like us. And they like to be kept abreast of the latest happenings in the industry.

How is this a project management tool? You might think it's tenuous, but actually it's crucially important. Running SEO projects on the shifting sands of Google's algorithms means we have to keep on our toes and be prepared to potentially shift our strategy at a moment's notice. So communicating these changes to our clients allows us to be on the same page when we start talking about pandas and penguins....

What Works For You?

It's important to note that what works for us may not work for you. Hopefully this has been helpful for you to take a peek at how we manage projects and communication. I'd love to hear what you guys have to offer in the comments!

Further Reading If you loved this psot and want to explore the subject further take a look at these:

• http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/project-management-for-seo/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/project-management-for-seo
• http://www.slideshare.net/SarahCarling/seo-project-management
• http://searchengineland.com/why-is-project-management-undervalued-in-seo-65750
• https://seogadget.co.uk/seo-management-good-seo-managers/

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Posted by MozCTO

Hello, I am Anthony Skinner, the CTO of MozLand!

Many of you were affected by several SEOmoz tool issues that happened last week, unfortunately all colliding into one colossal day of craziness on May 3rd. We want to first apologize for any inconveniences or problems that these issues caused you.

The good news is that our awesome engineers fixed these problems quickly, but we want to share an update of what happened, how we fixed it, and what we’re doing to prevent "colossal days of craziness" from ever happening again. So, here’s the inside scoop (y’all know we like that whole transparency thing 'n stuff ;-)).

So, down to the nitty gritty of what happened last week and where we are now....

Status

Issue

Fixed

Rankings – Rankings were delayed by a couple of days for all customers due to some intermittent outages in our database. This delay caused custom reports without rankings data.
 
Fix: After trying it the hard way, we had a eureka moment (in the shower, no less) and promoted our back-up disks to primary, resolving the problem almost immediately.

Why it won’t happen again: We had planned for SSD failures, but did not expect to see a full cluster failure at one time. Going forward, we’ll be looking at making sure we’re using SSDs appropriately, and, when we do use SSDs, having more robust failover plans in place. We’re also changing the way custom reports are built to speed up the process, and enhancing custom reports to wait on dependencies.

Fixed

Slow Open Site Explorer CSV Reports, and Mozscape API calls were failing – The Mozscape API was running noticeably slower and reports weren’t finishing. We found two export jobs that were continually requeuing themselves, severely backing up the CSV reports queue.

Fix: We fixed the condition causing the queueing and made some adjustments to the load balancing on the servers.

Why it won’t happen again: To prevent the queues backing up in the future, we’ve added a hook to prevent failed jobs from re-queuing. Monitoring and alarms have also been added to notify our ops team if these queues start backing up.

Fixed

Campaign Setup and Custom Crawl – Users were running into an error message when trying to create new campaigns, and some users were seeing a dramatic reduction in the number of pages crawled.

Fix: With some creative ops magic, our engineers were able to configure the proper permissions and get campaign creation working again. Truncated crawls were caused by a race condition. We also made the transition between finalizing the crawling of a campaign and scheduling the next crawl smoother, which resolved this race condition. Affected campaigns were re-crawled so users could receive a full weekly crawl.

Why it won’t happen again: We’re working to do better testing at scale and to create more defined unit tests to catch these types of race conditions that don't appear in small scale testing. We’re also working on better monitoring around the campaign crawl service and decoupling campaign creation from the custom crawl service so back end crawler problems will not have such a dramatic affect on the usability of the rest of the SEOmoz PRO app.

Fixed

Delay in SEOmoz PRO Web App picking up the new index - Our latest index update wasn’t reflected in the SEOmoz PRO web app right away.

Fix: We redeployed an old endpoint in our API that we had been using for campaigns to pick up the new index metrics. We also updated the PRO software to use the new endpoints that Mozscape API now supports.

Why it won’t happen again: We updated our release procedures, and also updated the PRO app to use a new Mozscape API endpoint that publicizes the index launch date. This improvement will mean much smoother updates to Mozscape API campaign metrics in the future.

Fixed

Social – PRO users trying to connect their Facebook accounts were receiving an error message. We were getting odd data back from the Facebook API indicating users' authentication data expired - like 25 years ago :).

Fix: We’ve updated the Facebook connection to return the correct time format.

Why it won’t happen again: To be honest, we’re not sure it won’t... We’ll try to stay on top of changes in Facebook and update our app before the changes affect our users.

We’re also going to be putting some of the new funding (read the memenouncement here) towards making sure things like this do not happen again. We’re investing in infrastructure improvements (blog post to come) to both help keep things running smoothly, and bring you new features and improve stability all around. We’re also hiring... if you’re a brilliant, motivated SEO-lover, apply here.

Again, many apologies for the inconvenience this caused all of you. We’ve learned a lot in this process and will keep doing our darnedest to keep things running smoothly.

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Posted by robkerry

SEOmoz and I don't always see eye to eye on industry issues, but I still have a lot of respect for the company. In fact SEOmoz is still the website that I send people to, when they want to learn about SEO or get into our industry. Rand kindly invited me to the SEOmoz office when I was in Seattle this week, for a chat and the opportunity to present a Whiteboard Friday.

This week's Whiteboard Friday covers the recent Penguin Update, including what to do and what not to do. I certainly wouldn't say that it's a comprehensive guide, but it does discuss the issues and causes that I have witnessed. Fortunately Ayima's campaigns have been unaffected (other than increases) by the update, but we do monitor our client's competitors and their agencies to a very granular level using in-house technology. Off-Page SEO has been changing dramatically for a while now, and it's important that agencies and in-house teams don't get left behind. Always ask questions and never just assume that Google whacked you by mistake, even if you are "White Hat".

/**/

Video Transcription Hello, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Rob Kerry. I'm co-founder of an SEO agency called Ayima. Today we're going to be talking about the Penguin Update. There's been a lot of talk in a lot of communities out there, a lot of SEO communities, about the Penguin Update. A lot of false information being chucked around out there as well. Hopefully, this video clears up quite a few things.

The first issue is that a lot of people still use the term white hat, grey hat, black hat. Now, this terminology was taken from the hacking world and adopted for SEO reasons. It's actually in Google's best interest for us to use this terminology because it makes SEO sound like a risky, dangerous, almost illegal thing to be doing. Whereas if you actually use the hacking terminology and adapt it to SEO, the only thing that is black hat SEO is hacking someone's website and embedding links into there for SEO reasons. Everything else is basically white hat, because you're either getting permission from another webmaster to have a link on their site, or you're making adaptations to your own website, all of which would be classed as white hat.

Rather than looking at whether you use a white hat SEO provider or a black hat SEO provider, actually have a look to see what techniques are being used. Even if you're not buying links, you can still get affected by the Penguin Update. This isn't an update about whether you are buying links or not buying links. This an update about how you're trying to manipulate Google.

If your white hat SEO provider is currently just putting links into your site for commercial terms or even only putting 50% of the links in using commercial terms, let's say we're trying to rank for the term "penguin," if half your links or more are saying penguin in them, then you're going to get tripped up in this kind of filter because you're seen as manipulating Google, even if those links were acquired through directories or through asking for links or through viral campaigns.

So, rather than looking at that, we need to look at the footprints that are going into your site. Quite a good case study for that is we have a client who works with a lot of seasonal campaigns. We were about to run one at the beginning of this year for an event, which they sell products for. A competitor SEO agency in the UK works with one of their big competitors, one of the big competitors of our client. We were basically monitoring to see what that other SEO agency was doing. Three months before the seasonal campaign needed to launch, they started building links into their client's website using the commercial anchor text, so people putting links in saying penguin, penguin, penguin, going into those client pages. Whereas, we went with a different tactic.

We actually changed the way that we do SEO in terms of off-page SEO about a year ago, predicting that this kind of update would get rolled out. With our clients now, as long as the on-page is optimized properly and there are a few links going in using commercial terms, then we basically just build up the authority and the trust of our client website.

It sounds like kind of a lame idea, and it goes against traditional ideas of SEO, but it does actually work ever since this update rolled out. So, whilst we were starting to go up and up and up in the rankings, eventually hitting number one place for the biggest term for this seasonal campaign, we noticed our competitor going down and down and down.

There are even complaining on Twitter that Google might be broken, there's an algorithm issue, just because they didn't understand why putting loads of anchor text with commercial terms going into the client's site wasn't working. It's basically because Google has been working towards this kind of thing for quite a long time.

So, have a look at your anchor text ratios. Go to Open Site Explorer, type in your website, click on the anchor text link, and that will order it by, I think, group linking domains. You can actually see what links are most used on each URL of your website. If your commercial terms are quite near the top, let's say in the top 10, then you need to really work at getting better links going into your site and maybe even taking down some of the links, which are overly optimized. This is basically their step towards an over-optimization penalty.

There's another thing, which is content providers, who as soon as the Penguin Update rolled out, we got a barrage of emails from all of these people saying, "We can fix Penguin by building lots and lots of more pages of content for your site." These would actually negatively affect you, because one of the things that Penguin's trying to do is further penalize the production of crap content.

Rather than paying thousands and thousands a month to have 200-words news articles put onto your website, get rid of those if they're not actually bringing any traffic in. Look at actually creating a good quality resource of information on your website to become the authority in your industry. A few pages of great content is a lot better than just hammering Google with loads of news articles.

The big thing is there's no quick fix. If you get an email from a company saying that, "We can fix all your Penguin issues," it's likely not to be the case, especially if it's like a $35 fix. You just basically need to build a better campaign for your website. Look at taking down content which might not be unique or useful information. Get rid of some of that from your website if it's not driving any traffic directly to it.

Also, look at just making your website look as natural as possible. Build authority into the pages that you want to rank, but don't start over- optimizing on the anchor text. If you start doing that, not only will it fix Penguin issues, but it will also help you to rise up in the rankings. Thank you very much, and that's about it.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Suzzicks

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.

This is the third and final installment in this mobile SEO blog post series, covering the impact of the new Google smartphone bot and how you can use it to make the most of your mobile content. The first article in the series discussed how the new smartphone bot works and which sites will be most affected. The post from last week discussed how to author redirects correctly to ensure that your mobile content will be properly indexed by the smartphone bot. This final post will review common search engine indexing problems that mobile sites and mobile platforms have, and how you can prevent them.

Some SEOs insist that we must believe what Google tells us about how and why they index things the way they do; that indexing is consistent, predictable and flawless. Unfortunately, that is not the case, especially in mobile where there are more pages and more potential for things to go wrong. Believing that indexing will always happen correctly, and that you need not mitigate risk factors for mis-indexing will not create the ideal SEO scenario. It will leave your sites (mobile/desktop/tablet) exposed when there are changes to the algorithm, or when new crawlers are evaluating your site for the first time.

If you are trying to ‘dot all your ‘i’s’ and cross all your ‘t’s’ in the world of mobile search engine indexing, here is what you need to know to prevent mis-indexing:

Avoid Duplicate Content

Google has never and will never like duplicate content. Google’s new smartphone bot, and their decision to index and cache mobile redirects may be a way for Google to avoid or minimize the need to index entire mobile pages (possibly), but it is still hard to tell how it all works. Adding mobile pages into a mix will always presents the RISK that something will be misunderstood as ‘duplicate’ and cause problems.

To keep Google happy, in the mobile world it is especially important to avoid the sneakier kinds of duplicate content that some webmasters forget about, otherwise known as DUST. The acronym stands for Duplicate Url Same Text [Acronym shared with my by the awesome Lindsay Perkin-Wassle, of Keyphrasiology]. DUST happens any time more than one version of a URL will resolve in the address bar but the browser shows the same page. The easiest example to understand is a page rendering with or without inclusion of the ‘www’ in the URL (the canonical v. non-canonical discussion usually stops here), but DUST can also be seen when there are multiple versions of a home page or category level page, as in the examples below:

Desktop

http://www.yoursite.com/
http://yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/index.asp
http://yoursite.com/index.asp

It is quite common for sites to allow all four of these URLs to be linked to or typed into the address bar so that the home page will be served. (This can happen at category level pages too, like
www.yoursite.com/cindy and
www.yoursite.com/cindy/index.asp)

Mobile

http://m.yoursite.com/
http://m.yoursite.com/index.asp

Adding mobile pages to the mix makes this even more confusing and cumbersome for Google.

In the mobile SEO world, it is quite common for mobilization platforms to control the servers and databases that generate the mobile content, and they are infamous (maybe only in my mind) for generating lots of DUST. Even the best mobilization platforms typically have minimal understanding of SEO; they try to set their servers to be very flexible with what page requests they can correctly render, and render as many different variations of a URL as possible. Instead of doing this, the platforms should be setting up the servers to 301 redirect any version of the URL that is not the canonical ‘chosen’ to redirect to the ‘chosen’ version of the URL. This is also how you can set up your own servers to prevent DUST.

Avoid 404 Errors and Misdirects

There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. This means that it will probably also have a heightened the sensitivity to errors that are present on a site or in a redirect.

In general having lots of errors on your site can hinder crawling and indexing and cast your mobile site (and possibly desktop site too) in a bad light. Be sure that you check the content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, especially if you are generating dynamic mobile pages or using a hosted mobile solution to generate your mobile pages. To make finding and fixing 404s easy, you should set your mobile content up in a separate Webmaster Tools account. This way, you can see just the errors and information related to the mobile content, and not have to subtract out desktop figures to generate meaningful information.

Many 404’s in mobilization platforms are caused by improperly expired mobile content, but you should also watch for 404 errors caused by a lack of capitalization normalization and trailing slash rules set up on the server. See the example below, where one version of a URL is working fine, but the same URL with a capital letter is understood as missing, and being redirected to the mobile home page. (This is also DUST – your server can automatically normalize URLs to remove capitals.)

Capital letters in the URL cause a 404 or redirect to the mobile home page:

Actual URL:
URL with a Capital ‘C’:

http://m.yoursite.com/cindy/
http://m.yoursite.com/Cindy/

Successful
404 Error or Redirect to Home Page

The presence or absence of trailing slashes can also cause problems, as shown below:

Actual URL:
URL with a Trailing Slash:

http://m.yoursite.com/cindy
http://m.yoursite.com/cindy/

Successful
404 Error or Redirect to Home Page

Whether the page is 404 or just redirecting to the home page, this is a problem. Stuff like this REALLY happens all the time, especially when the mobilization platforms are in charge of the server, so if you are working with an external mobilization vendor, go check this stuff out when you are done reading the article. Error-based redirect to the home page could be somehow mis-indexed as the mobile redirect.

Mobilization platforms will usually not archive mobilized pages for long periods of time, especially for sites that generate new content on a daily basis, but they also generally don’t have a proper mechanism to expire the content in a way that is good for SEO so a very similar scenario could happen with a 404 error on a page that has expired.. Mobilization platforms will generally just remove the content and leave a 404 error, which makes the mobile site look bad, because as you are constantly generating new content, you are also constantly generating new 404 errors at the same rate.

What if Google took the 404 errors on the mobile pages seriously? What if Google somehow associated the errors on the mobile pages with the corresponding desktop pages even though they were still live and fine? Hopefully Google would not let the 404 on the mobile page drag down the credibility and rankings of the desktop page that was redirecting to it, but it is not worth the risk! If you are worried about it, there is a Mobile SEO Tool to help you check indexing of one domain across the desktop and WAP index. 

When you are optimizing your mobile content, the best bet is to always play it safe, and keep your content and your server settings as neat and tidy as possible. Avoid the risk of mis-indexing by checking your URLs and watching for errors. When you add more pages and more redirects, and potentially even more servers and different companies to the mix to achieve a good mobile user experience, you increase the risk of mis-indexing.

Thanks for tuning in to this mobile SEO series about optimizing for Google’s new smartphone bot! If you missed the previous articles, they cover important information like how the new bot works, which sites will be affected and how to generate the right kinds of redirects to ensure that your content is correctly indexed by the new bot. Good luck with all of your SEO efforts and stay mobile!

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Posted by iPullRank

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing is arguably the greatest single post of all time. If you don’t agree, well, it’s at least my favorite. Oli Gardner (of Unbounce) displayed a playful writing style mixed with pixel perfect graphic design, and a GPS of a roadmap to take your site from mile marker zero to one hundred in six months. It’s nothing short of amazing.

While savvy content marketers realize that many of Oli’s tactics will naturally attract links, fledgling link builders got to the 63rd page and were still wondering what to do. With this companion piece, it is my goal to grab the baton from Oli and outline a six-month link building action plan for your brand or client’s new web property. Even if the website isn’t brand spanking new, that’s fine, what I really mean is that this is the link building plan for the less savvy looking to do dive into off page optimization. Marketers with long existing sites and more link building experience will be better served downloading the Complete Six-month Off Page SEO Gameplan from iAcquire.

Following this guide in concert with Oli’s you will identify your audience, build a list of prospects, plan and execute four successful pieces of content and convince influencers to create content for your site.

Since we last spoke I left Publicis Modem to become the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire which is a technology-focused off page seo agency. I encourage you to read the “Quantifying Outreach” study that I released at LinkLove London wherein I examined nearly 300k outreach emails from both our own iRank platform and Buzzstream’s CRM software. The study will help you optimize your outreach emailing tactics and understand why treating people like people rather than prospects is a far more effective tactic than sending form letters.

For those keeping score at home this falls under both the Content Strategy/Development and Social Strategy phases of the New SEO Process.

For many, link building is a numbers game and it quickly becomes clear why those people would rather put their resources into black hat tactics. Those marketers are too impatient to properly build links because link building is a process wherein you are convincing people who don’t know you to take a real world action that benefits you. To do that at scale requires a budget, great understanding of people, a large outreach team and a commitment to creating content that people will actually be compelled to link to or embed into their sites. In other words, you either have to make friends or make news.

In this age of 2pac Holograms, stop motion action figure videos, and augmented reality utilities how do you compete? While that type of content is awesome, it represents the type of big swings that may not be in your wheelhouse or relevant to your brand/client so often people wonder how to build links in their otherwise boring niche.

Naturally, there are ways to manually submit your site to millions of forums, blog comments, and directories, but those links are generally very low quality and have been the focus of algorithm updates such as Penguin. That is not to say that these tactics don’t work, but just as you should diversify your traffic sources beyond just Search, you will want to diversify your link building tactics to build a varied and natural link portfolio.

Sites with unnatural link profiles create a footprint that is easy to identify from a 10,000 foot view and of course Google has that perspective. Don’t put yourself on their radar by engaging in spammy tactics.

Anchor Text Distribution

This metric, which is the number of times an anchor in your backlink profile occurs, is best measured using tools like Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, etc., is very important. An ex-Googler told me at SMX Australia to always be sure the highest occurring anchor text for a site is branded otherwise you may trigger an algorithmic filter or penalty.

Link Equity

The value of the links you build to your site is not a trivial thing. Links are the lifeblood of Search campaigns and therefore the foundation on which every site that is visible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) must be built.

These numbers will not be an exact determination of what you will need to accomplish as there is a sliding scale of worth for links, but this crude explanation will make it clear to higher ups what needs to be done and why.

1. Use the aforementioned backlink profiling tools to determine how many links your competitors have and how many links you have. Whether you only use one tool or all tools, make sure that you stay consistent. Backlink profile tools all measure a different portion of the web and none of them are as comprehensive as Google so it’s important to use the same source(s) to capture a snapshot for every site.
    
2. Calculate Share of Voice.
   Share of voice is a traditional advertising term that basically means of the percentage of opportunity that a given brand occupies. If there are 10 TV advertising slots for a given TV show and a company ran ads that filled five of those slots for that show, they have a 50% Share of Voice.
   
   
   
   For the keyword [ham sandwich] the site HamSandwichMusic.Com has the highest SoV because it’s in the #1 position. The keyword [ham sandwich] has a local search volume of 33,100 which means the largest amount of traffic you can get from that keyword (according to industry standards) is 18.2% which is 6024.2 visits. So if my traffic for that keyword monthly is only 500 visits, I have an 8.3% SoV for [ham sandwich].
    
3. Determine the number of links required for you to beat your competitors. That is to say if the first position has 100 links and you have five, make the case that it will take you 96 links to get the share of voice that your top competitor has. Again, this is not exactly indicative of what it will take to beat your competitor because you may surpass them with less links that are higher quality or it may require more links and competitors will continue to build links, but to build an easily understood case use share of voice.

Tools

The specific tools required for each month are called out in this guide however there are tools that may be used at any point for a variety of reasons. Every tool mentioned in this guide is free or at least has a free tier and/or a free trial that will allow you at least start working.

• Rapportive – This Gmail Plugin is for identifying what users social profiles are connected to their email address. This is key because reaching out to people via social media first is far more effective than emailing them first.
• Boomerang – This Gmail plugin allows you to schedule and automatically follow up on emails.
• Microsoft Excel – This spreadsheet application is in invaluable for collecting, slicing and dicing data. Get to know it well with Distilled’s Excel Guide to SEO.
• SEOmoz Toolbar – The SEOmoz toolbar is a must-have for a variety of reasons, but in the case of building links you can find out whether a site meets your SEO metric requirements as you go.
• Scraper for Chrome – Stop copy and pasting data one piece at a time, use this plugin to quickly scrape data off a page and port it right to Google Docs.
• Google Refine – The data you collect will often be wonky or at least not in the format that you want it to be in and for some things Excel just doesn’t cut it. This tool by Google helps you clean it up.
• SpyOnWeb – Using this tool you can quickly figure out what domain names or IPs share the same space and what sites have the same AdSense ID. In other words you can use SpyOnWeb to identify whether your prospect is a part of a link farm.
• Link Detective – This link classification tool quickly lets you determine what types of links you or your competitor has. Take a CSV from Open Site Explorer and throw it into the system and find out the makeup of a link profile.
• Link Indices – A link index gives you the links that are linking to a given page or site. This is invaluable intel for tracking progress and identifying opportunities and deficiencies. Each of the following link indices has its own strengths and weaknesses, so give them all a try and determine which one fits your needs the best just like Branko Rihtman did:
• Open Site Explorer
• MajesticSEO
• Ahrefs

 

MONTH ONE – PLANNING AND QUICK HITS

This month in the Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide you are setting up your online presence and the tools to measure it. Simultaneously, you should be planning out your link building campaign.

PLANNING

Oli’s guide talks about launching an editorial calendar at Month Two, but I suggest you start thinking about when you’re rolling your content out before you start anything. You should of course be thinking about what’s hitting the blog when, but content takes time and careful planning to create and then launch.

When planning your link building you should do what it takes to differentiate yourself and your content because you are competing with the whole web. Making your content stand out will make building links substantially easier.

With that in mind you will be launching the following content:

• Egobait (Month Two) – This is content that includes and flatters your key influencers to in turn encourage them to participate by linking to or sharing your digital assets.
• Data Visualization (Month Three) – Everyone’s go-to version of this is an infographic, but consider other ways of visualizing the data such as a book (Storybird), a timeline (dipity) or a videographic if possible. In month three you will be launching your own.
  
  
   
• E-Book and Guest Post (Month Four) – By the time the fourth month rolls around, the key influencers in your space should know about you or your client and what you bring to the table. At this point an e-book is great way to solidify you or your client’s thought leadership. Much like this guide and Oli’s, you will be coupling that e-book with a blog post on an influential site in your space to be sure that it is seen.
  
  The content should have a centralized theme that links back to your business goals, but you want it to be different enough so that your growing audience will want to share all of it.
   
• Audience/Influencer Personas – Understand who your target audience is by creating personas. Personas are general representations of your audience. Typically you should create four personas for the whole site campaign and while you can make as you like, four are more easily managed.
  
  These personas don’t have to be particularly in-depth (for example we don’t need to determine their need states) nor validated through measurement, they just have to help you create a mental model for content ideation, prospecting and outreach. While a more in-depth form of this falls under the Opportunity Discovery model, for the purposes of link building a basic understanding of who is potentially out there is all that is required. This will make it easier to associate concepts and keywords with one segment of the audience rather than another and then ultimately allow you to tailor outreach specifically to that segment in order to scale the messages.
  • Social Listening – Use tools like Topsy, Social Mention, Amplicate and Google Discussion Search to identify user segments based on keyword searches and usage. Starting from basic keyword searches that you have identified in the Adwords Keyword Tool identify who is contributing to that conversation. In cases where the conversation is particularly spammy, download the tweets and clean them up using Google Refine.
     
  • Facebook Ad Creator – The Facebook Ad Creator is to audience research what the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is to Keyword Research. It is an invaluable tool to understand the inventory of people that fit a very precise demographic. This tool will be the validation required for the personas you are building. If you hypothesize from social listening that there is a user segment out there between 30 and 40 and is interested in search engine optimization, you can then take that to the Facebook Ad Creator and see how valid that is. The only limitation is that you can’t examine the interests together using “AND.” You can only use examine the inventory using “OR.”

 

• Prospecting – Finding people who will be interested in your content has never been easier. Now that you have identified the type of people that you want links from and split them into targets and influencers you have a fairly precise idea of what they are into. Break these into defining keywords and run searches in:
  • FollowerWonk
  • Zerply
  • About.Me

You can also prospect specifically for sites within Google by using a variety of search queries. Additionally, there are prospecting tools such as Citation Labs and Ontolo, but these require paid subscriptions.

Keep track of these users by persona type so you can later segment your outreach and create more directly tailored form letters — if that is your thing. If you’re prospecting specifically by site you can also keep track of those sites by the segment that those sites target.

• Original Content Ideation – Even with an incredible Creative team amazing content is not scalable. Even Don Draper’s team had far more misses than makes, but what Sterling Cooper didn’t have is Social Media.
  • GoFish – This is a tool that I built to perform real-time keyword research in order to help identify co-relevant ideas that are already occurring on Twitter and gives you a list of users that have tweeted those keywords. I gave an example in my “Targeting Humans” talk where I put in the keyword “Michael Jackson” and it identified the keywords “Jackson trial” and “south park” as occurring together very often. A content idea with a built-in audience would be “The Michael Jackson Doctor Trial” played out with South Park characters. More information on how this tool works can be found in my “Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand” post.
     
  • Facebook Ad Creator – You might be surprised to see this tool twice. In addition to being great for segment inventory it’s also great for inferring content ideas that will resonate with those people. For example if we found that target segment of XXX is interested in [A].[B],[C] can we can infer that they would be interested in a __________________. This is the same idea as with GoFish, but it allows for more evergreen concepts.
     
• Pre-Contacting – At this point you have your ideas and a strong list of prospects. Strike up a conversation and tell them about the content you’re working on. Ask them for feedback due to their expertise or interest in the subject matter. Update them regularly along the way to make sure they are still onboard so when the content launches you will have a warm rapport with these people. Keep track of who was interested in your spreadsheet.

QUICK HITS

The following quick hits can be done at any point in any month. Many of them are one-offs, others will benefit from continued engagement. They are placed here so that you can get wins and show movement to the powers that be in order to get continued buy-in for your link building campaigns.

• Ask for Links in Mailing List Signups – Encourage users to link to your website when sending out the confirmation email for your mailing asking them or including embed code.
   
• Profile Links – Many Web 2.0 profiles allow you to implement a “DoFollow” link or links that pass link equity. When claiming your brand on social networks be sure to include links from your profile.
  • Facebook Fan Page
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Google+ Profile
     
• Directory Submission – Directory submissions are generally considered the lowest form of link building and generally won’t help you move the needle. That said you can easily identify directories with keyword searches plus directory type e.g. “3d tv rss directory.” Again, you can show numbers with these, but they are generally not worth your time.
  • RSS Directories
  • Niche Directories
  • Paid Directories
  • Article Directories
  • Blog Directories
  • Design Galleries
     
• Better Business Bureau – The BBB has a site with an incredibly high domain authority, it’s a widely trusted site in both the eyes of the search engines and the consumer. Getting linked from this site is fairly easy and very valuable.
   
• Chamber of Commerce – Similar to the BBB, the local chamber of commerce provides the same type of value and ease for obtaining links.
   
• Join the Conversation – Typically this is called “link dropping,” but that is only in cases where people place links without joining in the conversation contextually. If you are adding to the conversation (as seen on SEOmoz posts) this is a viable tactic for link building.
  • Message Boards/Blogs – Find these with keyword searches in Google’s discussion search and Social Mention.
  • Quora
  • LinkedIn
  • Yahoo Answers

MONTH TWO – EGOBAIT

This month in the Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide you are building your social media followings and soon you will be expected to seed users. That’s much easier said than done, but one of the best ways to do that is by getting your influencers to put your content in front of their users. The best way to accomplish this is by launching egobait which is content made to flatter, include or get the attention of specific users while also providing utility to your audience,

• Crowd Sourced Posts – Reach out to influencers and ask them what they think about current events. This makes them feel important and allows them to voice their opinion on topics without having to write a full post themselves and truthfully allows you to create content with little effort.
   
• Best of Lists – Curate a list of the greatest content, writers, things in your space and give props to your target influencers. Another way to quickly make content that will make the rounds and their audience will start to engage with you.
   
• Interviews – Have a Q&A session with a popular thought leader over the phone using Google Voice and you will quickly have a transcript of your interview and your influencer will have piece of content they are proud to share and link to.
   
• Awards/Badges – Gillian Muessig said it best “no one gave us the authority to launch the Web 2.0 awards, but we did and people still try to enter them to this day.” Launch your own awards in your space and send the people you want to link to you badges that they can use to link back to you. You can take this even further by launching an unbranded microsite and then tricking you competitors into linking to you.

• X-Factor – There’s an infinite amount of ways to flatter people. Without picking up a copy of the Art of Seduction I’m sure you can creatively figure out how to get influencers to come out to play. Here’s an example from a Credit Card Finder site in Australia where they created a comic book series starring the top financial bloggers in their space.
  
  This is a great opportunity to revitalize a dormant content idea that never quite took off. Do you have creative content that fell to the wayside because the characters never took a life of their own? Take your influencers and breathe new life into an old idea by making them the stars.

 

MONTH THREE – LAUNCHING DATA VISUALIZATION

The infographic is largely misunderstood as a piece of automatically viral content. The reality is that the infographic has been done to death so unless you have an active built-in community yours requires a substantial launch plan and push. The Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide places the launch of an infographic at Month Six, but to get the most mileage out of it as a noob, I’m placing data visualization at Month Three. Feel free to launch an additional infographic at Month Six.

In 2012, data visualization should be presented as a Maximum Viable Product. A great example of such is an Australian site in the life insurance space called Life Insurance Finder who launched a very impressive and successful piece of link bait called “What Happens Online When You Die.”

Don’t just build the infographic, build a data visualization experience that exhausts the available digital assets. Create a video counterpart to that infographic, and highlight the source data to build a higher barrier to entry for those that will look to steal your success. Even right now you’re thinking that’s a lot of work; well think of how competitors will feel once that work is finished. Zappos has over 30,000 videos for its products; it is very difficult to compete with Zappos in video search because they got there first. Be the Zappos of the topic you visualize.

Simply put, some people want infographics, some people want a page and some people want a video and the performance of the “What Happens When You Die Online” campaign is very indicative of that. Here are the numbers:

• Page – 258 Links, 86 Root Domains, 172 Facebook Shares, 145 Tweets, 51 +1s
• Video – 81,072 views, 2071 Facebook Shares, 69 links, 10 Root Domains, 2601 Tweets, 61 +1s
• Infographic – 86 Links, 28 Root Domains, 31 Facebook Shares, 99 Tweets, 16 +1s

Make it easy to link to you, give the people what they want.

TACTICS

• Seed to Your Influencers – You have pre-contacted influencers for this very reason. Spell out their involvement in your content so they are compelled to link to it, share it and otherwise endorse it.
   
• Reach out to your Targets – The list of prospects you’ve created have been waiting for this moment. Ideally, you will reach out to them first in social media and then escalate to email.
   
• Contact Those Already Linking to You – Pull your existing links using a link index tool and then inform all of the relevant people that already link to you that you have launched a new piece of incredible content.
   
• Leverage Your Mailing List – At this point your mailing list should be full of people that want to find out about your content. Inform them of your new content and include the relevant embed code to make it easy for users to link to you.
   
• Add to the Conversation – Head back to the forums, blogs, message boards and Q&A sites and contextually add to the on-going conversation and when it makes sense add a link to your content.

MONTH FOUR – RELEASE AN EBOOK AND GUEST POST

By now you and/or your team have written the most incredible e-book your niche has ever seen with the best graphic design and interesting if not new insights on your subject. Luckily, you’ve saved some room for your new influential buddies to get a piece of the action and enough tangential or cutting room floor content to spread it around and get the most mileage out of it.

TACTICS

• Exclusive Release – Align with an influential site in your space that gets a lot of traffic and offer your E-Book as an exclusive download.
   
• Guest Post – A good guest posting opportunity typically serves two purposes. First, you are writing content for a third-party website wherein you can drop as many exact match anchor text links as you like. Secondly, you have an opportunity to leverage the eyeballs of users that frequent the site.
   
• Foreword – Invite a key influencer to write the foreword of the book so their name can be attached to your promotions in social media and on other influential websites.
   
• Quotes – Reach out to thought leaders in the space for quotes, similar to the pre-contacting done in the first month asking thought leaders for quotes keeps them aware of the process that you are making a book and once the book arrives you can easily reach out to those influencers and request a link or promotional support.
   
• Reviews – Reach out to bloggers that specifically write book reviews in your space. Simply search for “[keyword] book review.” For example, if I were to write an SEO e-book I would certainly reach out to this gentleman, Ian Lurie, since he has reviewed an book about SEO in the past.
  
  (I just egobaited Ian here. Now when I tweet about it I can put "featuring @portenint" in the tweet)

 

MONTH FIVE – HOST A BLOG CONTEST

In Month Six Oli suggests holding a contest in social media. I’m going to move that up one month in order to couple it with the event you will be throwing in Month Six. I’m also going to take another page out of Oli’s book and suggest this be a blogging contest.

The concept is quite simple:

• Reach out to influencers in your space that are awesome writers
• Convince them to write their best work
• Offer awesome prizes
• Decide the winners based on social metrics

You may be few thousand dollars lighter from the prizes you pay out, but you also have a ton of great content from thought leaders in your space which then turns into more linkable assets. You also have a ton of social shares that put your content in front of those influencers’ followers in social media.

Does it work? Well Unbounce ran the same contest and here’s the leaderboard:

The posts led to a combined 20,000 unique visitors during the respective two week scoring periods of each post and twenty one posts that continue to drive substantial traffic and links for Unbounce.

TACTICS

At this point the content on your site will be robust enough to make linking to you easy and worthwhile. The following tactics will allow you to continually identify contextual prospects and grease the wheels for any ongoing outreach link building:

• Set up Google Alerts – Use your brand name, the names of people involved in the business and target keywords as the queries that you are targeting in Google Alerts. If someone has mentioned you and not linked to you, quickly ask them for a link.
   
• Ifttt– Set up automatic alerts using If That Then This for when the brand, keywords or guest post URLs are mentioned in social media. Reach out to those people and encourage them to link to you.
   
• LinkStant – Find out when someone is linking to you as they are writing their post and ask for updated anchor text.
   
• Image Search – Google’s image search allows you to search for sites that have embedded your infographic and request that they cite their source by linking to you.
   
• Video Search – Sometimes people re-upload videos to YouTube and that causes the views to be split between them. Search for those videos on YouTube and then search for the URL in Google to find sites that have embedded your video and request that they switch videos and link to you.

Once the competition is over, revisit your badge strategy by sending all entrants a badge and encouraging them to link back to their post.

MONTH SIX – THROW AN EVENT

You may have heard that the best way to get someone to link to you is to buy them a beer; throwing an event is the scaled version of that. Throwing a successful event naturally generates a lot of fanfare, promotion and chatter that will also lead to links.

First, you must decide what type of event you want to put on:

• Meetup
• Conference
• Party
• Dinner

TACTICS

Ask People You Know To Link To You – The people that you specifically invite to your event should be the type of people that you want to link to you. Show them a good time and encourage them to write about your event after the fact.

• Press Releases - These have been abused by SEOs on PRWeb and Businesswire for content launches and link building but they are most effective in the case of launching an event.
   
• Reach Out Directly to Journalists – Find journalists with the keyword searches “columnist for [publication]” and “writes for [publication].”Invite these people out and show them a great time.
   
• Handwritten Notes – Follow up after the event is over with handwritten notes so potential linkers remember you and your hospitality.

FINAL QUICK HITS

• The SEER Method - For your grand sendoff use the SEER Interactive method; pull your full list of followers using SimplyMeasured and pull your complete backlink profile with MajesticSEO, expand any shortened URLs and do VLOOKUPs to determine what users are following you, but not linking to you and reach out to them.
   
• Find Who Shared Your Stuff – Similarly, using Topsy, pull the profiles for all the people that shared your URLs and perform a VLOOKUP to see what users shared your content but didn’t link to you and reach out to them.

CONGRATS!

Presumably, you’ve made it through not one, but two guides on how to successfully launch a new web property and ultimately get visibility not just in the SERPs but amongst key influencers in your vertical. I hope now that link building doesn’t seem quite as daunting as it once did and I wish you great success!

Remember there are two solid ways to build links: Make News or Make Friends.

Which one are you prepared to do?

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Posted by randfish

Yesterday, I filmed some quick thoughts on Google's Penguin update. You can find the full video on our Google+ page:

In it, I cover a few unique items about Penguin:

• It's (weirdly) not focused on improving search quality
• It appears to affect some of the worst spam (but not all) and some very light forms of spam/manipulation (oddly)
• Not tied to on-page or on-site necessarily, though outlinks may be looked at and several other updates occurred at similar times (making it tough to reverse engineer what might have caused a penalty)
• Appears to affect a disproportionate number of web service industry sites (though that could be correlation, not causation)
• Not yet clear if this a rolling update (though there are signs it may be)
• Left a lot of very strange, "empty" types of results in many of the spammiest verticals/SERPs

I wanted to crosspost about it here so those asking for my opinions about Penguin could check it out. Look forward to some great discussion on G+ (or here in the comments). Oh, and if you haven't encircled SEOmoz on Google+... You totally should! We've got another WB+ video coming out very soon :-)

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by evolvingSEO

Or do you find yourself feeling a bit like Gary Coleman...

He is talking about WordPress, yes?

If you've ever tried to optimize WordPress for SEO success you've probably said those exact words at some point... some crazy theme breaks something, or a plugin crashes the whole site, or in terms of SEO you get 971 duplicate pages back from your crawl report. 

But I don't think your troubles with WordPress are your fault entirely. I've been there too when I was first learning it! Gary Coleman has been there. But this post is an opportunity to move on from that...

Let's Wipe That Gary Coleman Look Off Your Face!

There's a lot of well meaning yet misguided info out there. After over two years of battling with (umm... using...) WordPress, I know it can be tricky and frustrating at times, and so I wanted to create a guide that might help clear some of this up.

I'm not here to get into every single little detail and variation, but rather to spend time on the core WordPress features and give special focus on SEO related WordPress issues.

Five Goals of This Post

1. Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminology
2. Explain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in "relational database") - and explain those relationships
3. Show you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focus
4. Give you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz's crawler diagnostics with other sources
5. Get rid of that 'ol Gary Coleman look!

For This Post, Let's Assume

• We're running wordpress.org (the self hosted version)
• This is a single author site (to keep it simple, although not hard to extend the concepts to multi-author)
• We're not doing any ecommerce, photo galleries, or anything else you'd find in a more custom application of WordPress.
• We're using Yoast's SEO for WordPress plugin.

Alright. Everyone ready? LET'S GO!! ....What Chu TALKIN' Bout WordPress?!

Part 1 - WordPress Terminology

• Explanation of some of the most common terms

Regular Web "Page" vs. WordPress "Page"

Let's get really basic here for a minute, hope you don't mind. But I think a lot of people may confuse/interchange a WordPress page with a Web Page.

A web page is a single HTML document that exists at a unique URL. Even if the extension is .php or .asp. The underlying source code is still HTML. This is a WEB page. It does not matter HOW it was created - it loads in your browser as an HTML document and that's all you need to know. And for the rest of this post, when I say "web page" I'm talking about any HTML document existing at a URL.

But a WordPress page is WordPress's version of a "static" page. In fact, anytime you're talking about a page in the context of WordPress, put the word "static" before "page" = "static page" and it will always make more sense.

Pages vs. Posts

This is the second thing people either usually confuse, or have a hard time grasping. To your credit, I think it's confusing that they're put side by side in documentation, as if they're somehow similar. They're not at all!

Note that pages and posts differ entirely in how they function.

• A post is dated and "time-sensitive" and a page is not.
• A post can belong to categories, tags, dates and authors and a page can not.
• You can access a post from multiple pages - its category, tag, date or author.
• A page is only accessible from where ever you link to it.

Some additional references about pages vs. posts:

• wordpress.com documentation (although not the self hosted version, still applies)
• wordpress codex about pages
• wordpress codex "the dynamic nature of pages"

Categories vs. Tags

Ah. Another sticky point for folks. Some may argue, but I think Yoast would agree. Categories are for your main 5-7 "buckets" of topics that your posts fall into. Tags are there to fine-tune categories, and are usually much more specific that categories.

• Also, you should NOT have a category that is the same as a tag or vice versa. Categories should all be unique from tags.
• And, categories can have hierarchy and tags have no hierarchy.

Author Archives

• Simple. Me like.

Dated Archives

• Easy. Good.

Pagination (Subpages)

Yeah... why is this confusing? The only thing that doesn't paginate... are PAGES!!  ....WHAT CHU TALKIN' BOUT??'

Part 2 - Relationships In WordPress

• This part will show you how the different elements within WordPress relate and interact with one another.

Pages - They're Static

Not much to 'splain here (I hope by now!).

• Pages are like regular, non-blog pages on a website.
• They can have a hierarchy.
• They will not go into the RSS feed.

Use Pages For The Following Types Of Content

• An "About Us" section
• If a dentist, say a page about "dental implants" describing your service.
• If a restaurant, your Menu Page.
• Directions page
• Fees page etc.

Posts->Categories

Think of "Many To Many" relationships in databases. 

• You can put a post in many categories. And of course a category can hold many posts.

Posts->Tags

• You can put the same tag on many posts.

Date & Author Archives

• Dates are simple. If you view a date archive by month, all the posts from that month appear within that date archive.
• For our single author blog setup, since every single posts is by the same author, that's what you'd get when viewing that archive (which is why we 301 redirect it to the blog homepage).

Accessing Posts

• This is showing you, you can arrive at the same post from multiple places.

• And this is showing you, for the most recent posts, or popular posts, sometimes there is a link in the sidebar - and of course the blog home IS a feed of the most recent posts.

Don't Forget Pagination (Subpages)!

• All of these web pages can have subpages off of them.

Bonus - For the Truly Geeky

I found this awesome template of the hierarchy within WordPress and loading a page. Not necessary to know for what we're doing here, and not 100% relevant either, but I found it really useful, especially if you like to know more about what's going on behind the scenes.

Part 3 - Best Practice Configuration Any Decisions I Need To Make Up Front?

This is sort of a "I wish I knew then" chart. Things that would be useful to know up front, such as;

• Decide your categories at the beginning.
• Decide what you want the homepage of your blog to be early on.
• When you create a user account, choose the username wisely, because this is the URL and can not be changed afterwards (don't get stuck with "admin"!)

What Should Be Accessible To Users & Search Engines?

• This chart is showing you what page types should be accessible to the user and to the search engines.
• So unless otherwise noted, the page type can be indexed and followed.

What Links Go In What Menus?

This is the general rule of thumb I follow for deciding what links to put where. In general

• I put pages and categories in main menus
• I put categories, recent/popular posts, dated archives, and maybe tags in the sidebar/widget.

Where Do I Control URLs Titles & Descriptions?

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called "slugs".

• Page and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editor
• Category and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under "slug"
• Author URLs are the "username"

If you've got everything set up correctly, it should be EASY to get your titles and descriptions in check.

• Title and description templates get set in Yoast
• Titles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in that page/post editor with Yoast.
• Need help writing a title? Use this post I did about writing titles.

Actual Setup Themes

This is where things get tricky, because a lot of themes tend to break perfectly good WordPress install. Or they try to handle SEO stuff when they shouldn't. Or, you get a theme, and a plugin and WordPress all handling title tags and it becomes a mess.

DO use themes for design elements;

• Colors
• Fonts,
• Page layout
• Headers
• Footers
• Basic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

• Indexation
• Analytics codes
• Titles and descriptions
• RSS feeds
• Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes. 

Plugins

There are two plugins I always install right away for pure SEO stuff;

• Yoast SEO for WordPress
• Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress

I often see other plugins that try to set SEO settings - so be sure you're only managing SEO with one thing!

Configuring Yoast SEO Titles & Descriptions

• Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive - so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don't forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the 'sitename' variable - this is the site title under settings>general

Indexation

• This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.
• Please note: Want to reiterate - this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup - one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.
• Also - if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

• Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.
• I like letting users browse posts in the dated archives
• Not best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page - but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

XML Sitemaps

• Make sure you don't have any other plugins or your theme handling the sitemap.
• Check off what you don't want included in the XML sitemap. (This is usually the same as what you are NOT indexing).

Permalinks

• One thing I LOVE about Yoast's plugin - you can strip /category/ off the folder structure for categories. AWESOME! You should definitely do this. If the site has already been indexed with /category/ redirects are automatically created.
• You could redirect images to their parent post or page. I usually don't but it won't do any harm if you do.
• Unless you're running something with https (secure pages) you can just leave canonical settings as default.

Part 4 - Diagnostics

This is THE most common question we get in Q&A. Duplicate content issues. Basically I want to give you guys some extra tools and resources for checking duplicate content issues re: WordPress and the Moz crawl report.

A lot of folks get concerned when they see "47 duplicate page titles found" etc, and with understanding!

If you've set everything up as above correctly, there isn't a whole lot of room for error. But sometimes things happen and stuff breaks or we miss something.

And most times, no matter the issue, ensuring you have things setup as described above in the post, will fix things.

Step 1 - Check Google Webmaster Tools

Check webmaster tools. If they are not reporting duplicate page titles or descriptions, you probably have little to worry about. Moz might have picked up on pages that were crawlable but not being indexed. But definitely check back in with webmaster tools in a week or so (its healthy to check webmaster tools once a week anyway!)

Step 2 - Crawl With Screaming Frog

I honestly love the Moz crawl report. Its turned up some important things to fix for me at times. Yet I think its just smart with ANY tool to cross check, especially if it involves a big error like duplicate content.

Use the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl up to 500 pages (and the paid version is unlimited).

1. Crawl the site
2. Click on titles
3. Select Duplicates
4. You'll see a report like this:

In this case we can clearly see subpages are causing a lot of the duplicate title issues. 

Step 3 - Use Google Queries To See What's Indexed

Just because a crawler like Screaming Frog or the SEOmoz crawler crawls pages, does not mean they are indexed. Check Google's index to find out with these queries.

• site:mydomain.com/blog - check for blog indexation
• site:mydomain.com/category - check for category indexation (unless you've stripped from folder structure)
• site:mydomain.com/tag - check to see what tags are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/author - check to see if author archives are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/2012 - check to see what dated archives from 2012
• site:mydomain.com/ inurl:page - check for subpages being indexed (see example below)

Steps To Take If You Confirm Errors

If you also find errors in webmaster tools, screaming frog, or Google's index:

1. Identify which page type it is (category, tag, dated archive, author archive, or subpages)
2. Determine if the page should be indexed to begin with.
3. If it should be indexed, make sure you have a setting in WordPress to generate unique titles/descriptions from the template.
4. If it should NOT be indexed, block it using Yoast and be sure you don't have to do any 301 redirects

I know that's a little overly simplistic - it'd be tough to cover every possible variation of errors within this post - but that general framework is what I would advise to follow.

Part 5 - Do The Gary Coleman Dance

No seriously. I know WordPress can be challenging - but I hope this guide has helped give you a better understanding of its different functions, and how to resolve some common issues on your own.

I will answer some questions...

Got questions? If you lead them with "What chu talkin' bout!?" I'll answer (within reason - only short 3-4 sentence answers possible here). NO specific site questions here please, just general concept questions.

Please take any detailed or site-specific questions on over to the Moz Q&A.

Or... ask me questions at MozCon! That's right, I'll be at MozCon, as an attendee, so if you're there you can track me down and ask away!

Thhhannnnnks!

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Posted by Stephanie Chang

Some of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords on the site, created a crawlable internal linking structure, and have paid for PR releases, submitted directory submissions, and written the occasional blog post. Now they ask, what’s next?

The latest Census Report indicates that ecommerce retail revenues are still rising quarter after quarter, meaning there is still boundless potential for the future of ecommerce. In addition, it’s also an exciting time to be involved in SEO as we've begun to realize that now is the time to focus on content marketing, as this is what will distinguish your site from others in the long-term.      The purpose of this post is to outline content and link building ideas, provide information on how your site could go about developing this type of strategy, and real-life examples of ecommerce brands that have implemented these tactics.   Creative Category Pages

Category pages are the money pages for ecommerce sites. Getting links to these pages is a major win because these are the pages that will be ranking for key head and mid-tail terms. Furthermore, even as products are rotated or as the site undergoes a redesign, the category pages will still remain a part of the site architecture and are the pages least likely to be impacted. However, it’s also a major challenge to garner links to these pages. Who wants to link to a page full of products? 

Start thinking about how you can redesign your category pages to make them more than just another page. For instance, Hema’s category page was designed to become a wacky Rube Goldberg device. This page has gotten 20,826 links from 2,686 linking root domains.

Using Products as Linkbait

Often times, it can be challenging to revamp or redesign category pages, so that valuable, unique content can be added. If that’s the case, selling interesting products on your site can become an effective form of linkbait. 

Threadless sells creative t-shirts. After the homepage, their second most linked to page is this product page. This product page received 5,065 links from 686 linking root domains, 3,068 Facebook Shares, and 1,167 Facebook Likes. It has received links from high authority sites, such as Wired and Boing Boing. 

  Other examples include:

• A robot tea infuser from ModCloth. The page received 789 total links from 201 linking root domains from sites, such as Uncrate and The Next Web. 
• Tactical duty kilt from 5.11. Although this product started off as an April Fool’s Joke, 5.11 ended up making them because of the demand, while also receiving links from sites, such as Alltop.

Leveraging Sales/Deals Pages

Another linkbuilding tactic is to build and maintain a deals/sales page on the site that fulfills SEO requirements, such as having crawlable, indexable content, static URL, incorporating targeted keywords on the page etc... Then keep the same URL and revamp it every time you have a new deal or sale. 

For example, let’s say that your site is giving away really amazing Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. Target mommy bloggers and coupon deal sites and let them know about it. When bloggers report this sale to their readers, they inevitably have to link back to that page. Once the sale is over, keep the page and revamp it whenever new sales/deals come up. Overtime, the link equity on that page can become significant as it garners more and more links.    Sephora has a weekly specials page (that could use a bit more SEO). However, if you take a look at its backlink profile using Open Site Explorer, you’ll notice that the page has received backlinks from different mommy blogger channels.        Personalized Product Giveaways

Think about what makes people feel special. Everyone appreciates personalized gifts. With Mother's Day just around the corner, why not create a care package to the top 50 most passionate moms within your community with a personalized thank you from you and your team? It doesn't have to be expensive to show that you care. Now take the surprise of the care package, combine this with people's insatiable desire to share via Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and they've just published and pinned beautiful photos of this sincere gift to their network for the world to see.

    Kotex recently did something similar titled "Women's Inspiration Day". From this campaign, Kotex received an incredible response with almost 100% of the 50 women they sent this gift to posting and pinning this user generated content online, resulting in 2,284 interactions and 694,953 total impressions. This example just goes to show you that sincerity, great execution, and placing something of value perceived value in the hands of your passionate users can pay dividends.    Link-worthy Contests

If personalized product giveaways aren’t possible, consider running effective contests in conjunction with identifying influential individuals on channels using tools, like Followerwonk. This would allow you to systematically target the type of audience and sites you want involved (while also expanding your brand awareness). You need to give something away that people would actually want, especially your target audience. It’s also worth having a little fun with it and seeing if you could come up with some creative tactics that would require contest submissions to link back to your site. 

Some possible ideas include:

• Fashion/clothing ecommerce sites: Does your boyfriend need a $500 fashion makeover? Send pictures and write a post on the products you would purchase.
• Tools/home improvement sites: Shopping spree competition - Does a room in your house need a makeover? How would you spend the money using products from our site?

Value of High-Quality Photos

Who doesn’t like looking at pretty pictures all day? We’re all visually stimulated by beautiful images and so really, it’s worth the effort to incorporate large, high-resolution photos on your site. Not to mention as an ecommerce site, your website is the main vehicle for visitors to take a closer look at the products you offer. If I can’t see the product clearly, why should I buy it from your site? How can I even trust it?

Pictures are also an effective linkbuilding tactic. Fab’s 4th most linked to page on their site is the Fab Inspiration wall. It’s a social mood board so that the community can share inspirational designs with each other. Although the impetus for the creation was to incorporate social sharing on the website, its design speaks volumes about the impact of bold, high-quality photos. Not to mention, the page has received links from Elle and Cool Hunting.   Leveraging Anticipation

There’s something to be said about building anticipation before a product actually hits the market. People are naturally inquisitive and want to be the first to be granted access and try out a product. Think about the huge lines that were outside of Apple stores the day the iPad 3 was released or the anticipation surrounding the release of Diablo 3. 

Startup Visual.ly released a teaser preview video about their product before people were allowed to sign up for public beta. When they finally opened the site up, it inspired 60,000 people to sign up for invites and resulted in 8,500 people following their Twitter account.     An ecommerce store that also successfully leveraged anticipation was Bonobos, who are in the business of selling better fitting men’s products. They recently launched a denim line, which expanded their product line from just chinos and cotton pants. The company built a micro site for individuals who wanted to be the first to be notified when the denim product line became live, as well as released a promo video. It was so successful that they ran out of invites! This new product launch received links from Esquire and Dappered, as well as coverage in the WSJ.   Widening Your Audience

Sometimes we become so entrenched in trying to attract our target audience (What’s their persona? Who do they follow? How can I build a relationship with them?), that we can lose sight of all the other potential opportunities that are out there. Brainstorm all the cool things that you’re doing as a company and what your next initiatives are. Can you make any of these into a story? If you can’t think of any, then think outside your site and your target audience and write a blog post that speaks to them.

Often times, companies use their company blog as a way to promote their products. That’s not the purpose of the blog (unless, perhaps, you’re Apple). People aren’t interested that your site has gone through two iterations of redesigns unless it directly affects them. Most don’t care that your new product is now renamed product 2.0 because it went through a minor change and even if they were interested, would they link to it? People want quality, interesting content that makes them go “Wow, that’s kind of neat. I want to share that!” or “(Name of person) would really enjoy this article. I’m going to send it to them now.”    Let’s say your site sells car brakes. Expand your scope, so that your site speaks to not just people who are interested in buying brakes, but into racing or race cars. There are likely more race car aficionados than brake ones. Use tools like Google Insights for Search and Google Alerts to figure out what are some hot trends in racing. Check out forums and learn more about what they’re interested in. Entrench yourself in these conversations by providing value.    This year, Codecademy launched Code Year, an initiative targeted towards individuals who want to learn to code and have made it their New Year’s Resolution. Each week, people who sign up receive a new coding lesson free. It was a massive success as over 400k individuals have signed up to receive these lessons. The designer who designed the Code Year landing page wrote a phenomenal post on how he designed the page in 1 hour. The purpose of the post probably isn’t targeted towards the 400k individuals who signed up, even though they helped make the site a success. I’d like to think it was targeted towards designers or entrepreneurs currently working on their own startup. The blog post received 671 links from 141 linking root domains from sites like Hacker News, Tech Meme, and Reddit.    Think about anything even semi-related to your industry-inspiring buzz or creating amazing products and write really quality content surrounding it (also use this post as a reference) on your site or blog.    If your site doesn’t have its own blog, consider securing guest blog post opportunities, which is still a valuable medium for link prospecting and link building (especially for building links to deeper pages, like category pages). Blog posting also offers opportunities to reach an audience that has not yet heard of your brand. There are tons of outstanding resources available that already provide in-depth detail on how to go about approaching bloggers for guest blog post opportunities.   

• Comprehensive Guide to Guest Blogging
• Posts about writing effective outreach emails here and here
• Lists of 500 sites that accept guest blog posts
• List of 100 sites that accept guest blog posts 

Using Personal Stories

The new online marketing landscape offers new opportunities for storytelling and adds a human element to the type of stories that we share. The Coca Cola content initiative demonstrates that content marketing is growing and becoming a vital part of online marketing. There are several other brands that also utilize storytelling as a channel, such as Nike's story on how running reunited a long-distance relationship. 

From an SEO perspective, storytelling attracts links. This video that told the story about a modern day knifemaker who makes his knives by hand attracted links from the NY Times, FastCoDesign, Huffington Post, and Gizmodo to his business site, Cut Brooklyn.      This fantastic video link bait slideshare shows how you can incorporate video into your link building strategy for around $1500. Furthermore, having video instead of just plain text will almost triple the average number of linking root domains.  Taking a Risk and Creating Amazing Content on a Budget

Let’s say you have a limited marketing budget and aren’t sure that you have the resources to create linkbait content. Having such constraints for marketing is normal, but being creative, bold, and taking a risk can still pay off. Take the Dollar Shave Club as an example. With less than $5,000 budget, Dollar Shave Club was able to create a Old Spice like video about their product that led to over 4.5 million views on YouTube, 27,000 Facebook Shares, and over 2,000 tweets. This LA-based startup combined razors, a monthly subscription model, and a video introducing their company to the world with humor as their way to break into the space. Creating content like this isn't without its risks, but when it pays off and is aligned with your core offering, there are many added benefits (brand awareness, growth in revenue, and word-of-mouth).

Audio Content Marketing

Here is another great example of how something as random as a late night Facebook comment manifested itself into a No. 1 Amazon.com selling book almost overnight. Adam Mansbach, author of the children's book for adults titled (kids, cover your ears for this one) "Go the F**k to Sleep" quickly garnered the attention of celebrity Samuel L Jackson to do the narrative once he heard there would be an Audible.com version of the book. It was this combination of interesting, yet unique content narrated by a recognizable voice that transformed Audible.com's sales page into one of the domains top linked, most socially shared, and highest reviewed pages on their site.

Quick stats about this audible page.. It has 8,053 user reviews, received links from 351 linking root domains. The page also received a total of 1,092 Links, 21,900 Facebook Shares, 21,124 Facebook Likes, and 1,902 Tweets.   Utilizing Pinterest

Pinterest has experienced rapid growth over the past 6 months with over 10 million registered users. The power of Pinterest is in its ability to drive referral traffic to your ecommerce site. This type of platform presents an opportunity for ecommerce sites to use Pinterest’s user base as a way to effectively engage targeted users by creating content that is relevant to them, and make its products more visible to the right audience. Ideally, the strategy should be to create compelling and valuable content so that users want to click on the pins and land on various product pages. Colby Almond of 97th Floor has created a Viral Guide to Pinterest Marketing, as well as written additional blog posts that introduce how to effectively build your Pinterest following and create the right type of content for this medium. 

Some brands, such as Whole Foods have launched its own Pinterest initiative (which has 28k followers) and use it as a social media channel to represent their core values. They’ve even launched contests, like this “Pins for Mom” one from their account.    Other ecommerce sites, such as Everlane view Pinterest as an opportunity to have its products pinned on different boards. As a result, they’ve incorporated Pinterest’s Pin It functionality on their product pages.    As far as direct SEO benefits are concerned, links from pins and repins are nofollow, as are links that appear in the description.    Lessons Learned When SEO Isn't a Consideration - Honda

Everybody loves a Rube Goldberg machine. They are fun, smart, interesting, and super darn creative. Honda created a Rube Goldberg device crafted out of their car parts called “The Cog”. You know what made this video less cool? The fact that still, to this day, this content is nowhere to be found on any of Honda's websites or YouTube channels. Guess who this did bode well for? A car enthusiast channel known as Web Rides TV with over 3.7 million views and counting. This URL also received links from 582 linking root domains. 

Just imagine the lost opportunity Honda had here to capture the links, social mentions, and brand attention to their website and YouTube Channel. When you begin to think creatively and outside the box on how to more effectively leverage different marketing channels (television in this case), don't forget to make SEO a KPI for your campaign and get that link equity flowing back to your website - self-host that video content on your website, post it on your YouTube channel, and do a focused PR push around your campaign that includes a link back to your site page. Finally, don't leave room for others to be the de facto page that comes up when they search for your amazing work and always incorporate SEO within all of your marketing campaigns.     It's Hard Work, But Keep at It

Link building is hard work and results often don’t appear until months after you’ve invested an incredible amount of time and resources. However, these case studies show that it works and even though results appear minimal at the beginning of the curve, results will grow exponentially at the end of the curve. It’s all about constantly pushing the flywheel, working really hard until you get even a hint of momentum, and then continuing to build upon that tiny amount of momentum until it starts to ease up and pushing through becomes easier. Just keep iterating and don’t give up! 

Additional Resources on Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

• http://www.slideshare.net/tomcritchlow/ecommerce-inspiration
• http://www.slideshare.net/tomcritchlow/ecommerce-seo-in-2012
• http://www.slideshare.net/richardbaxterseo/linkbuilding-for-ecommerce-sites-smx-munich-2012
• http://kaiserthesage.com/seo-strategies-for-ecommerce-websites-2/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-small-ecommerce-sites
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-ecommerce-sites-targeting-the-right-anchor-text

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Posted by Modesto Siotos

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.

Google’s actions against “overoptimised” sites have been intensified and it seems that the recent updates are able to detect various links-related overoptimisation violations that can result in short or long-term positional drops, with or without warnings. Even though Google announced the Penguin update on the 24th if April 2012, changes on Google’s link evaluation system have been noticeable several weeks before the public announcement.

It appears that in some cases Google has been overzealous, hitting (temporarily) even websites with rather natural link profiles. In other cases, Google admitted algorithmic classification mistakes, publishing apologetic messages like this one Matt Cutts posted on Google+.

According to Patrick Altoft (branded3) the sites that have received unnatural links notifications fall under five main categories, and they are not just the ones participating in link exchanges or other types of link networks. Rand made a Whiteboard Friday video about 6 changes every SEO should make before the overoptimisation penalty hits. Now that Google has rolled out the Penguin update against "black web spam," making sure that your website's backlink profile does not violate Google's quality guidelines is quite essential, especially if your traffic has gone down.

This is a follow up to the post ‘How to Monitor Your Website For Link Equity Loss’, which can be used to identify backlinks from low quality or penalised/deindexed websites. However, this post intends to cover the following links related overoptimisation cases:

A) Excessive Link Acquisition

B) Site-wide links detection

C) Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

D) Unnatural Spread of Links Authority

A. Excessive Link Acquisition Check

Acquiring a high number of links over a short period of time has never been a good practice and webmasters need to keep an eye on the levels of acquired links, especially these days that negative SEO seems to become more of an issue. Phrases like the following one from Dan Thies, seem to be heard more often lately:

"Both sites have received “unnatural links” messages in Webmaster Tools. Neither site has had a “link building” campaign ever. By using 3rd party tools (e.g. Majestic) I can see a lot of unnatural links pointing at both sites, but I didn’t put those links there"

There are two quick ways to check your site's link acquisition velocity, using Ahrefs or Majestic SEO.

Extremely  High Link Acquisition Velocity (Ahrefs) 

Unnatural Link Acquisition Velocity (Majestic SEO historic index, cumulative view)

B. How To Check For Site-wide Links

A high number of blog-roll, header, footer or sidebar links can trigger Google’s “overoptimisation” wrath and keeping them to a minimum would be a rather reasonable thing to do. Certainly some site-wide links may have occurred naturally but the less "overoptimisation" signals you site sends out, the better. There are a few ways to quickly check your website against site-wide links with the quickest one being Webmaster Tools.

Under 'Your site on the web' -> Links to your site WMT list the domains that link the most to your site. The ones that link several times should be flagged as potential site-wide links and be manually checked.

Using Webmaster Tools to detect site-wide links is a rather easy and quick way. However, because WMT don't report all backlinks Google actually see, for a more thorough investigation a third party link intelligence service should be used such as Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs etc. One thing to bear in mind using any 3d party service, is that their crawlers do not try to replicate Google's behaviour, therefore in some cases the data can be significantly skewed. This is particularly the case for links from web sites that Google has removed from its index but the 3d party services will still report as normal links. 

A section in the Ahrefs FAQ page reads: “Having the full information at hand you may decide on subjective estimates of links and figure out real situation with the given website or page”. In a similar manner a Majestic SEO rep commented that:

 "Our index is independent of Google and will remain so. If Google has banned a site, it does not mean there are no longer links to that site. We map the link graph – not Google’s interpretation of it."

C. How To Check For Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

Overoptimised anchor text seems like a ticking bomb, especially after Google made public the following two messages:

"Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust."

"Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website."

This task is quite more complicated because, ideally, you need as much data as possible. Exporting anchor text data from as many different data sources as possible is strongly recommended e.g. Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Sistrix, Blekko. 

Next you would need to filter the data removing the following:

• Dead links - These are sites that no longer link to your site but used to link in the past. Filtering out the dead links is absolutely necessary and some 3d party services offer such tools. Otherwise, proprietary link checkers can be used like the one we use at iCrossing UK - Alex Ovsianikov's creation. Counting dead links into a backlinks audit can result in wrong conclusions.
• Deindexed linking root domains - It's rather pointless carrying out a backlinks audit for Google including links from sites that Google has deindexed. NetPeak Checker, makes this task quite easy as it is explained on this post.
• No follow links - These are unlikely to cause any overoptimisation issues and could be discounted
• Site-wide links - These should be counted once, otherwise the anchor text distribution will be greatly skewed. Different services treat site-wides differently; hence you need to pay extra attention at how each service treats them.

After having applied the above filters, the remaining backlinks data could be analysed for different anchor text types such as:

• Exact match targeted keywords e.g. hr software
• Broad match keywords e.g. online hr software system
• Brand terms e.g. BreatheHR, www.breatheHR.com
• Keyword + brand terms e.g. Breathe HR software system
• Image links
• Other e.g. 'click here', 'this site' and other natural anchor text that doesn't fall under any of the above categories.

Having classified all different anchor text variations, it is now relatively easy to spot weaknesses - pay particular attention for spikes on exact match keywords as in the following graph:

D. How To Check For Unnatural Link Authority Spread Another area where overoptimisation can occur is when backlinks are consistently gained from authoritative domains. Tom Anthony created a handy link profile tool to detect such anomalies.   In the following example the links authority of the site represented by the blue line seems quite unnatural compared to the backlinks authority spread of the other 4 sites, which seems far more natural. Any high spikes towards the middle of the graph could potentially be flagged by Google as suspicious attempts of PageRank maninpulation.  Proactively carrying out the above checks will help identify weaknesses on a site's backlink profile and be better prepared for Google's current and forthcoming "overoptimisation" updates.   Don’t Let The Penguin Leave You In the Cold As with any new algorithmic update there will be winners and losers. Google have acknowledged that and there is a feedback form for web masters who feel that their site should not have been affected by the Penguin update. If all the above fails, then try this petition where site owners are urging Google to kill the penguin update.  

About the author
Modesto Siotos (@macmodi) works as a Senior Natural Search Analyst for iCrossing UK, where he focuses on technical SEO issues, link tactics and content strategy. Modesto is happy to share his experiences with others and posts regularly on digital marketing blog Connect.

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Posted by Marshall Simmonds

Today we have special guest Marshall Simmonds joining us in the Moz studio to present this week's Whiteboard Friday. Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Define Media Group. He is also a pioneer in the field of SEO, and we are all too pleased to have him present a topic he knows all to well. Having worked for some of the largest online brands, Marshall knows a thing or two about convincing upper management in the value of search.

We look forward to reading your comments below. Happy Friday everyone! Enjoy!

/*

Video Transcription Hello, SEOMoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Marshall Simmonds. I'm the founder of Define Media Group. I was formally the Chief Search Strategist of the New York Times and About.com.

What I want to talk about today is enterprise search engine optimization, what I've learned from enterprise SEO, and how that corresponds to either startup, small to midsize companies, and how to basically convince upper management that what you do is important and how to justify your existence, which is also what I'm subtitling this little presentation about today too.

There are a lot of different schools of thought. Do you need top-down input? Do you need bottom-up input? How are you going about earning your keep? How are you going about justifying and convincing upper management that what you do is a valuable component of search?

A lot of times because of the size of the organization or because of just the overall acceptance of what search is and how companies get accustomed to your traffic and to the expectations of the traffic that will technically, they think, always be there. So a lot of times, search unfortunately kind of blends into the background, and what we do blends into the background. Sometimes we don't necessarily have the buy-in that we're looking for.

How do you justify that buy-in? Is it a top-down or bottom-up approach? Unfortunately, there isn't really a good answer to that. Ultimately, it does help to have upper management buy-in, but ultimately what we're doing is we're working in the trenches. A lot of what we're doing is having to convince product managers, having to convince certain executives or department heads that what you're doing or what you want to do will help the company from a search perspective.

So we have to find certain motivators to find that pain point or that pressure point. What makes a company act? Is it ego? Is it money? Is it traffic? Is it data? What are those factors that get the attention of upper management or a department head?

For example, ego is a great way to get attention of an editorial team, because editorial teams are driven by having a lot of exposure, making sure that their articles are prominent, making sure that their name is prominent, making sure that their social profile is prominent. The best way to get somebody's attention is to show examples of failure. Failure is a fantastic motivator when it comes to showing that a competitor may be outpacing you in content creation for a topic or for a piece of content that you should maybe have more exposure for than a competitor does.

Money. Money is, of course, an excellent motivator too, because the value of link equity cannot be underestimated. Link equity is the value of your backlink profile. It's imperative that a company understands that backlink profile, that it understands that backlinks are essentially the foundation of a company from a search engine optimization perspective. Every company needs to understand this.

It takes a long time to convince a company, to convince upper management that link equity is as valuable as it is. The best way to do that is just to go to the Open Site Explorer. Take a picture, a snapshot, of that backlink profile and put a dollar amount to it to show that if we move content, which is okay, if we redesign or migrate the site, which is okay to do too, it has to be done protecting the empire, protecting the kingdom. That is through link equity, understanding that the monetary value of links cannot be underestimated.

We also have to look at traffic. Traffic is a key differentiator too, because it's not ranking anymore in search. Ranking is important, but traffic obviously drives the end result. Social has come on so strong in this round too that it's actually stolen budget. A lot of times in these enterprise organizations, that department is growing at an incredible rate, much faster than maybe the SEO department is.

This is where the SEO and the aikido of SEO is really important, because social is so intertwined. I'm sure everybody knows and understands how important it is in the ecosystem of search. Social drives search, drives traffic, drives social. It's this symbiotic relationship that we have to work with social.

It's making sure that we are customizing and yet creating a consistent message with social, with PR, with product, with editorial to ensure that best practices are enacted, and that we're using the data that comes from social, because it's really valuable data. The data that we can glean from that user experience and from how our social networks work is incredibly important because it feeds into this data. This data is the last building block as far as the four motivators that I've laid out here.

Who gets the reports? We've got an incredible amount of data. Now, as an SEO expert, I can't take that data and put it in front of an editorial team or even upper management. I can of course attach that spreadsheet that I have, but it's pretty deep down the rabbit hole, and that's not worthwhile data. On a weekly or a monthly basis, what's important though is that the editorial team gets a consistent message, a customized message that shows the fruits of their labor, because we want to close that circle. We want to draw the editorial team in and close the loop. What I mean by that is, after they push the publish button, what happens? A lot of editorial teams check out at that moment. But what we need to do is give them data that quantifies and rewards them for their efforts. Sometimes it's going to be the big green arrow going up, and sometimes it's going to be a red arrow, but that's very, very important, simple data that we need to give editorial teams.

Upper management though, however, gets the nuts and bolts. Right? They get to see that over a year-over-year basis, what happened to the traffic. Are there certain outliers? Are there prominent sections of the site that have done well, and why, and giving some explanation about that.

So, who gets the reports and the data? It needs to be highly segmented. Because of who we are, as far as an SEO is concerned, a lot of times there's not a big barrier. There are not a lot of levels between the head of SEO and the head of marketing, or a CEO, or a CTO. So you may be called to the floor at any point in time to justify why you are doing what you're doing or why something has gone wrong, which it does.

You always have to know. You always have to know these four things. You have to know how much what you are doing will cost if you're asking for more budget or if you're asking for an initiative that you're trying to push through. You have to know how much it's going to make, what the traffic potential is, and what's involved.

If you can't answer those four questions at any point in time, you're probably not going to get the traction that you're looking for. Upper management has to be able to have some quantifiable number or percentage around these four questions. So you have to have this available at any point in time, because if you don't, you're going to be held accountable for what we've seen in the last year or so. That is something going wrong.

Something is going to go wrong in your SEO plan, in your SEO agenda and grand scheme. It's imperative that you have that contingency plan. How do you react to what Panda has thrown at us in the last 14 months? A lot of things have happened, but it's been a huge opportunity for search engine optimization and for the search engine optimization experts.

Panda has been an incredible opportunity to push an agenda, because there are always things that we have been barking about for years and years and years that maybe now are basically getting the exposure and the attention that it needs. That's what Panda has been good for. Panda has put a light on a section of our network, of our world that may have needed some attention really bad.

The final point is never give up. It may feel like at times you have absolutely no traction, you have no exposure at a company, and the company has no insight into what you are pushing or respect for what you are doing internally. You see mistakes made. You see mistakes repeated. You're giving the same training over and over and there's not a lot of attention or there's not a lot of action as a result of what you're trying to educate on.

That's okay. That's going to happen. You have to find quick wins. You have to find the one person, one department that will buy into just a small part of what you're trying to push. Is it just changing a title tag? Is it actually uploading or working with ALT text and images. Is it getting a sitemap, just a basic sitemap. Some of these small little wins can create huge results.

That's the point. It's to just not give up on your agenda and understand where your floor is and making sure that you don't go beyond that, but at the same time, looking for whatever win will help drive these motivators, and then essentially justify your existence.

I hope this was helpful. I thank you, and I look forward to the comments.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Google’s war on lovable critters escalated on April 24th with the release of the “Penguin” update (originally dubbed the “webspam update” by Google). While every major algorithm update causes some protest, post-Penguin panic seems to be at near record levels, worsened by weeks of speculation about an “over-optimization” penalty. Webmasters and SEOs are understandably worried, and many have legitimately lost traffic and revenue. Before you go out and burn your website to the ground for fear of a penguin in the pantry, I want to offer some advice on how to handle life after an algorithm update.

1. What We Know

First, let’s review what we know. I’m going to break the rules of blogging and recommend that you stop and read this level-headed Penguin post by Danny Sullivan. It covers some of the basics and is the most speculation-free post I’ve read on the subject so far. Glenn Gabe also had a good post on potential Penguin factors.  There’s still a lot of speculation, but likely culprits include:

• Aggressive exact-match anchor text
• Overuse of exact-match domains
• Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
• Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links

Many people have suggested low-quality link profiles in general, but analysis of Panda has been complicated by Google’s recent attack on link networks, which seems to have been manual and has probably been going on for weeks. The overlap has made analysis difficult, so let’s take a quick look at the timeline.

What’s the Timeline?

The official roll-out date for Penguin was April 24th, and it seems to have rolled out, for the most part, in a single day. Unfortunately, it came on the heels of other events. On April 19th, Panda 3.5 rolled out (most likely a data update). On April 16th, a data glitch caused a number of sites to be mistakenly tagged as parked domains. Throughout April (and weeks before Penguin), Google started sending out a large number of unnatural link notices via Google Webmaster Tools. Sadly, it seems that April really was the cruelest month.

How Bad Was It?

Google officially claimed that Penguin impacted about 3.1% of English queries, compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%. Since rankings change daily – even hourly – even with no updates, these numbers are nearly impossible to confirm, but it does appear that the impact of Penguin was immediate and substantial. This is an internal SEOmoz graph of Top 10 ranking changes around April 24th (please note that the Y-axis is scaled to accentuate changes):

Pardon the slightly cryptic nature of this graph – it’s for an upcoming project – but the core point is that the impact of Penguin dwarfed either Panda 3.5 or Google’s 4/16 glitch.

Is It Going Away?

In a word: no. Penguin wasn’t accidental, and Google is clearly serious about combatting spam tactics that have been lingering for too long. As you can see from the graph, it doesn’t appear that there were any major reversals in the few days since Penguin rolled out. Does that mean Google won’t make ANY adjustments? Of course not – it’s entirely likely that they’ll continue to tweak Penguin.

For comparison’s sake, remember that Panda 3.5 came 14 months after the initial launch of Panda 1.0. We’ve come a long way since the monthly “Google Dances” of 2003. Keep in mind, though, that Panda was somewhat unique – we believe that it feeds multiple variables into a single ranking factor that gets updated outside of the real-time index. There’s currently no compelling evidence to suggest that Penguin works in the same way. The Penguin update appears to be integrated directly into the main algorithm, like a more traditional Google update.

Update (May 11, 2012): Google seems to have confirmed that Penguin is operating similarly to Panda, with data updates occuring outside of the main index. It appears that my initial assumptions on that were incorrect. Danny Sullivan has a good follow-up piece on Penguin today, with some direct feedback from Google. It's not good news, for the most part, but it's a very useful read.

2. What to Do

Given the overlapping timelines, this advice applies to any Google update, and not just Penguin. The algorithm is changing constantly (Google reported 516 changes in 2010, and that rate seems to be accelerating), and I want to give you the tools to survive not just Penguin, but Zebra, Skunk, Orca, and any other black-and-white animals Google can ruin…

DO Take a Deep Breath

I’m not trying to be condescending or to minimize any losses you may have suffered. Over 17 years of working with clients, I’ve learned that panic almost never makes things better. No matter how hard Penguin hit you, you need to stop, take a breath, and assess the damage. Dig into your analytics and find out exactly where you sustained losses. Segment your data (by channel, engine, keyword, and page) as much as possible. It’s not enough to know that you lost traffic – you need to be an expert on exactly which traffic you lost.

DO Check the Timeline

Even though the overlapping timelines make analyzing the core Penguin factors difficult, the actual timeline when Penguin rolled out is clear. If you saw major traffic losses between Tuesday, April 24th and Wednesday, April 25th, odds are good that Penguin is at least part of the problem.

DO Double-check IT Issues

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been involved in a Q&A or consulting situation where a website owner was 100% sure they had been hit by an algorithm update, only to have their 17th message to me go something like this:

Oh, by the way, our site was down for 3 days a couple of weeks ago, right before our rankings dropped. I’m sure this wasn’t the problem, but I just thought I’d let you know.

Um, erp, what?! I’ve died a little inside so many times from messages like this that I’m not sure that I’m technically still human. Especially if your losses weren’t sudden or don’t match the algorithm timeline precisely, make absolutely sure that nothing happened to your site or changed that could impact Google’s crawlers. One of the worst things you can do in SEO is to spend a small fortune solving the wrong problem.

DO Quickly Audit Your SEO

Likewise, make sure that you know exactly what SEO efforts are underway, not just within your own team but across any 3rd-party contractors. I’ve had clients swear up and down that everything they did was completely white-hat only to find out weeks later that they hired an outside link-building firm and let them loose with no accountability. Make absolutely sure you know what every agent under your control did in the weeks leading up to the algorithm update.

3. What Not to Do

Panic leads to drastic action, and while I don’t think you should sit on your hands, bad choices made under uninformed hysteria can make a bad situation much, much worse. I’m not speaking hypothetically – I’ve seen businesses destroyed by overreacting to an algorithm change. Here are a few words of advice, once you’ve taken that deep breath (don’t forget to start breathing again)…

DON’T Take a Hatchet to Your Links

It’s unclear how Penguin may have penalized links, or if recent reports of link-related issues are tied to other April changes, but regardless of the cause, the worst thing you can do is to start simply hacking at your back-links. Even low-quality back-links can, in theory, help you, and if you start cutting links that aren’t causing you problems, you could see your rankings drop even farther.

I highly recommend this recent interview with Jim Boykin, because Jim has freely admitted to dabbling in the gray arts and he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to risky link-building. Tackling your problem links is incredibly tough, but start with the worst culprits:

• Known, obvious paid links
• Links in networks Google has recently delisted
• Footer links with exact-match anchor text
• Other site-wide links with exact-match anchors

Whenever possible, deal with low-authority links first. If a link is passing very little authority AND it’s suspicious, it’s a no-brainer. Cutting links is tough (see my tips on removing bad links) – if you don’t have control over a link, you may have to let it go and focus on positive link-building going forward.

DON’T “De-optimize” Without a Plan

One complaint I hear a lot in Q&A is that the “wrong” page is ranking for a term. So, to get the “right” page to rank, the well-meaning SEO starts de-optimizing the page that’s currently ranking. This usually means turning a decent TITLE tag into a mess and cutting out keywords to leave behind Swiss-cheese copy. Sometimes, the “right” page starts ranking again. Other times, they lose both pages and their traffic.

“Over-optimize” is a terrible phrase, and that alone has people in a panic. There’s nothing “optimal” about jamming a keyword 87 times into 500 words of copy and linking it to the same affiliate site. “Over-gaming” would be a better word. You think you figured out the rules of the game, so you pounded on them until there was nothing but a pile of dust on the board.

If you think you’ve played the game too aggressively, step back and look at the big picture. Does your content serve a purpose? Does your anchor text match the intent of the target? Do your pages exist because they need to or only to target one more long-tail variations of a term? Don’t de-optimize your on-page SEO – re-optimize it into something better.

DON’T Submit a Reconsideration Request

While I don’t think reconsideration will doom you, Penguin is an algorithmic change, not a manual penalty, and reconsideration is not an appropriate avenue. If you think you were impacted by the recent crackdown on link networks, IF you have removed those links, and IF you aren’t engaged in other suspicious link-building, you might consider requesting reconsideration. Just make sure your house is in order first.

Google has created a form for sites unfairly hit by Penguin, but it’s unclear at this point whether that form will result in manual action, or if Google is just collecting broad quality data. If you sincerely believe that you’re an accidental victim, then feel free to fill the form out, but don’t base your entire recovery strategy on clicking [Submit].

Fix What You Can Fix

Recently, I had a long debate with a client about whether or not they had been hit by a specific algorithm update. In the end, it was a pointless debate (for both of us), because we had two clear facts: (1) organic traffic had fallen precipitously, and (2) there were clear, solvable problems with the site. From a diagnostic standpoint, it definitely helps to know whether you were hit by Penguin or another update, but after that, you have to fix what's in your power to fix. Don't spend weeks trying to prove to management that this was all Google's fault. Isolate the damage, find the problems you can fix, and get to work fixing them.

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Posted by Thomas McElroy

Late Sunday night through Monday, the harddrives responsible for most of our rankings system failed. These failures have resulted in slower rankings collection, but has not resulted in lost data.

Update for 5/7/2012-
Rankings are back on-track and up-to-date.
April monthly reports are re-generated, and last weeks weekly reports have been re-generated.

We are back to normal.  Thanks for your patience over the last week.

What does this mean for customers?

The main features that have been affected are Web App Rankings and Reports. In the Web App, rankings may not update on the same day that they’ve historically updated. You’ll know when your rankings were last updated by going to the “Rankings” tab and looking underneath the “Keyword Rankings” subtitle.

 

If you’ve set up a customized report, you might not have received your report as soon as you expected to receive it. If you did receive a report and it included a rankings section, one or more of the subsections might have been blank:

These features were intermittently failing because the data was on the affected drives, but as of right now, these should now be functioning, albeit possibly more slowly than normal:

• Campaign ranking history
• Campaign ranking history CSV exports
• The Keyword Analysis Tool
• Custom Reports that include rankings data

For more technical details, please see this post on the dev blog.

When will it be fixed?

We are currently prioritizing the collection of keywords in the order they would normally be collected, which means all rankings collection will be delayed for customers this week. We expect this catch-up process to complete by the end of the week, returning us to normal at that point. Our current expectation is that rankings will be delayed 2-3 days for all campaigns, until we can catch up this weekend.

We are still working to resolve this issue and will update this post every morning until the issue is resolved. We sincerely apologize if these failures affect your work as we know how much you depend on our tools. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and we’ll try to respond quickly.

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Posted by neilpatel

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.

Do you have what it takes to become a superstar blogger?

While anybody can set up a blog…not everyone can take that blog and turn it into a world-renowned blog that ends up on Time Magazine’s best blog list or Ad Age’s Power 150.

The bad news is that you need some pretty unique qualities to make it to the top. The good news is that just about everybody can learn those qualities.

Let’s take a look at them…

Superstar bloggers are insane

Most superstar bloggers have one thing in common: they take risks. They take risks with their blogs and they take risks with their content.

Your goal as a writer for your blog is to stop someone dead in their tracks nearly to the point that they can’t believe you just wrote what you just wrote...

And they have to keep reading.

This means you have to write headlines like How to Rank on the First Page of Google through Videos and 8 Simple SEO Tricks That Will Help You Rank Above the Fold and Increase Your CTR.

But on a higher level, you keep on pushing the boundaries of what your blog can do. You wonder about the design of your blog…and can you make it work harder?

You wonder about conversion and how you can triple it. You think about crazy ideas…

Sure, not every idea will work.

But that’s what separates a superstar blogger from your average blogger…they never give up. They keep trying and pushing and making everything they touch better.

Superstar bloggers write and write and write

You’ll never get away from this one because you have to write a lot to get better at what you do. What I mean by this is you need to write at least 1,000 words a day…

Seven days a week.

Some of that content won’t be that great. Some of it will be awesome and drive you a ton of traffic. Your quantity can suffer some time as long as your quality doesn’t.

And another lesson about writing so much is that you will cast a wider net when you have more and more blog posts online for the search engines to index.

There are currently about 3 billion searches a day on Google…

This will ultimately lead to more visitors and subscribers.

Superstar bloggers stick to their master plan

Do you have a master plan?

In Daniel Pink’s book Drive, he talks about the single sentence that defines you. He uses as an example where Carol Boothe Luce once said to John F. Kennedy, "A great man is one sentence. Abraham Lincoln's was 'He preserved the Union and freed the slaves.' What's yours?"

What about you? What one sentence defines you? Here are some examples to get you motivated:

• A world traveler who speaks about entrepreneurship to foreign governments.
• North America’s greatest digital media strategist.
• A well-rounded political writer with a blog read by 25,000 people.

Those may sound like pretty grand ideas…but remember…superstar bloggers are insane.

They go big.

But once that master plan is in place, you need to stick to it. You need to create the plan and then start working the plan. You won’t go anywhere if you don’t work the plan

You have to ship.

And don’t worry about perfection. Sure, you’ll want to make adjustments when you get feedback…but make those changes and keep pushing forward.

Becoming a blogging superstar is a journey…not a finished goal. 

Superstar bloggers are creative

If you want to become a superstar blogger, then you need to come up with a way that you generate idea after crazy idea.

That’s going to be hard because you will have to churn out a lot of content.

What do superstar bloggers do to keep those ideas and creativity constantly coming? Here are six tips for breaking writer’s block from Darren Rowse:

• Change your environment – If you are struggling to be creative in your office, jump up and work from the kitchen. Or move outside. Spend a couple days a week working from a café or restaurant that doesn’t mind you being there for a while. Or work with a friend.
• Keep an idea journal – Whether you use a notebook and pencil or a free tool like Evernote, jot down ideas for content when ever inspiration hits you.
• Just write – Sometimes to jolt your creative system you need to simply write without an agenda. This is a great way to empty your mind of thoughts and ideas that have been percolating for quite some time.
• Read other bloggers – Become a master at reading a ton of other blogs. If you can manage hundreds a day, you will never be short of ideas. And remember to copy ideas down as you get them.
• Figure out needs – Use your readers’ needs as the starting point for your blog posts. What problems are they facing? What questions are they asking?
• Combine two unrelated ideas – A great exercise for generating ideas is to take two completely unrelated ideas and then combine them. For example, what kind of ideas can you create when you match blogging with Mt. Everest? Or what about digital marketing and The Simpsons? See how that works?

Superstar bloggers are passionate

If you look at bloggers like Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin or Ramit Sethi you’ll see that they love what they do. You can also see that they are also totally immersed in what they do.

Are you totally immersed in what you do?

It’s okay to start a blog and then learn 30 days down the road that you really don’t love the subject you are trying to write on. Maybe it was just a passing phase.

What you need to do, however, is drop it fast and pick up something that you do love…because readers will be able to tell if you are not enthusiastic about your blog. They’ll sniff you out and you will struggle to grow it. 

The godfather of passion, however, has to be Gary Vaynerchuk. His passion is obvious whatever he touches or speaks…it could be on his Wine Library TV or on stage or on one of the many videos that he shares through his marketing blog.

He’s on fire and you can’t help watch him and get on fire, too. And this is why he is a superstar blogger. 

Superstar bloggers interact with their readers

You can not shy away from those who comment on your site. You need to jump in and thank every single person who comments. You need to engage them with questions and pick their brains for ideas on new topics.

Run surveys on your site using KISSinsights or simply publish a post asking for new content suggestions.

You should also run contests that reward your readers with gifts… letting them know how much you appreciate their support.

When you create content that your readers really love and can relate to then you are on your way to creating a vibrant community who will support you for a very long time…both as readers and buyers.

Besides, you want this community engaged so they share your content on the social web.

Superstar bloggers are insanely focused

You’ll kick butt in the blogging world if you can stay focused and organized. The very best of bloggers have a razor-sharp focus…

They see the big picture and then use their self-discipline to stick to it.

But they also don’t do it alone. They use productivity tools to help them stay focused and efficient. Here are 8 I recommend every blogger use:

1. Zaarly – You can hire just about anybody in your area to do just about anything you need done. Want somebody to research for you? What about put a desk together?
2. Batchbook – As your contact list grows, you’ll want a great system to manage it. Batchbook is a cloud-based contact management tool that can even handle your social media contacts.
3. MailChimp – I’ll mention this in a later section, but you’ll want to create an email newsletter that looks professional and doesn’t cost a fortune. MailChimp can help you.
4. DropBox – With this app you can access any document or file anywhere you want. Store a document on your laptop and it’s on your iPhone, too.
5. Jing – This free tool allows you to capture images from the web, create arrows and boxes on those images and then post to your blog. You can also create videos and narrate on the fly…
6. Rescue Time – This thing will easily save you 4 to 5 hours every week because it tracks what you do and helps you avoid distractions.
7. Evernote – Clip a URL, selection of a page or the entire page into Evernote and then save for later. Great for recording ideas for future blog posts.
8. FreshBooks – Once you start earning a living off of your blogging, you will definitely keep track of your income and expenses. This tool will help you do that without wasting your time. 

Superstar bloggers understand their strengths and weaknesses

Great bloggers know what they are really good at…and they know what they are really bad at. This helps them to see what they need to work on…or delegate to someone else…to help conquer their goals.

This can include things like design, code or proofing.

But you also need to learn how to give away those tasks that you don’t enjoy at all. Those are the tasks that rob you of productivity because you tend to procrastinate. And like I mentioned above, use a tool like Zaarly to delegate.

Superstar bloggers use a variety of media

In today’s world, copy is not enough. Google is learning how to index video and audio and giving you a wider net to cast for possible search terms.

What you have to do is learn when to use each of these tools. For example, you need to ask yourself:

• When should you use text? As long as search is dominated by keywords, then this will make up the chunk of content you produce. But as you will see, you will also be combining medias.
• When should you use video? I’m a fan of creating short…anywhere from 2 minutes to 11 eleven minute…videos for tutorial type content. SEOmoz does this with their Whiteboard Fridays and Khan Academy has become famous though his use of video.  This also works well with video, especially with Google+’s hangout feature. Keep in mind that you should create a transcript to put on YouTube and your website for the skim readers and search engine spiders.
• When should you use audio? Audio works great for tutorials, but I’ve found that the best podcasts are those that feature two people talking make it way more interesting. Check out the Manager Tools podcast to see what I mean.

Superstar bloggers diversify their income

Superstar bloggers don’t rely on their blog to bring in all their income. In other words, you don’t rely on just one income stream.

This means that you need to use your blog as a stepping stone to other ventures. This could be to books you sell and create like Darren Rowse does…

or information products to sell like Timothy Sykes does.

Maybe it’s to promote yourself as a speaker or the platform you use to promote your own conference.

In addition, your blog will also become a magnet for joint ventures with other bloggers…something you must engage in if you want to expand your audience. 

Superstar bloggers are thorough and original

While in the early days of blogging…before there was so much competition…being brief was very important.

Not so anymore.

These days people want more than just a quick answer. They want a detailed, highly-researched post that will answer their questions completely.

The worst thing you can do as a blogger is to provide a pat answer to a real problem.

When it comes to creating content for your blog, the superstar method is to study your analytics to see who is coming to your site, when, from what source, where are they going, why they are there…and how to get them converted into subscribers.

There is a huge audience online. This Edison report shows that more than half of Americans who are +12 or older are using social media…

How do you tap into those people?

You analyze the search terms…you study your Twitter analytics to see what gets shared the most...you look into why some posts get more comments than others…and then you create content that produces those kinds of results.

Superstar bloggers are curious

You’re probably thinking that superstar bloggers reach a certain point and then they stop learning.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The bloggers that I’ve met who I consider superstars…people like Ben Huh and John Chow…are constantly reading, studying and looking for ways to implement and test their ideas.

These are people who will try anything once. Your weirdoes…

These are your 0.1%. And that’s going to be you.

The thing about these guys and girls is that they are curious, restless and eager to know more.

They are also some of the most humble people I’ve met, too, which is important. They never come off as arrogant or prideful. They want to learn from you no matter who you are…and they want to help you learn, too.

Superstar bloggers are relentless

From reading to writing and testing to tweaking…superstar bloggers never stop. Sure, they may take a short break just to get their bearings again…but they won’t be away from it too long.

And when it comes to writing great content…each and every day they are creating posts that stick to the subject matter they are experts on.

They don’t stray…and when it seems like they do they are always really good about tying the post back into their cornerstone content.

And when it comes to their schedule…superstars are also very consistent here, too. You need to decide when you are going to post…and then stick to it!

One more thing…if you want to become a superstar blogger you have to understand that success takes a long time.

Trust me…I’ve been at this for over ten years…and one of the things that has kept me at it even when things get really difficult…is that I’m relentless and I stick to the master plan.

Superstar bloggers are humble

You can’t really be a life-long learner if you think you know it all. That’s why you need to remain humble and understand that you have so much to learn…

It will take time and you will master certain aspects of blogging. You may become one of the best headline writers like Matt Drudge is…but you know you can always get better.

That’s humility.

Superstar bloggers are self-starters

If you ever plan on working for yourself, then you better know that you will need to be able to manage yourself.

What do I mean exactly?                 

You’ll need to be able to kick yourself out of bed and get to writing when you would much rather sleep in on the rainy day.

The thing about working for yourself is that you only make as much money as you work. If you’re not writing, then you are losing money.

Being a self-starter is all about having ideas…and then putting them to work. If you can’t do that, then you will not become a superstar blogger.

Superstar bloggers watch for trends

If you really want to catch some traction with your blog…watch what is trending on Twitter and Google and then jump on that traffic.

This is why blog posts that tie into current trends always get a lot of traction. For example, when Steve Jobs pasted away I wrote a post on the 11 Business Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Me. And I didn’t just do it for the traffic, but instead it allowed me to look back at all of the great things he helped me accomplish in life.

That post got a lot of traction.

Here’s another example. This is what is hot on searches as of this writing:

You could write an article titled “How Amanda Bynes Getting Arrested Can Make You Filthy Rich.” You could do that with all of those searches.

Keep in mind that trendy posts must relate to your readers self interest…in other words, you just can’t write a trendy post for the sake of writing a trendy post…

You have to write about something your readers care about.

Superstar bloggers find a common enemy

This a great copywriter tactic that says you will engage readers if you choose an enemy that both of you hate. For example, very successful financial newsletters will play on fears that the government is out to get the money of the rich…and make the government the enemy.

In SEO, Google or Microsoft is often played as the enemy…the big bad guys who wants to spy on everyone, play to their favorites and never give SEOs a break:

Now I don’t suggest that your cornerstone content is all about you attacking this common enemy. That will get old quick.

Superstar bloggers are not afraid to outdo another blogger

For the most part the blogging community is made up of people who get along pretty well. So I’m not talking about doing something rude to someone else…

I’m simply talking about taking their idea and making it better.

Here’s what I mean. If I write a blog post called 10 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore…then you can come along and write one called “10 SEO Trends That Will Drive Massive Traffic to Your Site in 45 Minutes”.

When it comes to gaining attention, that strategy really works.

Don’t be afraid to use it. 

Superstar bloggers twist social media to their advantage

Back in the day when blogging was the only game in town the way to get people talking about and sharing your content was through commenting on other blogs.

This is what Pete Cashmore did with Mashable. He literally commented on hundreds of blogs a day.

With the rise of social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, commenting is still a successful strategy...but using these social media sites have become a major part of a successful bloggers arsenal.

It all starts with creating great content that people love to share. And it continues with you sharing other people’s content, building a list of influencers you follow and interacting on a daily basis with your followers.

Social media will help spread your brand across the web.

Superstar bloggers build a list

The real magic of the blog comes in with the list that you build from your growing audience. The more you blog the more traffic you will get…

But that traffic is worthless if you don’t do anything with it.

See, the email inbox is still a very private thing…and it’s a place that almost everyone still communicates.

Friendstar came and went. MySpace has come and gone. And maybe Twitter, Facebook and eventually Google+ will go away when something new and better comes along.

But through all of this email still remains.

So if you want a way to communicate with your audience…then start building an email newsletter list.

This gives those who sign up an exclusive relationship with you. And your conversion rates will be much higher when you market to the email list. 

Superstar bloggers target their traffic

One big mistake that a lot of beginning bloggers make is they try for the biggest audience. They may end up getting 1,000 hits a day to their blog…but not get more single subscriber or one single person to buy from them.

How can that be? If the traffic is so high…they should be able to make at least one sale, right?

Sadly it’s wrong.

The problem with this approach is that quantity never outranks quality. If you have only 50 highly-qualified hits to your site you will more than likely have higher conversion rates than if you had 1,000.

So know who your audience is and what they want…and then give it to them.

Superstar bloggers are very personal

You likely have one or two bloggers who you think are the greatest. And I’ll bet that one of the reasons that you like these bloggers so much is how personal they are.

They blog every day about business and the world of content marketing, but it’s always in there…those life experiences that are very close to them…and how these experiences can turn into lessons to help you the reader.

Chris Brogan is a master of this skill. If you look at his “Best Of” page you’ll see that a lot of that content is written from a personal perspective:

It’s like he was writing just to you because he is writing like he is talking. He is very conversational. It is coming out so easy because he is passionate and informed about what he is talking about…but it’s in such a personal context that you can totally relate.

Superstar bloggers stick to their brand

While lots of superstar bloggers started off without really knowing their brand…they knew what they were really good at it…but they didn’t have a really good idea of their essence.

But blogging eventually helped flesh that out.

Johnny B Truant has created a brand of blogger misfit. His name alone tells you a lot…but then his avatar that’s branded on Twitter, Facebook and his blog tells you even more. He’s biting into an apple, which reminds you of Adam and Eve and the first sin.

His brand is very distinct.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t create another blog and create another brand. Lots of superstar bloggers run two or more blogs…but each blog is branded very uniquely.

Conclusion

In a world where so many blogs are being published you need to know what qualities are necessary to rise above the crowd and stand out like a superstar. Fortunately you can look at current blogging superstars and follow what they did.

What other qualities do blogging superstars have? 

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

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Posted by AndrewDumont

Over the last few months our engineering team has been working feverishly on a new index. Our crawlers were extremely successful, but, we ran into a few bumps in the road along the way. Those proverbial bumps shifted our expected launch date from the beginning of April... to today. It's not all bad, though.

The new index went live today, and it's big. 159 billion URLs big.     That said, we learned an important lesson in all of this -- maybe bigger isn't better. Our community has voiced their opinion and we agree, consistent index launches are essential.   That's why we've made changes to dial back our crawlers to a manageable size in order to address the community's number one concern, releasing indexes on a reliable schedule. Our overarching goal is to increase index size over a long period of time, all while updating our processing architecture to maintain a reliable release schedule, starting with our next index that'll be launching in the coming weeks.   Before jumping into the juicy details of this index, I wanted to first point out that the other news (ahem) we announced today will play a large role in alleviating these delays in the future. Plans include both growing our team of engineers to solve these complex scaling problems and investing in the necessary computing resources to consistently produce a larger index. Money can't do everything, but it sure doesn't hurt when it comes to index consistency. :)   Here Are The Latest Stats

• 159,751,604,443 (159 billion) URLs
• 1,114,893,161 (1.1 billion) Subdomains
• 153,439,996 (153 million) Root Domains
• 1,768,519,682,804 (1.7 trillion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.47% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 64.05% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 35.95% are external
• Rel Canonical - 11.13% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 82.90 links on it
  • 71.75 internal links on average
  • 11.15 external links on average

A Few Caveats   I know, I know -- there's always got to to be a catch. So, the index isn’t 100% up-to-speed right off the bat. But it's close. In an effort to get the new index out, we had to make a few sacrifices. Namely, our Anchor Text call will still be indexing the old index when queried, meaning that if you request Anchor Text information it will be slightly dated. The legacy Anchor Text funnel will only hang around for 6 - 8 days from now, until we roll out a refresh to the index. Then, all will be back to normal.   What's This MozScape Stuff?   Finally, you may have noticed Linkscape's shiny new API pages and snazzy new name. The short of it is that Linkscape is now Mozscape, both to better scale our API naming conventions and to refresh the brand. Along with that refresh came a drastic increase in speed, bumping the API rate limit from one request every 10 seconds to 10 requests per second on the paid levels, some great case studies of folks using our data and a simplification of our pricing model. It's just the beginning of our big plans that we have in store.   Enjoy the updates, and if you've got any questions about the new index or Mozscape, drop me a line in the comments or via email.

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Posted by randfish

Today is a good day. Whether you're a Mozzer, a fan of what we've built, a Seattle-startup supporter or even tangentially involved in the field of web marketing, there's reason to celebrate. After 5 years of organic growth (from our initial funding in 2007) and two tough, failed attempts at financing (in 2009 and 2011), I'm excited to announce that SEOmoz has raised $18 million in venture capital from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. Brad Feld from Foundry and Moz's COO, Sarah Bird will be joining the board as Gillian Muessig steps down to pursue new goals. Oh, and that chip on my shoulder about VCs is probably gonna shrink a bit. :-)

You can find the official meme-based press release here. But, as our core values dictate, this post is going to be lengthy and extremely transparent about our progress to date, the financing process, our new investor, and the road ahead. I've broken these into the sections below:

• The Past 5 years of Metrics & Growth
• Our 2012 Funding Process & Deck
• Brad Feld & Foundry
• Company Ownership and Notes on my Cofounder's Departure
• Plans for the Months and Years Ahead

SEOmoz's Past 5 Years of Metrics & Growth

In February of 2007, we launched a collection of tools and resources for SEOs, hoping it would help bolster our traditional consulting practice. By the end of that year, it was responsible for nearly half our total revenue and Seattle's Ignition Partners and Curious Office, invested $1.1mm to help see the vision of software for professional SEOs grow. Two years later, we dropped consulting entirely to focus 100% of our efforts on PRO membership.

Since then, our subscription product has grown tremendously and achieved exceptional traction. We've iterated massively on the orignal product with launches of the Linkscape web index in 2008, Open Site Explorer and our Pro Web App in 2010, the Mozbar for Firefox and Chrome, SERPs Analysis and more recently, too, with additions like Social Tracking, Branded Segmentation, Google Analytics integration, Universal SERPs tracking, and our new, much larger, Mozscape index. And our customers seem to have appreciated it:

*As of April 2012, we're significantly ahead of budget for 2012, w/ a March revenue run rate of ~$19mm

As you can see, our small Series A has carried us a long way. Out of necessity, we've been re-investing nearly all of the money we've made in the last half-decade back into growing the company. Below, you can see the progress of our subscription model over the last 6 months.
_

*December's lower free trials (due to the holidays) means slower January growth

I've talked a number of times about our subscription metrics here at SEOmoz, but given this fundraising, I know there may be additional interest and scrutiny, so I'll try to describe them with a bit more depth:

• On an average weekday, ~150 marketers take a free trial
• Approximately 56% of those 150 free trials will convert into paid memberships
• Of those, ~40% cancel their membership in the first 3 paying months
• The remaining 60% (~50 out of our 150) keep their PRO subscription 13+ months on average (meaning the monthly cancellation rate is ~2.5%)
• Approximately half of those (~25) retain PRO membership for 18+ months
• Note: historically we've counted upgrades/downgrades, billing changes and some other dumb stuff in "churn" which likely inflates those figures.

For an enterprise SaaS business, these metrics are fairly mediocre (well, the churn metrics anyway, the acquisition numbers would be phenomenal), but thankfully, we're not the typical enterprise model. Because we have very low costs for customer acquisition (we acquire ~85% of our customers using inbound marketing rather than paid channels), and very low COGS (no account management, sales people, or services costs), our model scales very nicely. You can see more detail about this in our funding slide deck, embedded in the next section.

Traffic's been growing at a somewhat shocking pace, too. In the first 122 days of the year, SEOmoz + OpenSiteExplorer had 6.85 million visits:

Our traffic from every source has been increasing dramatically. In comparison, the 122-day period from April 3rd - July 30th, 2011 had 4.46 million visits, a growth rate of 54%. Search engines have been sending more traffic, our email marketing efforts are getting better, social media sources are up dramatically, and referring links + branded/direct is up, too. The only traffic source that's remained relatively stable is RSS, which we suspect is due to more and more people replacing their RSS reader with socially-based referrals and apps.

Looking at Moz in 2012, it would appear that we've got a healthy, growing business, but as you can see from the growth chart above, we'd predicted that our last few years of doubling subscription revenue would slow. This is largely due to capital constraints on the business. We couldn't make the technology, infrastructure, people or marketing investments we knew were needed to accelerate. That's precisely why, at our early February board meeting, we decided that despite our setbacks the previous summer, it was time to hit the road seeking venture investment for a third time.

Our 2012 Funding Process & Deck

Our board of directors meets quarterly to discuss the key issues facing the company and review the progress made in the prior three months. At our February meeting, each of our executive team members - Jamie from Marketing, Adam from Product, Sarah from Operations and Anthony from Engineering - expressed the sentiment that their teams could benefit from additional capital and that the time was right for a raise. Kelly Smith (of Curious Office, an observer on our board) and Michelle Goldberg (who represents Ingition) agreed.

Unfortunately, that meant getting my weary, jaded head back into the funding world, something I'd been dreading since our last financing fell apart just after we signed a term sheet in August 2011. We strongly considered but ultimately rejected hiring bankers to help us run the deal process, and this was in large part due to my personal issues of confidence. It's hard to describe that feeling now, but I truly believed and feared that we'd once again spend months on road, pitching investors, and end in June or July with nothing to show for it again.

Much of February was spent contacting investors, colleagues and entrepreneurs we knew and asking for help with introductions, positioning and the creation and review of a funding slide deck. You can see a modified version of that deck below:

Some of those calls and connections led to early interest from some big names in the later-stage industry (VCs who typically put $15-50mm into companies at Series C, D and above). Unfortunately, these started out with a familiar pattern - a call expressing interest, a request for data, upon receipt of that data, a deeper request for more data, repeat ad nauseum. We were just settling in for the tough reality of a long slog to reach that first offer we could leverage to start a process when I got on the phone with Brad.

Brad Feld and Foundry Group

Nearly every entrepreneur and person connected to the startup field knows of Brad Feld and Foundry Group through the exceptional reputation they've built. Brad's been named the most respected VC in the business, makes hilarious music parody videos, funds dozens of successful companies, co-founded Techstars, is a two-time entrepreneur himself, runs inhumanly long distances and sponsors lots of public bathrooms. He's a very awesome, very weird and very Mozzy guy. I liked Ben Huh's recent post about him best:

I've been fortunate to have him on our board and he's helped us even before we took funding. In start-up lingo, he's my number one value add, even on a board studded with greatly helpful and wickedly smart people.

The funny thing is, I would describe my interactions with Brad as slightly weird. Yup. Weird. Not in the creepy WTF? kind of way, but good, like whoa-I'm-being-transported-to-another-planet kinda way...

...He's unlike any VC I've ever met.

When we got on the phone, I knew that A) Foundry almost always does early-stage deals and B) They almost never put more than $10mm into a deal and C) They hadn't asked us for any preliminary information or a deck. Thus, I was fairly certain that this call was purely advice-driven, though I hoped it would potentially lead to some helpful introductions. But, when I started the call asking for help, Brad stopped me. He said Foundry was interested in potentially leading the round themselves. My heart skipped a few beats, and we got into a conversation.

How do I know Brad? Through three of the more unlikely sources imaginable: first, Brad + Seth had looked at SEOmoz briefly in our 2009 raise attempt, but, like a lot of others, passed at the time; second, through my blog post on failing to raise money (which Brad read and wrote about); and last, through my wife Geraldine, whose blog and tweets are apparently a topic of enjoyment between Brad and his wife Amy. Side note: Next time someone asks what Geraldine's blog monetization strategy is, I'm replying with "it already made $18mm, what more do you want?!" :-)

The Saturday morning after that phone call, Brad wrote a post entitled "Don't Be Gunshy Because You Dealt with BucketHeads the Last Time Around." The Moz team was already enamored with Brad and working hard to keep our excitement in check. That post made it harder, and then this email (sent later that evening) made it 10X harder still:

We sent in excess of 40 emails back and forth over the next 3 days. Included in that volley was an invitation to come to Boulder, Colorado to meet some of the companies he'd invested in, his partners at Foundry, and talk seriously about an investment. I also got to talk to T.A. McCann from Gist, Ben Huh from Cheezburger and Keith Smith from BigDoor, Brad's other investments in Seattle.

Interesting side note: Many investors we've talked to over the years have told us to "talk to their CEOs." I almost always take those introductions and get on the phone, but VCs may not realize either A) how honest CEOs are with each other or B) what their CEOs actually think of them. Due to these, I've often heard recommendations that damn with faint praise or point out a lot of good reasons not to get involved.

Brad's one of only a few exceptions. The reviews were unbelievably positive. So much so that it was hard to believe they were real. Each one brought up example after example of Brad putting the entrepreneur's interests ahead of his/Foundry's own, even when serious amounts of money were on the line. He may never have heard of TAGFEE until our conversations, but Brad lives those values in his personal and professional life with the same obsessesiveness that we do at Moz.

On Friday March 16th at butt'o'clock in the morning, Sarah and I boarded a flight to Denver, rented a car and drove to Boulder. We had lunch with the crew from GNIP, another of Foundry's investments. They are clearly awesome dudes - the kind we'd love to work with (and the restaurant they took us to had the impossibly-hard-to-find cult beer, Pliny the Younger, in stock). The pattern of Brad's investment in very cool people was becoming clear.

After lunch, we spent the afternoon meeting with the Foundry team. There's only 4 of them, because Brad doesn't believe in associates (I'll let him explain in a blog post at some point). Jason, Ryan, Seth and Brad were all surprisingly easy-going and their styles put at ease, too. It was a welcome change of pace from the usual hours spent in VC offices. After the meetings wrapped up, Brad took Sarah and I to dinner down the street at Oak.

Within minutes of sitting down, he said (rough, from my memory): "I talked to the guys before we left the office; everyone wants to do this deal. We're in."

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you want to get up, run around the room screaming and high-fiving everyone then order all the beer on the menu, but you have to stay cool and act like everything's normal? First world problem, indeed. :-)

Luckily, 30 minutes later, I got up to "use the bathroom" and texted my wife. She wrote back in classic Geraldine fashion:

Can I just say again how awesome it is being married to her?

We finished dinner with Brad, grabbed froyo next door, walked around Boulder's promenade and went back to our hotel. The following afternoon, he emailed over deal terms, all of which looked good except the pre-money valuation (initially $70mm - we'd hoped for higher). I emailed back that we loved everything about the deal, but were seeking a slightly higher pre-money. Brad said he'd check with his team and get back to us Monday. Despite my illness, I headed out to a bar for Moz's help team manager's (Aaron Wheeler) birthday. On St. Patrick's day.

The bar was packed to overflowing. I think I ordered a "whatever sounds good to you" from the bartender. The wall was lined with Montana-esque memorabilia and knick-knacks. Nearly a dozen mozzers crowded around a jam-packed booth. I looked down at my phone and saw this email from Brad.

Cue me freaking out, standing up from the booth, screaming and possibly attempting to buy everyone in the bar a round of drinks (thankfully, Geraldine grabbed me before I did so as it would have been a very expensive proposition). That round of jumping around and high-fiving everyone I missed out on in Boulder came back that night. I hope that after reading this post, you can let that same crazy smile spread across your face and lift a glass of your favorite beverage to help us toast. :-)

Looking back on this process with Foundry, the calendar is practically unbelievable. The time from the first phone call to an offer and agreement on deal terms was literally 8 days.

 

Now back in Seattle, we spoke to Michelle from Ignition and went to their Bellevue offices that Monday to pitch their partnership (using the deck you've seen above). The timeline was accelerated by an upcoming 2.5 week trip I had to Madrid, Munich, London, Boston, and San Francisco, but we made it work. When I left for Madrid on Wednesday, March 21st, we had already started the diligence process for our Series B.

On the middle leg of that long trip, in Munich for SMX, I had the chance to share some exciting news with friends at a downtown pub:

And somehow, Geraldine captured their reactions (and mine) with impeccable timing: 

I think Will Critchlow's face in this photo perfectly sums up how all of us at Moz are feeling about this event.

This, of course, was followed by much drinking of German beer:

The round formally closed on Monday, April 23rd, when funds were wired to our account. Sarah sent around a nice screencap:

Prior to that, $2.17mm was our highest-ever account balance (we've been a bit more profitable than expected the last few months). I have to say that after years of aiming for investment to help us grow the business and, yes, to get some additional, external validation of our work, our model and our market, the transaction itself feels pretty good. But, perhaps stranger still, was a reflection on the funding I shared first with Geraldine, and then later in an email to Brad:

It sounds cheesy or overly-sentimental to say, but it's the truth. The money is going to help us do amazing things, and it's going to mean we can do a lot more of them faster and at greater scale than we could have on our own. But money can come from a lot of places. There's only one seat on our board for a new investor and I'm more certain than I've ever been about anything in my long tenure with this company that he and Foundry are the right match for our special brand of startup.

The Company Today and My Cofounder's New Path

For those interested in the VC world and the specific of the transaction, I'll try to provide some detail:

• The "pre-money" valuation of SEOmoz for this round was $75mm, which is ~4.1X our revenue run rate at the time of the deal.
• Ignition contributed $3mm to the round; Foundry put in $15mm
• The round carries mostly Series A terms, meaning a liquidation preference of 1X, but with no "participation" (this means in the event of a sale/liquidation of the company at less than their investment price, they get their money out first, but in a higher-than-investment price, they get only the percentage of the company they own and not the investment capital + stock returns, known as "participating preferred")
• Sarah Bird, our longtime COO, will be joining the board of directors
• Brad Feld from Foundry will also be joining the board
• Gillian Muessig, my co-founder (and my mom), will be stepping down from the board of directors and resigning her title of President (more on that below)
• Both Gillian and I gave up some shares without compensation in this round in order to issue grants to current employees to protect them from dilution (also more on that below)

Following the transaction, here's how the ownership breakdown of SEOmoz looks (be sure to mentally place a ~ in front of numbers):

As part of this round, Gillian and I had initially planned two somewhat unique moves.

First, to take some "money off the table," meaning that we'd sell shares directly to the company and use some of the funding for personal capital. We had initially intended to have Gillian take ~$4mm and me take $1mm, but ran into a challenge around pricing. In order to fairly value "common" stock (which is what Gillian, myself and employees own), companies must undergo a 409A valuation by an external party. Ours came back valuing the common stock at $49mm (vs. $93mm for preferred). This low number is great for employee option grants and recruiting, but means that we'd be selling a lot of shares to reach those target numbers. Hence, we opted to take more minimal payouts now of ~$440,000 each, most of which is going into a fund for some family members' debt we've long wanted to pay off. In the future, we'll have the option to sell back more shares at future 409A valuation prices.

The second move is more non-standard. When a new employee joins a startup, they usually receive stock options equivalent to some percent of the company's total ownership (if you're interested in learning more, I recommend this post from Dan Shapiro and this one from Tony Wright on the topic). For example, let's say John joined SEOmoz in January 2012 and received 1,000 stock options and we have a total of 1,000,000 shares. John has options equivalent to 0.1% of the company. In a normal fundraising round, everyone takes some "dilution" to make room for the new investors. If the new investors own, say, 20% of the company in the funding round, John's options now represent 0.08%.

Gillian and I have always been passionate about three goals around SEOmoz:

• Make it easier for people to spread ideas on the web (first with consulting, then later through software and education)
• Create a role model company in Seattle that will inspire others in the startup and marketing ecosystems
• Mint a large number of new millionaires in the Seattle region through the value the company creates

Saying those are goals is one thing, but making tangible, visible moves to prove that commitment is harder. This is one of the few times we can show how serious we are about goal #3. Thus, we each sacrificed shares we owned to give back to each active employee at the company so they maintain their ownership percentage. In our example of John above, this would mean 0.02% of new stock options granted to him.

I'm incredibly grateful to Gillian for helping to make not just this transaction and stock sacrifice possible, but for all the amazing support and effort she's devoted to the the company over the last decade. For those who don't know, Gillian founded the business that eventually became SEOmoz in 1981! That's more than three decades ago. For the first two, she was the sole propietor. After 2001, when I dropped out of school, we joined forces with Gillian as President for the next 6 years. In 2007, after our funding transaction from Ignition, she stepped out of a day-to-day operational role to contribute as a full-time evangelist and member of our board of directors. Today, she takes another step toward pursuing new goals and aspirations.

Thousands of folks in the Moz community have met and interacted with Gillian over the last few years through her extensive world travels. I hope you'll join me in thanking her for the amazing work she's done and supporting her new, more independent direction.

Plans for the Months and Years Ahead

The few people I've told of this transaction before today almost always ask "what are you going to do with $20 million in the bank?!"

We do have some big plans, but we also want to be very cautious and deliberate with spending. Given our revenue and expenses run rate, this is a decent amount of operating capital, but it certainly doesn't give us the freedom to be reckless. Several items on our roadmap in the next 12-18 months include:

• Hire 12-15 new mozzers in roles across the company. We'll be posting those here and would love to have your help recruiting.
• Move offices, hopefully by January/February of 2013, to help accomodate a larger team.
• Grow Mozscape, our link graph, dramatically in both size and freshness. In April, we spent nearly $500K to keep things running. We have a lot of infrastructure and code investments to make to get better here. Short term, we're looking to have new indices close to 100 billion URLs every 2 weeks, then improve from there. Later today (possibly tomorrow) we'll be launching a new index (~150B URLs, almost 3X our previous record).
• Launch one very big, exciting new project we've been building since last year, hopefully in October or November of 2012, but possibly early 2013.
• Look into some potential acquisitions of companies/assets for technology, data, people and strategic considerations.
• Ramp up marketing, both on the inbound front and in paid channels.
• Invest in some research and content-focused projects across the field of inbound marketing - content, community, search, social, analytics and CRO. I'm looking forward to doing more work like our beginners' guide and ranking factors projects in each of these arenas.

If you have suggestions, we are, of course, all ears!

My sincere thanks and great big hugs go out to everyone in the Moz community, Seattle startup world and of course, our investors, new and old. We know that the road ahead will have more big challenges to overcome, but it's been so much more fun and rewarding taking this ride together. Here's to finally putting the psychological fear and disappointment of failed funding behind us and to an incredibly bright future.

p.s. If you have any questions related to this news, feel free to ask in the comments and I'll do my best to reply (am on my way to the Future of Web Insights conference in Vegas this afternoon, so please forgive if I'm a bit tardy).

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