This might be the most expensive blog post I've ever written, but here goes ... This week I was talking to a developer who sells open source products and their attitude was that they fight even... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

A few weeks back I made a deliberately provocative post entitled "Even Wordpress Usability Sucks" and ended with the suggestion that Joomla form a Usability team. It looks like one is starting to roll. Congrats to Kyle from Joomlapraise, Chris from JoomlaJunkie and the others in the Joomla UX group on people.joomla.org for getting this started. Here's how you can help: 1) Join the people.joomla.org group and get involved. 2) Reply to Kyle's post today with an initial set of areas to work on. 3) Check out Marco Barbosa's Minima template. He's been working in this area for several months now and trying to imagine what the Joomla 1.7 admin area might look like. You can test his prototype at: http://marcobarbosa.com/minima/administrator/ Login with demo / demo. Leave feedback here.

Wonderfully smart readers ... I need to pick your brains. We've been using Pingdom for years to track our sites. I love it. When sites go down it sends out an automatic email, SMS and even a message via an iPhone app. When our servers go down, we know. However, that's not the same thing as saying when our sites go down, we know. This weekend a site was hit by a session error and that bought the site down. All a visitor could see was a MySQL error and the message "please repair the database". Because the server was still responding, Pingdom thought the site was up and so didn't tell us about the problem. Any ideas on how we can get around this? How can we get notified even when our server is active but our site is throwing out errors?

We've been to over 50 cities in North America from Anchorage in Alaska to Miami in Florida. There aren't many places left on the list of place we'd like to teach. There's Hawaii of course (we very nearly had a client invite us there) and Puerto Rico too. However, there is one gaping hole in our U.S. coverage ... Boston. No longer. Next week we'll be in downtown Boston teaching Joomla and Drupal for 2 days each. What's even better is that I'll be teaching with the wonderful Jen Kramer. If you don't know who Jen is you will shortly. She's a mainstay of the Joomla world: Jen Kramer Jen is a senior faculty member at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, teaching courses and workshops in web site design and management, including Joomla. She has also previously taught at Champlain College, the Community College of Vermont, and the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Jen is a Lynda.com author for the titles "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates", "Joomla! Advanced CSS" and more. Her first book, “Joomla! Start to Finish” was published by Wrox Press/Wiley in January 2010. Read more...

One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed. I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve's readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.

No, not like that, but in the good way! :D The following is a guest post by Jim Kukral highlighting one of the most fundamental tips to succeeding online. Have you ever really taken a step back from all the technical SEO stuff and thought about why Google wins? The real reasons why they have mass-market share and why they continue to dominate? It's time you should, because once you understand how to start thinking like Google, you can finally begin to go beyond just ranking better, but also how to be a master Internet marketer so you can get more sales, leads and publicity. After all, once you've been found, you now have to convert. Otherwise, it's a waste of time. So why does Google win? Because Google is the world's biggest, and best, problem solver. The truth is that there are only two reasons why we all go online, using Google or not. Those two reasons are: 1. To have a problem solved 2. To be entertained That's it. Everything, and I mean everything you do online falls under one of those categories. For example, let's say you're planning on cooking your wife her favorite chicken marsala dish for your anniversary. You go online and do a search for "chicken marsala recipes". Boom, you now have recipes, and videos, and images and cookbooks and all kinds of information to help you solve your problem. As another example, let's say you wanted to relax after work and watch your favorite musician play some of your favorite songs. You go to YouTube and do a search for "Rolling Stones Videos" and boom, you're now watching video content that entertains you. YouTube, which is owned by Google, is already the number two most searched search engine on the Internet (behind Google of course). That means that today billions of people are actively searching the Internet for video content. That also means that because of the public's fast-growing massive hunger for content in video form, that regular people and businesses alike are now able to profit from the creation of that said video content. The truth is, Google (and your business) has to solve problems for their (your) customers, the Internet searcher. If they (you) can't do that, they (you) lose customers. It's that black and white. So I'll ask you again. Are you thinking like Google? Have you sat down and figured out what your target audience's biggest problems are? If you haven't done that you need to do it now. Anticipate what they need. Figure out their pain and then create products/services that take that pain away. Just like Google. For over 15-years, Jim Kukral has helped small businesses and large companies like Fedex, Sherwin Williams, Ernst & Young and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. Jim is the author of the book, "Attention! This Book Will Make You Money", as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant. Find out more by visiting www.JimKukral.com. You can also follow Jim on Twitter @JimKukral.

Yes, deliberate mistake :) It grates when people write poorly, huh. When writers write well, the words almost become invisible. The focus shifts away from technical details, and onto the message. Is there an easy way to write better blog posts? E-mails? Web copy? Let's take a look at three guidelines for web writing. 1. If You Can Say It, You Can Write It The Dilbert Mission Statement Generator - sadly now offline - comes up with convoluted gems this: "Our challenge is to assertively network economically sound methods of empowerment so that we may continually negotiate performance based infrastructures" Satire, one would hope. However, the US Air Force uses the following mission statement: "The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests - to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace" "Deliver sovereign options"? Who talks like this? Well, apart from the US military. Nobody. Good web writing is the same as good spoken language. Use short sentences, short words, simple structures and a natural, predictable flow of ideas. Avoid waffle, hyperbole and words that hide meaning. Whenever you finish a piece of writing, read it aloud. Cut or rephrase phrases that sound clunky, because they'll read clunky, too. Your writing will sound warm and human. The human voice is especially important online. Communicating at a distance, particularly two-way communication, is relatively new to humans. To help people connect with one another more easily, it pays to write in a warm, conversational style that mimics personal conversation when conducted in close, physical proximity. When you think about how you would say something, especially to a specific person, you choose words, expressions and structures based on that personal context. Try to imagine that person in front of you as your write. This approach works well for all applications - from formal legal sites, to personal sites. 2. Planning Planning what you're going to say helps you to complete any writing task more quickly and easily. 1. Identify and list your goals. What is the message? What is the desired action you want your reader to take? What is the key thought you want your reader to take away? For example, a goal list might look like this: *inform people the last project went well, even though there were problems *highlight the good aspects about the project *highlight the problems *present ideas on how these problems can be overcome in the next project *get everyone revved up and excited about the next project 2. Think about the audience. Who is your audience? What do you know about the person or group? 3. Determine the right tone and format based on answers 1& 2 4. Write quickly. Don't edit, even if your writing is a mess. Separate out your writing and editing functions. 5. Draw a solid conclusion. Calls to action work well. 6. Read aloud what you've written. Cut, fix and tighten. Writing comes alive in the rewrite. Solid blog posts sound spontaneous, but they're not. They're often structured, worked and reworked. 3. Hyperbole Doesn't Work On The Web Hyperbole means extreme exaggeration. i.e. "All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand". Web readers tend to gloss over the flowery and the convoluted. On the web, people scan, so the shape of your writing - how it appears on the page - can be just as important as what you say. So think about the shape and form of your writing. Can you use bullets, headings and images to break up large blocks of text? Sometimes, the best thing to do is not write at all. Can an image convey your message? If so, use it. Also consider context. When visitors arrive on a page, a page deep within your site, do they know what your site is about from glancing at that one page? If not, consider using chunks of content to provide context. These chunks of information can be repeated on every page of your site, and should be self explanatory. Think directory entry. Your repeat visitors will become blind to it, but your first time readers will appreciate it. We could go on all day about web writing. However, we'd like to hear your tips. How do you approach writing on your site? Do you plan? Do you wing it? What style of writing gets the best results?

Does the thought of selling fill you with dread? If you see yourself as a technologist, or marketer, then selling may not come easy to you. But we all need to sell something, even if it is just our opinion! If you're a consultant of any description, it comes with the territory. So it pays to know a few techniques. Luckily, sales isn't something you have to be born to do - it does not require supernatural charm, charisma, a hide as thick as an elephant, and a superhuman drive. Selling can be like a doctors consultation. A Visit To The Doctor When you go to the doctor, do you expect the doctor to just guess what is wrong with you? A doctors consultation involves the doctor asking you a series of questions. This questioning is to help determine what the problem is, and how it can best be solved. At the end of the process, the feeling is probably one of relief and assurance i.e. that the doctor has your best interests at heart, and will cure what ails you. It's the same in business. Any client you encounter has a problem. Like a specialist doctor, it is your job to ask a series of questions to help nail down the problem and find a solution. The very act of questioning - known as consultative selling - helps build trust and rapport with the client in the same way you may experience with a doctor. This works especially well in the field of consulting, which is based on information sharing. The emphasis is on clients needs, as opposed to getting a signature on the dotted line. You first establish a client's needs, then you provide a solution, if you have one. You're building a relationship, based on trust, by asking a series of questions. Not so hard, really. The Mechanics Of Consultative Selling Ok, so how do you do it? First, you need to understand the buyers buying process. You then match your selling process to their buy process. All buyers go through a specific process. For example, if a company needs internet marketing services, do they go to their established provider - possibly the web design company who built their site - or do they go direct to the SEO market? Do they attend conferences? If so, which ones? Hint: they may not be SEO conferences. Do they ask other business people in their business network? Do they go with a known brand? It's pretty simple to determine the buying process if the buyer comes straight to your website, fills out the contact form, and requests a call-back. But life often doesn't work that way. A prospective client may ask their web design company. Their web design company may not have had a clue, had you not been in to see them a week earlier. You asked the web design people a few questions about whether they had an SEO capability in house, found out they didn't, and found out they had a lot of clients who quite possibly needed SEO. You proposed a joint deal whereas they would refer their clients to you, for a 10% commission. Try to find out how your prospective clients buy SEO services, and position yourself accordingly. Think business associations and clubs, their existing providers in related areas, and the other companies they have an association with. You need to get yourself positioned correctly in their buying process. If you've managed to get in front of them, you then need to think about the questions you are going to ask. You should be asking about their business, where they see it going, what problems they are having, their place in the market, and their competitors. Business owners typically like doing this, and will welcome your interest, so long as you're seen as a "doctor" i.e someone they trust to help. You'll also need to make a presentation, which, depending on the context, need not be formal. It could consist of showing them case studies of how you've helped solve this problem before. Let's face it, most SEO/SEM problems and solutions are going to look pretty much the same. It's all about trust relationships. It's a fact of life that people buy more readily from people they trust. But how do you know if you can trust your prospective buyer? Screening Buyers Consultative selling is also a great way to screen out tire kickers. A person who is just pumping you for information will reveal very little about themselves. The conversation will be one sided. If they are genuinely interested in your service, they are more likely to answer questions. They do have to trust you first in order to do this, so try to think like a doctor if you encounter resistance. i.e. "I want to help you get more traffic, but I can't do so if I don't know more about your business before I can devise an appropriate solution". Be prepared to walk if they don't volunteer the information you need. Even if you did land the job, you may end providing a substandard solution to their problem, which will likely end in tears. Better to find clients who you can work with, rather than against. Another method of screening is to pre-close the sale. When you are gathering needs, ask that if you can solve their problems to their complete satisfaction, as a result of this discussion, that they will buy your services. This will sound to them like a fairly safe bet i.e. you have to propose something that solves their problem. However, it also creates an implied obligation on their part to do so. There is no risk on your side, as you can either solve the problem, in which case you'll likely get the business, or you can't, in which case you'll walk anyway. If they are hesitant, it is either an opportunity to walk, and thus stop wasting your time, or an opportunity to find out something more about their buying process. In short, when thinking about sales: You are not a salesperson. You are a "doctor" Focus on the needs of the client, not landing the job. Sale hucksters typically focus on the close too soon, which can destroy trust It's ok to walk away. You won't be able to help some clients Insist that the client engage in conversation. A client who asks you questions, and volunteers little information, might be pumping you for information These consultative sales techniques are covered in various sales theory books. Check out "Consultative Selling", by Mack Hanan, Jay Abrams "The Sticking Point Solution", and "Stop Telling, Start Selling: How to Use Customer-Focused Dialogue to Close Sales" by Linda Richardson.

One of the best ways to track Google's strategies is through visualizing & analyzing their acquisitions. Which is what the following image helps you do. Click on it for the full enlarged version :) via Scores

Alexa, a free and well-known website information tool, recently released a paid service. For $199 per site Alexa will audit your site (up to 10,000 pages) and return a variety of different on-page reports relating to your SEO efforts. It has a few off-page data points but it focuses mostly on your on-page optimization. You can access Alexa's Site Audit Report here: http://www.alexa.com/siteaudit Report Sections Alexa's Site Audit Report breaks the information down into 6 different sections (some which have additional sub-sections as well) Overview Crawl Coverage Reputation Page Optimization Keywords Stats The sections break down as follows: So we ran Seobook.com through the tool to test it out :) Generally these reports take about a day or two, ours had some type of processing error so it took about a week. Overview The first section you'll see is the number of pages crawled, followed by 3 "critical" aspects of the site (Crawl Coverage, Reputation, and Page Optimization). All three have their own report sections as well. Looks like we got an 88. Excuse me, but shouldn't that be a B+? :) So it looks like we did just fine on Crawl Coverage and Reputation, but have some work to do with Page Optimization. The next section on the overview page is 5 recommendations on how to improve your site, with links to those specific report sections as well. At the bottom you can scroll to the next page or use the side navigation. We'll investigate these report sections individually but I think the overview page is helpful in getting a high-level overview of what's going on with the site. Crawl Coverage This measures the "crawl-ability" of the site, internal links, your robots.txt file, as well as any redirects or server errors. Reachability The Reachability report shows you a break down of what HTML pages were easy to reach versus which ones were not so easy to each. Essentially for our site, the break down is: Easy to find - 4 or less links a crawler must follow to get to a page Hard to find - more than 4 links a crawler must follow to get to a page The calculation is based on the following method used by Alexa in determining the path length specific to your site: Our calculation of the optimal path length is based on the total number of pages on your site and a consideration of the number of clicks required to reach each page. Because optimally available sites tend to have a fan-out factor of at least ten unique links per page, our calculation is based on that model. When your site falls short of that minimum fan-out factor, crawlers will be less likely to index all of the pages on your site. A neat feature in this report is the ability to download your URL's + the number of links the crawler had to follow to find the page in a .CSV format. This is a useful feature for mid-large scale sites. You can get a decent handle on some internal linking issues you may have which could be affecting how relevant a search engine feels a particular page might be. Also, this report can spot some weaknesses in your site's linking architecture from a usability standpoint. On-Site Links While getting external links from unique domains is typically a stronger component to ranking a site it is important to have a strong internal linking plan as well. Internal links are important in a few ways: The only links where you can 100% control the anchor text (outside of your own sites of course, or sites owned by your friends) They can help you flow link equity to pages on your site that need an extra bit of juice to rank Users will appreciate a logical, clear internal navigation structure and you can use internal linking to get them to where you want them to go Alexa will show you your top linked to (from internal links) pages: You can also click the link to the right to expand and see the top ten pages that link to that page: So if you are having problems trying to rank some sub-pages for core keywords or long-tail keywords, you can check the internal link counts (and see the top 10 linked from pages) and see if something is amiss with respect to your internal linking structure for a particular page. Robots.txt Here you'll see if you've restricted access to these search engine crawlers: ia_archiver (Alexa) googlebot (Google) teoma (Ask) msnbot (Bing slurp (Yahoo) baiduspider (Baidu) If you block out registration areas or other areas that are normally restricted, then the report will say that you are not blocking major crawlers but will show you the URL's you are blocking under that part of the report. There is not much that is groundbreaking with Robots.Txt checks but it's another part of a site that you should check when doing an SEO review so it is a helpful piece of information. Redirects We all know what happens when redirects go bad on a mid-large sized site :) This report will show you what percentage of your crawled pages are being redirected to other pages with temporary redirects. The thing with temporary redirects, like 302's, is that unlike 301's they do not pass any link juice so you should pay attention to this part of the report and see if any key pages are being redirected improperly. Server Errors This section of the report will show you any pages which have server errors. Making sure your server is handling errors correctly (such as a 404) is certainly worthy of your attention. Reputation The only part of this module is external links from authoritative sites and where your site ranks in conjunction with "similar sites" with respect to the number of sites linking to your sites and similar sites. Links from Top Sites The analysis is given based on the aforementioned forumla: Then you are shown a chart which correlates to your site and related sites (according to Alexa) plus the total links pointing at each site which places the sites in a specific percentile based on links and Alexa Rank. Since Alexa is heavily biased towards webmaster type sites based on their user base, these Alexa Rank's are probably higher than they should be but it's all relative since all sites are being judged on this measure. The Related Sites area is located below the chart: Followed by the Top Ranked sites linking to your site: I do not find this incredibly useful as a standalone measure of reputation. As mentioned, Alexa Rank can be off and I'd rather know where competing sites (and my site or sites) are ranking in terms of co-occurring keywords, unique domains linking, strength of the overall link profile, and so on as a measure of true relevance. It is, however, another data point you can use in conjunction with other tools and methods to get a broader idea of your site and related sites compare. Page Optimization Checking the on-page aspects of a mid-large sized site can be pretty time consuming. Our Website Health Check Tool covers some of the major components (like duplicate/missing title tags, duplicate/missing meta descriptions, canonical issues, error handling responses, and multiple index page issues) but this module does some other things too. Link Text The Link Text report shows a break down of your internal anchor text: Click on the pages link and see the top pages using that anchor text to link to a page (shows the page the text is on as well as the page it links too): The report is based on the pages it crawled so if you have a very large site or lots and lots of blog posts you might find this report lacking a bit in terms of breadth of coverage on your internal anchor text counts. Broken Links Checks broken links (internal and external) and groups them by page, which is an expandable option similar to the other reports: Xenu is more comprehensive as a standalone tool for this kind of report (and for some of their other link reports as well). Duplicate Content The Duplicate Content report groups all the pages that have the same content together and gives you some recommendations on things you can do to help with duplicate content like: Working with robots.txt How to use canonical tags Using HTTP headers to thwart duplicate content issues Here is how they group items together: Anything that can give you some decent insight into potential duplicate content issues (especially if you use a CMS) is a useful tool. Duplicate Meta Descriptions No duplicate meta descriptions here! Fairly self-explanatory and while a meta description isn't incredibly powerful as standalone metric it does pay to make sure you have unique ones for your pages as every little bit helps! Duplicate Title Tags You'll want to make sure you are using your title tags properly and not attacking the same keyword or keywords in multiple title tags on separate pages. Much like the other reports here, Alexa will group the duplicates together: Low Word Count Having a good amount of text on a page is good way to work in your core keywords as well as to help in ranking for longer tail keywords (which tend to drive lots of traffic to most sites). This report kicks out pages which have (in looking at the stats) less than 150 words or so on the page: There's no real magic bullet for the amount of words you "should" have on a page. You want to have the right balance of word counts, images, and overall presentation components to make your site: Linkable Textually relevant for your core and related keywords Readable for humans Image Descriptions Continuing on with the "every little bit helps" mantra, you can see pages that have images with missing ALT attributes: Alexa groups the images on per page, so just click the link to the right to expand the list: Like meta descriptions, this is not a mega-important item as a standalone metric but it helps a bit and helps with image search. Session IDs This report will show you any issues your site is having due to the use of session id's. If you have issues with session id's and/or other URL parameters here you should take a look at using canonical tags or Google's parameter handling (mostly to increase the efficiency of your site's crawl by Googlebot, as Google will typically skip the crawling of pages based on your parameter list) Heading Recommendations Usually I cringe when I see automated SEO solutions. The headings section contains "recommended" headings for your pages. You can download the entire list in CSV format: The second one listed, "interface seo", is on a page which talks about Google adding breadcrumbs to the search results. I do not think that is a good heading tag for this blog post. I suspect most of the automated tags are going to be average to less than average. Keywords Alexa's Keyword module offers recommended keywords to pursue as well as on site recommendations in the following sub-categories: Search Engine Marketing (keywords) Link Recommendations (on-site link recommendations Search Engine Marketing Based on your site's content Alexa offers up some keyword recommendations: The metrics are defined as: Query - the proposed keyword Opportunity - (scales up to 1.0) based on expected search traffic to your site from keywords which have a low CPC. A higher value here typically means a higher query popularity and a low QCI. Essentially, the higher the number the better the relationship is between search volume, low CPC, and low ad competition. Query Popularity (scales up to 100) based on the frequency of searches for that keyword QCI - (scales up to 100) based on how many ads are showing across major search engines for the keyword For me, it's another keyword source. The custom metrics are ok to look at but what disappoints me about this report is that they do not align the keywords to relevant pages. It would be nice to see "XYZ keywords might be good plays for page ABC based on ABC's content". Link Recommendations This is kind of an interesting report. You've got 3 sets of data here. The first is the "source page" and this is a listing of pages that, according to Alexa's crawl, are pages that appear to be important to search engines as well as pages that are easily crawled by crawlers: These are pages Alexa feels should be pages you link from. The next 2 data sets are in the same table. They are "target pages" and keywords: Some of the pages are similar but the attempt is to match up pages and predict the anchor text that should be used from the source page to the target page. It's a good idea but there's a bit of page overlap which detracts from the overall usefulness of the report IMO. Stats The Stats section offers 3 different reports: Report Stats - an overview of crawled pages Crawler Errors - errors Alexa encountered in crawling your site Unique Hosts Crawled - number of unique hosts (your domain and internal/external domains and sub-domains) Alexa encountered in crawling your site Report Stats An overview of crawl statistics: Crawler Errors This is where Alexa would show what errors, if any, they encountered when crawling the site Unique Hosts Crawled A report showing which sites you are linking to (as well as your own domain/subdomains) Is it Worth $199? Some of the report functionality is handled by free (in some cases) tools that are available to you. Xenu does a lot of what Alexa's link modules do and if you are a member here the Website Health Check Tool does some of the on-page stuff as well. I would also like to see more export functionality especially in lieu of white label reporting. The crawling features are kind of interesting and the price point is fairly affordable as one time fee. The Alexa Site Audit Report does offer some benefit IMO and the price point isn't overly cost-prohibitive but I wasn't really wowed by the report. If you are ok with spending $199 to get a broad overview of things then I think it's an ok investment. For larger sites sometimes finding (and fixing) only 1 or 2 major issues can be worth thousands in additional traffic. It left me wanting a bit more though, so I might prefer to spend that $199 on links since most of the tool's functionality is available to me without dropping down the fee. Further, the new SEOmoz app also covers a lot of these features & is available at a monthly $99 price-point, while allowing you to run reports on up to 5 sites at a time. The other big thing for improving the value of the Alexa application would be if they allowed you to run a before and after report as part of their package. That way in-house SEOs can not only show their boss what was wrong, but can also use that same 3rd party tool as verification that it has been fixed.

Do you want Google to tell you what you should be doing? Mr. Schmidt thinks so: "More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. ... serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically." Of course the problem with algorithms is they rely on prior experience to guide you. The won't tell you to do something unique & original that can change the world, rather they will lead you down a well worn path. What are some of the most bland and most well worn paths in the world? Established brands: The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. "Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." If Google is so smart then why the lazy reliance on brand? Why not show me something unique & original & world-changing? Does brand affinity actually have a hard wired genetic component? Or is it that computers are stupid & brands have many obvious signals associated with them: one of which typically being a large ad budget. And why has Google's leading search engineer complained about the problem of "brand recognition" recently? While Google is collecting your data and selling it off to marketers, they have also thought of other ways to monetize that data and deliver serendipity: "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market..." Eric Schmidt continues, "and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that." Any guess how that product might have added value to the world? On down days (or days when you search for "debt help") would Google deliver more negatively biased ads & play off fears more, while on up days selling more euphoric ads? Might that serendipity put you on the wrong side of almost every trade you make? After all, that is how the big names in that space make money - telling you to take the losing side of a trade with bogus "research." Eric Schmidt asks who you would rather give access to this data: “All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” That exchange helped John Gruber give Eric Schmidt the label Creep Executive Officer, while asking: "Maybe the question isn’t who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information." But Google has a moral conscience. They think quality score (AKA bid rigging) is illegal, except for when they are the ones doing it! "I think judgement matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," - Eric Schmidt Which is why the blog of a certain mistress disappeared from the web. And, of course, since this post is on a blog, it doesn't matter: If you're ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That's all you need to see. - Eric Schmdit Here is the thing I don't get about Google's rhetorical position on serendipity & moral authority: if they are to be trusted to recommend what you do, then why do they recommend illegal activities like pirating copyright works via warez, keygens, cracks & torrents? Serendipity ho!

Everyday it seems like a new SEO tool or toolset is launching. I've been quite impressed with the improvements and enhancements to Raven's SEO Tools since they launched. There are so many features in Raven but I want to focus on some of the really unique ones which make Raven a must have for me. Link Research Tools Raven has 2 powerful, time-saving tools in their Link Research toolset. Site Finder and Backlink Explorer are 2 tools that really help me quickly assess and work through link profiles and the link landscape of a particular keyword. Site Finder Site Finder is keyword driven and the reports are saved under the website profile you are working on in Raven. While the tool is fast (my auto insurance quotes example took about 6 seconds!) one of the workflow features that I really like is that I can run a bunch of these and go off to do other things within Raven rather than waiting for the reports to come back. On to Site Finder! : To use Site Finder, just navigate to it under the Links tab, enter your keyword, and hit "Run": Here are the results returned for my query on auto insurance quotes: Site Finder gives you quite a bit of data and options in an easy to use interface, here's how it breaks down: Search Box - search for a specific domain or reset the results post-search Display Settings - show anywhere from 25 - 1k results on the page, show links that are "hidden" (links you "hid" via the options column), or show all links with no filters Display Settings Option Box - click "Display Settings' and you'll get a box where you can toggle ACRank, MozRank, Page Authority, and/or Connections off and on Domain- the name of a domain which is linking to at least 1 site in the top ten Google Results. Click on the domain link to get a slick drop down of the sites that domain is linking too Link Icon - click the icon to display the domain in a new Connections - number of sites in the top 10 for your keyword that have a link from that domain ACRank - a quick, simple data point which aims to show how important a specific page is (0-15, 15 is the highest) based on referring domains. A more in-depth definition can be found here MozRank - SeoMoz's global link popularity score. It mirrors PageRank but SeoMoz says it updates it more frequently and is more precise (scaled 0-10, 10 being the highest). A more in-depth overview can be found here Page Authority - a predictor of how likely a page is to rank based on a 100 point, logarithmic scale independent of the page's content. The higher the better :) Backlinks - total number of links the domain has going into the top 10 Google results Options Tab - if you want to hide a domain from the report (maybe not a link you want to go after, you or your team members can click "hide" and the link will be hidden from the report. If "add" is clicked then the link is added to the link queue in the Link Manager (more on this shortly) Export Options - export your report to PDF or CSV (really helpful, especially when running reports on hidden links to gauge how well a link builder might be doing in terms of assessing the appropriate links to hide So that's Site Finder. The flexibility, power, speed, and collaborative features of Site Finder make it one of my favorite tools to use. Backlink Explorer Researching competitor's link profiles is usually a time-consuming piece of the SEO puzzle. While it still involves time, especially on larger link profiles, Backlink Explorer delivers some pretty impressive results quickly and efficiently via a 3rd party tie-in to Majestic SEO. Another nice thing with Raven is a consistent, clean user interface across the toolset. Here's the spot where you enter the domain you want to research: Just like Site Finder it will save the report in the history of whatever website profile you are saving the report in. You can explore it at anytime or delete it at anytime: Continuing on with the auto insurance theme, I ran a quick report on GEICO: Backlink Explorer gives you the following data points and options: Search Box - search for a particular domain or words within a domain Display Settings - group domains (this is really helpful for cutting down duplicate results from domains with more than one link to the site), show/hide hidden or already linked from domains, filter by ACRank, and display up to 1,000 results on the page Display Settings Box - display or hide no-follow, image, or date data fields Source URL - the site the link is from Link Icon - open page in a new window ACRank - as discussed in Site Finder's review, more info here Anchor Text - the anchor text of the link No-follow - whether it's no-follow or not Image - whether it's an image link or not Options Box - hide the domain or add it to your link queue Export - export results, filtered or non-filtered to CSV What's really great about this tool is that you can do some pretty heavy filtering to get rid of the noisy links and quickly add the good ones to your link queue. On its face it may seem like it's not that big of a time-saver, but it really is if you are combing through a large profile or multiple link profiles. You could really buzz through some fairly thick link profiles with the filtering options and put them right into your link queue for you to work on later or for a team member to work on. Once you start working with it you'll quickly see how efficient it is for you or for you and your staff. Link Management This is probably my favorite tool in the toolset. Prior to utilizing this tool, I was using lots and lots of spreadsheets to track link building campaigns which got to be pretty time consuming and tough to collaborate on. It's built in to the Raven SEO Toolbar which allows you to quickly add a link to your link queue, right from your browser, rather than hand copying the website's data to a spreadsheet for further processing. This is a slick feature for a one person show and really sings when used in a collaborative link building environment. The last 2 spots are where your site would be listed and your account profile name: When you are researching link partners, simply click that Add Link button and you are presented with this screen: The link manager in an of itself is worth the price of admission in my opinion. So here you can: Set the status to queued, requested, active, inactive, ignore, or declined. Most of the time it will be "queued" if you are saving it for further handling Input the date the record was created Select the type of link (organic, paid, blog, exchange, and so on). You can even define custom types in Raven and it will show as an option in this application Note the desired anchor text of the link (great for collaboration with link building staff members) Include the URL of where you'd like the link to point to Add more links if you might be getting more than one link from the page Tag the link for sorting within the link manager application Set it to be monitored automatically from within Raven Add it as a task for you or a staff member Raven pulls in the URL, domain name of the site, and PageRank of the page If available you can list the contact name and email as well as the type of site it is and even leave a note attached to the record Try doing all that in a spreadsheet and a bunch of word or text documents for notes :) Once again, another solid way to save loads of time doing what is probably the most time consuming part of an SEO campaign, link building. So that was just the toolbar portion of the Link Manager. Within your Raven account you have access to the same "add link" application that you do from the toolbar. Perhaps you have link opportunities that you or a staff member cultivated outside of Raven. You can use this form to plug them right in. You can also import links into your Raven account. You can upload a CSV file with custom data that Raven will recognize up to 20 columns of data points. These data points relate to Raven's Link Manager application. So you're able to define all of these (Raven gives you a handy sample CSV to do this from): Status Link Type Link Text Link URL Website Name Website URL Website Type PR Contact Name Contact Email Contact ID Cost Type Cost Payment Method Payment Reference Start Date End Date Creation Date Comment Owner Name Currently the currencies supported are USD, GBP, EUR, AUD. When you upload you can automatically add link monitoring by clicking the link monitoring box. You can also import up to 1,000 backlinks from Yahoo! via your domain or your competitor's domains (ones you've defined in Raven). Raven's link monitoring service will alert you if any changes occur to a link or a page the link is on. For example, you would be notified if: PageRank changes Anchor text changes Another link gets added to the page They add no-follow to your link The location of your link changes I believe Raven now has about 21 different tools within their toolset now. This one tool, for me, is well worth the subscription cost. It really does save quite a bit of time and there's really nothing else like it on the market that I've seen (in terms of functionality, collaboration, and ease of use). Facebook There are a growing number of applications out there where you can manage your social media accounts (mainly Twitter and Facebook, but Facebook in this example). If you want the most bang for your buck, Raven offers a state of the art Facebook application within its toolset. In addition to the deep reporting Raven gives you from within Facebook you can now integrate with Google Analytics from within Raven. Here are some of the features offered within Raven's Facebook Tool: Deep Google Analytics integration White label reporting of Facebook metrics Automatic wall post scheduling Fan tracking, customizable by date range Monitor posts, comments, and likes What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what's working and not working over defined periods of time. The reason why I'm a big fan of the integration here is due to the fact that you are likely going to be using either Twitter or Facebook (or both) in your internet marketing campaign(s). So to have this data in one place and integrated, as well as using the deep metrics that the tools provide, amount to a set of game changing features with respect to Facebook campaign management. Sometimes with all in one toolsets you see features like this get added and they are kind of watered down. This is not the case here, it's one of the stronger Facebook management tools out there. If you are going to allocate resources to search and social then you need a way to accurately track the ROI of your campaigns and that's exactly what you get with this tool. Twitter Occasionally Social Media campaigns can be tough to quantify in terms of ROI and overall effectiveness. Much like the Facebook Monitor, Raven offers a tool for Twitter users which is a real gem. Raven's Twitter Tool One feature within the Twitter tool is the ability to post a new tweet right away or schedule it for later, integrate with 3 URL shortener services (bit.ly, is.gd, j.mp, and tinyurl), and set custom Google Analytics campaign variables. Raven also gives you the ability to work with bit.ly and j.mp's APIs. Monitor Twitter Activity and Engagement If you are allocating resources to Twitter, or being paid by a company to run their Twitter account, then you'll want the ability to see some pretty juicy stats related to your Twitter campaign. With Raven's new Twitter tool you'll be able to see the following: Posts Followers Friends Friend to Follower Ratio Mentions Google Analytics referral data Reply and Retweet reach (a great way to see how many readers are seeing the message Here's a screenshot of the statistical overlay: What's really nice about this is the date range comparisons. It's a huge time-saver to manage this data mostly in one place, you can truly get a handle on what's working and what's not working, as well as why it's not working or working. The level of detail and integration is really unique to Raven's suite of tools. Monitor Tweets Related to Your Account In addition to viewing tweets from your public timeline you can also see all mentions associated with your account, as well as tweets posted from your account: A great feature here is that if there is a thread associated with a tweet you can click on the "view thread" link and see the entire thread from within the Twitter tool. You can also access this via Raven's slick iPhone/iPad app Campaign Reporting Much like the link tools are worth the full subscription for me, if you have a need for custom reporting then Raven's Campaign Reporting features are probably worth the price of admission for you. In lockstep with their other tools, the Campaign Reporting feature set is super easy to use: You can quickly create white-labeled, customized reports for the following modules within Raven: Link Building Twitter Rankings Facebook Keyword Research Competitor Research Social Media Monitoring (track mentions of your brand and/or keywords related to your service. It also allows you to manage overall sentiment and track daily buzz) Google Analytics The reporting options include the ability for you to use customized descriptions to explain different parts of the report, summary pages for different sections, and Raven will even generate a table of contents for you. Brand Templates Here you can quickly create a completely customized brand template for use with your reports, just click New Brand Template in the campaign home screen. Give the template a name: Assign it to a website, a profile or an account: Pick a custom logo or text header: Customize the colors and the footer text Customize the appearance of your ranking results (keyword and rank alignment, numbers/+/-/arrows) Report Templates Report Templates allow you to configure specific aspects of each report, saving you from having to create them over and over again for each client or each report: Similar to a Brand Template you start by clicking "New Report Template" in the Campaign Report screen. What I like about these reports is that they are fully customizable. Maybe you have clients that just hire you for keyword research, or just links, or both of those and social media (and so on). Well with the customization flexibility of these reports you can set up a custom template for just about any reporting need you may come across. So name your report (I did Test 1) and you'll see the creation options on the left side: To give you an idea of how deep your customization and reporting options are, here is that left bar fully extended: Every singe one of those tabs is a customizable report :) So you just click on the ones you want to add and they are added to the report template. Customizing Reporting Fields When you add the fields to a template, or when you are creating the report, you can expand the section and customize each one (the summary page and title are report-wide options, but they each have other options depending on the piece you are reporting on). Here's the customization options you get with the link detail module: Once you add more than one, you can collapse them and reorder them in a drag and drop fashion: Scheduling and Auto Delivery Maybe you want to auto-deliver reports to employees for further customization or presentation work, or maybe you want to set and forget the delivery of reports to your clients. You can send reports as attached PDF's or as trackable download links. You can do monthly, daily, weekly, or quarterly reports and select a day between 1-28 as well as define a custom date range. Create the Report It's really easy to create a detailed, customized report within Raven. Name your report, select your brand and report templates, set you scheduling and delivery options, and create! It is really that simple. As mentioned in the Report Template section you can add, customize, and arrange all those reporting areas to suit your reporting needs. Additional Features While I focused on key areas that sold me on Raven, I also utilize their other tools. In addition to the tools mentioned above Raven's tools also include Blog Manager - manage unlimited WordPress blogs (or any blog that supports XML-RPC Competitor Manager - track competitors and see key metrics like PageRank, pages in Google's index, and links. Contact Manager - this is where Raven stores (via this feature and via the Link Manager) contact information (mailing address, email, phone number, username, company, etc) which you can assign to different links, websites, and tasks Content Manager - a place where you can manager articles, website content, and posts. You can add keyword analyzer features to check frequency, density, and relevance. You can also list where the article or post was used (quite handy for link building campaigns) Design Analyzer - what I really like about this tool is the ability to look at your website in a Lynx browser Event Manager - similar to GA annotations, the event manager can help you track any type of event related to your site. You can even include these in your reports, which is great for in-house record-keeping and/or client reports. Firefox Toolbar - a killer link building assistant as discussed in the link section of this review. You can easily switch between your site profiles in the toolbar, use the analyzer features, and use logins for different social media personas. Keyword Manager - a place to store potential and active keywords. A handy tagging system can be used to group keywords and you can add them to your rank tracker in one click. Persona Manager - store multiple social network profiles and logins. In addition, you can also share these with staff members. This functionality is also available in the Toolbar. Quality Analyzer - you can use this in your Raven account and from the Toolbar (which is a nice feature when scouring the web for links). It measures the site's indexed page count in Google and Yahoo, links from Yahoo, .edu links, .gov links, domain age, domain expiration, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, and whether or not the site is in DMOZ. It assigns a numerical score based on this data. Research Assistant - enter a domain to see data regarding the site's paid keywords, organic keywords, and competitors in both. You can one-click add a keyword or a competing URL to either the keyword/competition manager or to your SERP tracker (rank checker). Enter a keyword to see matching keywords and related keyword with data from SEM Rush, Google, and Wordtracker. View a page to see semantic data powered by OpenCalais.Com and keywords (related to the page's content) from AlchemyAPI.Com. SERP Tracker - Raven's rank checker, runs once per week automatically, has historical chart and data viewing capabilities, and supports a bunch of international versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google Analytics Integration - tie in your Google Analytics account for easy viewing and slick reporting. Social Media - in addition to Facebook and Twitter Raven also offers brand/keyword monitoring services, integration with KnowEm and Omgili. Website Directory - records of all the websites used in your campaign with filtering options to sort out different site and link types. iPhone and iPad apps Give Raven a Try Raven's integration is slick and powerful: Google, SEM Rush, and Wordtracker for keyword research Majestic SEO & SeoMoz for link building and research Google Analytics integration Twitter & Facebook integration with lots of engagement goodies Raven currently offers a free 30 trial, no credit card required, on all their plans. The combination of SEO tools, link building tools, social media integration, and custom reporting options were strong selling points for me especially at the price points Raven offers. I think you can also see the significant time saving benefits Raven provides, especially in the reporting module. There isn't much to lose, a free 30 day trial that doesn't require you to enter any payment information. So give Raven's SEO Tools a try. Pricing and Free Trial Info

Pretty exciting day in search seeing Bing results live on Yahoo! Search results. There were some questions as to what might transfer and what might stay. It seems that generally algorithmically there was roughly a 1 to 1 transfer. Yahoo! is still showing fewer characters in their page titles than Bing does. Site links (listed below some sites) may also use different anchor text. But the core results are the same. The big exceptions to the concept of the 1:1 representation would be vertical search results, left rail navigation customizations & the inline search suggestions Bing does in their search results for popular search queries. The vertical search results & left rail navigation being home grown is no surprise, as many of the features aim to keep you on the parent portal, and that is Yahoo!'s bread and butter. Here is an example of the inline suggestions Bing does (in this example, for "loans") Instead of inline suggestions like that, you might see the following kinds of navigational cues from Yahoo! There has been some speculation as to if any Yahoo! penalties will get rolled into Bing (or Yahoo!'s version of Bing) & so far it seems like that is generally a no. Of course, that could change over time. There also has been speculation of Yahoo! Site Explorer going away, but it seems it will remain through early 2012. The Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible for webmasters. At this stage in the transition, it is important for webmasters to continue using Yahoo! Site Explorer to inform us about your website and its structure so you keep getting high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites – even from markets outside the US and Canada that haven’t yet transitioned to Microsoft systems. To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period. When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites. Unfortunately some of Yahoo!'s advanced link query operators seem to no longer work (say you wanted to find links to a domain from .gov pages). But you can get such link data (or at least a piece of it) from Majestic SEO or SEOmoz's Linkscape (also in OSE's export feature & eventually their online interface). Some smaller search companies, like Exalead, still offer advanced filters while performing link searches. The ability to search a full web index allows you to do cool stuff you can't do with just a link graph. I haven't looked at it yet, but I have heard good things & owe the folks at InfluenceFinder a review soon. When Blekko launches they will have a boatload of free SEO features to share as well. Members of our community have been giving it rave reviews for the past month or so.

Sigh, not this again. ;) Recently Rand highlighted his surprise at how prevalent search spam is. But the big issue with search today is not the existence of spam, but how it is dealt with. For a long period of time Google spent much of their resources fighting spam manually. That worked when spammers were sorta poor and one hit wonders fighting on the edge of the web & few people knew how search worked. But as technology advances & "spammers" keep building a bigger stock of capital eventually Google loses the manual game. Search engines concede the importance of SEO. It is now officially mainstream. Both Google and Microsoft offer SEO guides. Microsoft and Yahoo! have in-house SEO teams. Yahoo! purchased a content mill. Microsoft's update email about powering Yahoo! search results later this week contained "After this organic transition is complete, Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches, which is 31.6 percent of the search market share in the United States and 8.6 percent share in Canada. You can take advantage of this traffic by using search engine optimization (SEO) to complement your search campaigns and boost the visibility of your business." Sure you will still see some media reports about the "dark arts" of SEO, but that is mainly because they prefer publishing ignorant pablum to drive more page views, as self-survival is their first objective. Some of the same media companies alerting us of the horrors of SEOs have in-house SEO teams that call me for SEO consultations. A Google engineer highlighted this piece by submitting it to Hacker News, using this as the title "sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content." We tend to over-estimate end users. If most people don't realize something is spam then to them it isn't. If the search engineers have a hard time telling if a blog is ESL or auto-generated, how is a typical web user going to distinguish the difference? Some SEO professionals have huge networks of websites and are 8 or 9 figures flush in capital. They can afford to simply buy marketshare in any market they want to enter. Burn one of their sites and they get better at covering their tracks as they buy 5 more. At the same time the media companies are partnering with content mills & the leading content mill filed for an IPO where they are hoping for a $1.5 billion valuation. Why does one form of garbage deserve to rank when another doesn't? If link buying is bad, then why did Google invest in Viglink? If link buying is so bad then is lying for links any better? If so, how? How exactly can Google stop the move toward spam in a capitalistic market where domains can be registered with privacy and marketers can always rent an expert to speak for the brand? Is a celebrity endorsement which yields publicity spam? How can Google speak out against spam when they beta test search results that are 100% Google ads? Wherever possible, Google is trying to replace part of the "organic" search results with another set of Google vertical results. If Google can roughly match relevancy while gaining further control over the traffic they will. Just look at how hard it is to get to the publisher site if you use Google image search. And Google is rumored to be buying Like.com, which will make image search far more profitable for Google. As Google continues to try to suck additional yield out of the search results, I believe they are moving away from demoting spam (due to the point of diminishing returns & risks associated with demoting what they themselves do creating anti-trust issues). Instead of looking for what to demote, they are now shifting toward trying to find more data/signals to promote quality from. The issue with manual intervention (rather than algorithmic advancements) is that it warps the web to promote large beaurocratic enterprises that are highly inefficient. That is ok in the short run, but in the long run it leaves search as a watered down experience. One lacking in flavor and variety. One which is boring. Google is going to get x% of online ad revenues and y% of GDP. In the long run, them promoting inefficient organizations doesn't make the web (or search) any more stable. They need to push toward the creation of more efficient and more profitable media enterprises. Purchases of ITA Software and Metawebs allow Google to attack some of the broader queries and gain more influence over the second click in the traffic stream. Business models which are efficient grow, whereas inefficient ones are driven into bankruptcy. As Paul Graham has highlighted, we might be moving away from a society dominated by large organizations to ones where more individuals are self-employed (or who work for smaller organizations). We hire about a dozen people, but they are sorta bucketed into separate clusters. Some work on SEO Book, some blog, some help create featured content, some help with marketing, etc. etc. etc. The net result of our efficient little enterprise is pushing terabytes of web traffic each month. Would you describe the site you are currently reading as being "spam" simply because it is efficient & profitable? Would a site that took VC capital and was less efficient be any more proper? How much less interesting is the average big media article on the field of SEO? If a search engine gets too aggressive with penalizing "spam" then tanking competitors becomes a quite profitable business model. If they are to focus on what to demote search engineers need to figure out who is doing what AND who did it. Thus the role of SEO today is not to remain "spam free" (whatever that is) but to create enough signals of quality that you earn the benefit of the doubt. This protects you from the whims of search engineers, algorithmic updates, and attempts at competitive sabotage. You can future-proof your SEO strategy to the point where your site never loses traffic because it never ranked! Or you can get in the game and keep building in terms of quantity and quality. If lower quality stuff is all that is typically profitable in a particular market then it isn't hard to stand out by starting out with a small high-quality website. That attempt to stand out might not be profitable, but it might give you a platform to test from. After all, Demand Media purchased eHow.com to throw up their "quality content" on. Online the concept of meritocracy is largely a farce. Which is precisely why large search companies are willing to buy content mills. If search engines want to promote meritocracy they should focus more on rewarding individual efforts, though that might have a lower yield, and some people prefer to stay anonymous given competitive threats from outing AND some of the creepy ways online ad networks harvest their data to target them. What does the lack of meritocracy mean for marketers? If you are a marketer you need to be aggressive at marketing your wares or someone with inferior product will out-market you and steal marketshare from you. Will someone consider your site spam? Sure. But they will have worse rankings than you do!

Jon Glick is one of the leading experts on search, having literally both wrote the code at leading search engines and later becoming an SEO professional. I remember speaking with him in 2004 at the Ghost Bar in Las Vegas and it was perhaps the most fascinating conversation about search I have ever been part of. I have wanted to interview him for years & just recently was able to. :) In some past interviews (like this one) you have highlighted how Google's key strength is perhaps brand rather than relevancy. After seeing Yahoo! bow out of the search game do you still hold that same opinion? What do you think of the Bing brand? Brand is still Google’s strongest competitive asset in search. It means that to get someone to switch you have to be significantly better than they are, which is a tall order. Bing is the first search offering from MSFT that is in the same league with Google, so it’s more about branding and positioning than objective quality at this point. If Bing was a standalone brand they wouldn’t have a chance, but it has the advantage of default positioning in IE, so for now it just has to be close enough that people won’t swap it out. Over time Bing may evolve some interesting differentiation from Google, but that’s not really the case right now (at least it seems to be pressuring Google to experiment/innovate a bit more). It’s been quite a while since using a MSFT product was “cool” and Bing has that drag on its brand. Some of the new upstarts entering the search game believe that perhaps the thinning of the herd is creating an entry opportunity? Have you checked out Blekko yet? Any other new general search projects interest you? Google rose to prominence during the dot-com bust when the existing players were quite disinterested in search, since at the time (pre-PPC) it was money loser. Search is so ridiculously lucrative right now that any promising technology that starts to get traction or buzz is likely to be quickly acquired by one of the major players as a blocking measure. Google’s rumored attempt to acquire Cuil for $80MM pre-launch is an example. There is an opportunity, but it’s more about getting bought out for a sweet price than taking down the SEs. There is also so much manual tuning in search these days that even a great system will take a lot of effort to return great results. “Plumber OR Pipefitter” is a Boolean query, “Portland OR Plumber” is not, and someone’s got to build code to recognize that. This is where the existing players have a huge legacy advantage. Looking at new search technologies I’m very cautious about those that ask users to do more work in return for better results. Search is a low-intensity activity that people don’t really want to learn or spend time on. This is where an approach like WA (that Bing is also aiming towards) looks interesting. We’d all like search to be like the computer from Star Trek that gives you back exactly the answer/data you ask for. The complication with this, beyond the technical issues, is what benefit it has for the webmasters (i.e. why should I let you crawl/index my site). Current SEs take your data for their use, but provide traffic in return, which an answering system would not. You are one of the few guys who literally wrote the relevancy algorithms & then later worked in the SEO space. Do you consider the roles to be primarily complimentary or adversarial? So is SEO good or bad for SEs? On the whole I think it’s a benefit for them. From an algo perspective it’s a lot easier to determine the intent of a well SEO’d page. The SEs give webmasters a lot of tools and encourage them to use them because it makes search better. 301 your pages so we know where the content went, let us know what parameters don’t impact page content so we don’t get caught in robot traps, tell us what language your page is in using the metatags so we don’t have to guess, etc. If one of these tools ends up being a net negative, SEs can always change how they treat it (NoFollow), or just start ignoring it all together (Keywords MetaTag). This is not to say that a lot of work doesn’t have to be put into removing spam and factoring out overly aggressive optimization, but it’s a lot less than what they’d need to do if no one SEO’d. Given your experience on both sides of the table, do you feel that ranking great in other search engines is like stealing candy from a baby, or is it still hard? What aspects of the SEO process do you find most challenging? For SEO-ing established businesses it’s not a slam dunk, but it is still possible to generate very strong returns. At Become.com we have dozens of people working on SEO in a very organized manner and paybacks on investing effort are better than almost any other aspect of our business. The challenging part is the innate volatility of SEO and the fact that ultimately the SEs control our destiny. You can put together a great growth plan, and then watch an algo update like MayDay shred it. For the spammers, it’s like stealing candy from a sleeping Doberman. It’s easy until the Doberman wakes up. Does your experience allow you to just look at a search result and almost instantly know why something is ranked? If so, what are the key things SEOs should study / work on to help gain that level of understanding? I wish. There is always some pattern recognition that comes from experience (i.e. this is a collage site), but there are so many nuances in the code and off-page stuff that it’s not always instant, you just get better at knowing what to look for. The real learning comes from looking at pages that are ranking well for no obvious reason and seeing what they are doing. It’s no secret why apple is #1 for “ipod nano,” but what is that site I haven’t heard of doing right to get the #5 position? Also if we see a competitor suddenly see a step-function traffic lift we look to see what they changed/added that the SEs seem to be liking. Back in 2006 you highlighted the rise of some of the MFA collage websites. In 2010 content mills are featured in the press almost every week. Are you surprised how far it has went & how long it has lasted? I think Google actually likes folks like Demand Media. What they are doing is seeing where GG’s users are looking for something and not finding it, then plugging that hole. It may not be the Pulitzer Prize-winning content, but it allows users to find something and thus makes Google more useful and universal. When better content comes along those pages will slip down, but they serve a purpose in Google’s ecosystem. Collage websites (stitch sites in Yahoo! parlance) are another story entirely. They add virtually no value and are pretty much spam IMO. The difficulty is in detecting and eradicating them as fast as they can be robo-created. You mentioned looking at the aboutness of a site for Become.com when judging links. Do you think broad general search engines care about link relevancy? Personally, I have not seen it have much of an impact, which is a shame. I think the main reason is that it is quite difficult for general SEs to judge which site relationships are meaningful, and which are not. For example, a golf course might get links from a real estate site; golf and real estate might be classified as very different verticals, but the links are quite relevant because the real estate agent is pointing out one of the benefits of the community. As a result link relevancy has become more about avoiding bad neighborhoods (3Ps, link farms, etc.) than finding good ones. How important do you think temporal analysis is in judging the quality and authenticity of a link profile? It’s certainly a red flag if a site gains too many links too quickly. The same is true if the profile of the links looks unnatural. If all your new links are coming from PR3-PR4 blog sites, something’s off. If bloggers are suddenly that interested in you wouldn’t a lot of PR0 comments exist, FB mentions, tweets, and a few higher PR press mentions? At Yahoo! sites that got a sudden upsurge in inlinks were classed as “spike” sites. Legit spike sites (ex. the website of some unknown who wins an Olympic medal) have typical hallmarks like temporally-linked mentions in media sites that you can’t buy access to (AP, NYT, Time, etc.). The spikes that are blackhatted look totally different. In an interview a couple years ago Priyank Garg mentioned Yahoo! looked at the link's location on a page. Do you feel other search engines take this into account? All of the major SEs have been doing boilerplate stripping for a while. They recognize footers, rail nav., etc. and look at those links differently. Also, SEs will only follow a limited number of links per page. They typically collect all the links, remove the checksum dups (note: if your links vary by even one parameter they will not be deduped at this phase), and follow the first N links from the code. None of the SEs will say exactly what N is, but it’s probably somewhere between 75 and 300 links (Google recommends you have <100). Put your important links high up in the code and save the header/footer stuff for further down. What are some of the biggest advantages vertical search engines have over general search engines? As Google adds verticals, will they be able to build meaningful services that people prefer to use over leading vertical plays? The big advantage of being a vertical search engine is the ability to limit the scope of the problem we’re trying to tackle. You can use a more focused taxonomy to provide a better experience, and present data in a way that is much more relevant than the 10 blue links. Sidestep is going to help me find the plane flight I want a lot easier than a Google search. The challenge is that the experience that you offer has to be dramatically better than Google. Google is easy, people know how to use it and it works for almost everything. Being 5% better at one thing won’t get anyone to switch behavior. As Google adds verticals, it’s ironic that they are in a position in the browser similar to how I think of Microsoft historically on the desktop (link and leverage): they don’t need to win by being the best, they win by being the default. Google Product Search doesn’t have to provide a better user experience than say Shopping.com; it will get used because it gets placed prominently on the Google SERP. At the upcoming SES you are speaking about meaningful SEO metrics. What are some of the least valuable metrics people still track heavily? The one that jumps to mind is pages indexed. Depending on which GG servers you are hitting, that number is going to fluctuate, and I see people stress over those fluctuations when there is often no actual change. Also, getting indexed is virtually worthless; it’s getting ranked that’s valuable. It’s easy to get your “iPod” page indexed, getting a top10 ranking is another story. What’s the point of having 300,000 pages indexed if all your traffic is coming from 30 that have decent rankings? If you have pages that are indexed, but not ranking; either do some SEO for those pages (internal links, extra content, etc.) or NoIndex them and take them out of your sitemaps so other pages on your site get a chance. Another is pageload time. Google has mentioned this as a ranking factor, but we really have not seen an impact. We focus on reducing latency, and loading search relevant content first (vs. headers or banner media), but that’s because it reduces abandonment rate not that it helps SEO. What are some of the most valuable metrics which are not generally appreciated enough in the market? The big one is revenue. Everything else is a means to this end; never lose sight of that. The other is crawl rate (esp. from Google). This is a great leading indicator. ---- Thanks Jon! To hear more of Jon's insights on search check out his panel at San Francisco's SES conference next week.

One of Wordnet's definitions for slave is "someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; 'a slave to fashion'; 'a slave to cocaine'; 'his mother was his abject slave.'" Amongst that definition of the word, it is no stretch to say many Americans (and indeed the United States) are debt slaves. We encourage it in virtually every aspect of our lives: consumerism, taking on debt to buy a new car or house, education which requires a decade or more of solid employment to pay for, even when it sometimes prohibits employment: Jordan Hueseman, 25, accrued roughly $100,000 in student loans at the University of Denver earning a bachelor's degree in international business and a master's in business administration. On the job hunt, he found his graduate degree sometimes hindered more than it helped. “At one point, I applied to Whole Foods, hoping they might see some potential for me to move to some type of management position,” Hueseman said. “The e-mail I received from them said I was far too overqualified for any of their hourly positions and as such would not be considered for a position.” Hueseman said that after one job application, he was told he should leave his degrees off his resume. As bad as that is, student loan debt typically can't be discharged via bankruptcy. Introducing the for-profit element to the federally guaranteed loans also gives you major price distortions: A student interested in a massage therapy certificate costing $14,000 at a for-profit college was told that the program was a good value. However the same certificate from a local community college cost $520. Imagine buying an iPod for $6,703.84. That is how much one would cost at the above ratio. Even the die hard Apple fans wouldn't be buyers at that price. And yet the availability of credit (which only has to be paid back later) tied with the words of a recruiter/salesman closes such a deal every single day of the year. You have to love marketing! Many try their hardest to pay their debts. Some can't. The debts are then bought up for pennies on the Dollar & then they harassed to pay them. Some who can't make the payments end up being put in jail: It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. The debts -- often five or six years old -- are purchased from companies like cellphone providers and credit card issuers, and cost a few cents on the dollar. Using automated dialing equipment and teams of lawyers, the debt-buyer firms try to collect the debt, plus interest and fees. A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover costs. Anything beyond that is profit. Bail is often being set at exactly how much debt you have. The banking class put teeth into the consumer bankruptcy laws under an Orwellian bill called the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005." Only a few months after it was passed an article titled Newly Bankrupt Raking In Piles of Credit Offers was published in the New York Times. Of course, a few years later, when it was turn for the bankrupt banks to go out of business due to widespread intentional mortgage fraud and accounting control fraud, they pushed a bill through congress offering them a bailout - threatening marshall law and tanks in the street if they didn't get it. The bailouts and legalizing accounting fraud (allowing banks to claim bogusly inflated asset values) were done with the alleged purpose of helping the banks restore their balance sheets. However those banks have started paying record bonuses again & a more cynical look at the sequence describes it as: In effect, it's a Third World/colonial scam on a gigantic scale: plunder the public treasury, then buy the debt which was borrowed and transferred to your pockets. You are buying the country with money you borrowed from its taxpayers. No despot could do better. The new president claimed to be in favor of transparency, and as part of the bill promoting it gave us this: The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities." Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot. Here is the thing about business and personal investment. So often what we think we need is to invest money when what we really need to invest is time and effort. If you work twice as long as most people do, learn furiously, are willing to put yourself out there, and you know your market then you can overcome a lack of capital to build momentum. Are there short cuts? Absolutely. But the most obvious ones which seem like they have the least upfront risk are typically not the best ones. There was a thread recently in our forums about forging a certain type of partnership, and John Andrews shared a great take on how that can work out. I shared a similar story as well. A $50,000+ life lesson without having to experience the pain. About a month ago there was a thread where someone thought they *had* to have something which cost $100,000. Members of the forums dug up a great alternative which was only $1,700. Now he is in an incredible position without all that debt! It is easy to think that debt is the key to growth, but "When the Student is Ready, the Teacher will appear" is a better way to think about growth. If you have to take on a lot of debt to do something then it might not be a great idea. Debt works to limit you. It consumes your thought cycles, adds uncertainty, and pull attention away from what you do best. It raises your stress and is a major cause of divorce. Rand's story of building up a half million of debt is a good story of why it should be avoided. And he didn't start getting very successful until the debts were being paid off so he could focus on growing his business. Given open source content management services like Wordpress, free themes, 99Designs, cheap web hosting, tons of market research data from keyword tools, etc. a person can get started for only a few hundred Dollars. Presuming you start by attacking your market from an informational angle, there is no need to take on huge leverage to get a project started. Money can be a great lever. And if you have a lot of it certainly it makes sense to use it to your advantage. But the compounding interest on debt is also a lever working against you. It is what forces us to have recessions. Can you succeed with the use of debt? Sure. But debt is a claim on future labor (with interest). The net impact on most people is probably more harmful than it is good. Particularly because if you spend more than you are making today then tomorrow you need to cut your expenses to within your income cut your expenses below your income to have money for interest on the loans cut your expenses further to have capital to pay off the principal of the loan And you have to do that in an increasingly gamed market where the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time. You don't control international balance of payments issues, but you certainly feel its impact in job security & the unemployment numbers. At any time forces beyond your control can pull the plug, rewrite the terms, or impact your market in ways that put you in a sour situation. If you have no debt and a bit of savings they can only screw you a bit. If you are loaded up on debt there are some risks you can't take. They own you. "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it." — Albert Einstein Am I trying to say there is such a thing as a perfectly secure market position? Not at all. Market makers are often market manipulators. But when I read this quote: "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," Schmidt said, "but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them." the last thing I want to do is load up on debt. How about you?

Marketing generally has 2 core strategies in terms of customers: finding new customers & keeping your current/old customers happy. The best businesses tend to keep the interest of their customers for months and years through consistently improving their products and services to deliver more value. Whereas the other sorts of businesses tend to be hard-close / hype driven & always promoting a new product / software / scheme. It is never a complete system being sold, but some "insider secret" shortcut that unearths millions automatically while you sleep - perpetually. ;) One of the problems with false scarcity hype launches is that it attracts the type of customers who can't succeed. The people who are receptive to that sort of marketing want to be sold a dream, they are not the type of people who want to put the time and effort in to become successful. They are at stage 2 in this video: "my life sucks" ... so sell me a story that will instantly make everything better without requiring any change from me at all. ;) Another one of the problems with the hype launch business model is that it requires you to keep repeating the sales process like a traveling salesman. Each day you need to think up a new scheme or angle to sell a new set of crap from, and you have to hope that the web has a short enough memory that the scammy angles used to pitch past hyped up product launches don't come to bite you in the ass. I don't mind when the get rich quick market work their core market, as there is a group of weak minded individuals who are addicted to buying that stuff. But I always get pissed off when someone claims that your field is trash or a scam (as an angle to sell something else), and then they later start trying to paint themselves as an expert in your field. Here is a video snippet of Ryan Deiss exclaiming his ignorance of the SEO field & how he got ripped off thrice because he knew so little he couldn't tell a bad service provider from a good one. "If you want to get free traffic you have to get good at the cut-throat game of SEO (which I for one am not). ... SEO for most of us isn't the right answer." - Ryan Deiss And his latest info-product (in perhaps a series of dozens of them?) is called Perpetual Traffic Formula. In the squeeze page he highlights that it offers you the opportunity to... "Discovering a crack in Google algorithm so big it simply can't be patched. Being able repeat the process for similar results in UNLIMITED niches." You don't have to be an expert to create an info-product! The Droid has a pretty good review of how awful his sites are doing in terms of "perpetual traffic." :D If you want to buy from a person who *always* has another new product with a secret short cut to sell, Ryan is THE guy. If you want to learn how to evaluate the quality of products being sold, here are some good tips on that front. And if you want to get a good overview of the internet marketing world for free you will love this.

PPC Blog has another cool infographic out. This one is called The History of Search: How Finding Stuff Online Became a $20 Billion Business. Click on the below image to see the full version. And if you like it, feel free to use the embed code to add it to your website :)

Rel=nofollow to the Rescue Years ago Google introduced rel=nofollow, claiming it as a cure-all for comment spam. Once in place, it was quickly promoted as a tool to use on any paid link. Google scared webmasters about selling links so much that many webmasters simply became afraid to link out to anyone for fear of falling out of favor with Google. If You Don't Disclose You Are a Spammer As the pool of links dried up due to the launch & spread of nofollow any ad network which used direct links was supposed to adopt nofollow or feel the wrath. Just ask Pay Per Post what Google can do to you if you sell links (to/through someone other than Google). Google demanded that any form of paid link contain a machine readable and user readable disclaimer that it is paid for (even though in Google's marketing they highlight how some of their users are unaware the search results contain paid links). What it came down to is if there was a monetary relationship associated with a link and you didn't disclose it then you were operating outside of Google's guidelines and may be considered a "spammer." Selective Search Guideline Enforcement I am one of many who have highlighted how by-and-large Google was responsible for killing off the link graph through their paranoia about "paid links," and their willingness to fund companies operating outside their guidelines that syndicate Google ads. Our affiliate program on this site stopped passing link juice after a fellow SEO blogger outed it quite publicly. Other affiliate programs continue to pass PageRank. Highlighting Google's double standards invites more scrutiny and more selective arbitrary enforcement. Whereas promoting Google products earns free links. ;) No Disclosure Required: WOOT! Reading the news today I found out that VigLink bought out DrivingTraffic. Both are networks to help publishers monetize their outbound links. The claim about VigLink is the one of no-effort money: "Quite simply, if you're a Web publisher who hasn't recognized the value of your outbound traffic, you are leaving money on the table," said Raymond Lyle, CEO and Co-Founder of Driving Revenue. "Dozens of our publishers make six figure incomes for a one-time investment of one minute of work. Who isn't interested in that?" Note that "1 minute of work" doesn't really leave much time for disclosure. As stated in this video, the intent is to not offer any: The page loads fast. And your site looks exactly the same. Even your links look and behave the same way. The only difference is that now when your visitors buy products or services you'll earn a commission. ... Once you have set up viglink you can sign in to view reports about your site. You can see how much money you are making every day and compare that with last week. You can see which merchants are the most profitable, and make decisions on who to link to in the future. So basically Viglink is suggesting controlling who you link to based on whatever makes you the most money, and not providing any disclosure of the financial relationship. AKA: paid links. Presumably these VigLinks will still pass PageRank, but the affiliate stuff will be layered on top of the regular links using JavaScript. Pay affiliates using VigLink a bit of a higher percent for the exposure and you bought a ton of valuable inbound links for pennies on the Dollar. Here is where it really gets screwed up: Google is an investor in VigLink. Selectively allowing some links to pass link juice while arbitrarily blocking others indeed controls the shape of the web graph. It gives anyone who works with Google a strong competitive advantage in the organic search results over those who are not using Google endorsed technology. Google also has a patent on automatically adding inline links inside content. Since they can't legally do it without permission of the webmaster, one presumes any implementation would be as part of a distributed ad network. Makes you wonder about how evil undisclosed paid links are, no?

Perhaps part of the "interesting data" Richard Rosenblatt was talking about was link anchor text on expired domains & cybersquatting efforts that he could redirect in bulk at high earning eHow pages. Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search results. I am not sure how long Yahoo!'s link function will work for, but below are screenshots showing the inbound links pointing at these expired domains that eHow was exploiting. After the domains got press coverage Demand Media quickly removed the redirects & the domains are generic PPC park pages. The domain names are registered using a proxy for cover to hide who is behind this sort of activity, but if you click on the "Buy this domain" link it leads to AcquireThisName.com, which has been highlighted as an eNom front organization: if these domains were acquired by Enom, fair and square and not from their own customers, then why all the deception, and not just offer these domains for sale through Enom? Is this another example of registrar abuse? Certainly, this maybe another reason for all domainers to take a long hard look at which companies they choose to do business with. Buying expired domain names for links is something Matt Cutts loathes. In fact, the first time he came across spam it was someone doing the exact same thing eNom was doing above - taking a well linked to domain name and leveraging that link equity for another purpose (see the very first question in the following video). The very technique that eHow uses today is *exactly* what caused Matt to create Google's anti-spam team! Google's blind eye and double standards toward the large MFA spam sites are becoming such a big issue that it looks to be at the core of the marketing strategy for new search engines!

Posted by Aaron Wheeler In this week's Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven't heard about. Given the importance of link building to SEO, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p) View statistics for this video Embed video <object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_174843" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_174843&mediaDuration=397.13"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_174843" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_174843&mediaDuration=397.13"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed('wistia_174843',640,360,{videoUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin',stillUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin',distilleryUrl:'http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x',accountKey:'wistia-production_3161',mediaId:'wistia-production_174843',mediaDuration:397.13})</script> <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz - SEO Software</a>   Video Transcription   Hey, SEOmoz fans!  Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.  Today we're talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the SEO sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site. Let's start with number one up here, giving testimonials.  I know this sounds a little odd.  You're thinking to yourself, "Wait, I'm a marketer.  I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company."  But in fact, give and you shall receive. So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service.  I enjoy using it.  If you'd like to use this as a testimonial, feel free."  You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of SEOmoz."  When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site. So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you.  I would definitely not do this disingenuously.  Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend.  It will come back and bite you otherwise.  But if you do this, you can get those great links too. The second one, design galleries.  This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops.  If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing.  I don't even know why I put so many boxes and lines.  I am sure there was a reason.  You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery.  If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great. Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired.  See what makes it.  See what is hot right now.  Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users.  Using CSS properly means that you're loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate.  It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well.  Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship.  As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site.  They'll find you more credible.  They'll want to show you off.  They'll want to share.  This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future. Number three.  This is sort of an interesting one.  Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is.  Can we interview you, show off your business?"  Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well.  When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link. Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story.  I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don't always do great things with that data.  They'll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways.  It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research.  If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means.  I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what's happening.  I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source.  When I combine those, I have great link and media bait.  The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that's interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you. A good example of this, check out www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts and you'll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we've combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data.  We didn't even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we're going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that."  Now when they do, they link back to SEOmoz and have the source in there.  We'll always say what the original source is too.  But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links. All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today.  I look forward to the discussion in the comments.  We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.  Take care. Video transcription by SpeechPad.com If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishIt's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah. If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we? Big Improvements to PRO Membership It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available. If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect. Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post) There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out. The Web App is Now in Public Beta Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking. We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab. As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better. Still Ironing Out Some Kinks There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon. I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues. We Love Your Feedback If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post. Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Dana LookadooThis post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.   Presentation Off Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).   Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion: Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you  never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch: You pitch SEO before that. Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all. Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story. He showed the Mozzers how  to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data. He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions. Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>  Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger: Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy. In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc. Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic: <If you're taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...> Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back. “Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average." Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords: Show competitors in SERPs. Match it with yeyword demand. Show how they are doing, side-by-side.   And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will. OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race. Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.” She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions: 1.     What is your website trying to do? 2.     If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground? 3.     What is the biggest threat to your success? You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus) Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including: Social Network Filters – combine Google Image Search - Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation. Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised. MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any  number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar(). Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.” Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist: Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships Take the resulting insights and dive deeper Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company Show the action items (not the data) to your company Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance. Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds: Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time: High Priority Tactics: Sitemaps Education 301s Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking Rel=canonical Rewriting urls How much it will make? What's the cost/traffic potential Low Priority Tactics: Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals. URLs Link Flow Video SEO Duplicate content CMS Overhaul W3C compliance Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point. Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle: Optimize all assets! Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating. Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race: rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem. Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap. Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors. Title is the most important element. Analytics suck!!!!!!!! Omniture – over reports search referrers Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images) Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.  Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize. Tom Critchlow Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:   Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan forMid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDFLong-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before. QDF = Query Deserves Freshness QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links. Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!  Keyword harvesting tools: Google Search Suggest Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific Google Related Searches       Mozenda + API = WIN Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool. Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche. Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche. Look at how people tag stories on Delicious The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)    Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.) Build an SEO friendly CMS: Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:   Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following: Delicious tags – todo, toread (API) Foursquare top checkins (API) Local events calendar (API) Yahoo Answers (API) Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish) No API? – Mozenda ftw! More: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was: It’s not that hard! <sigh>   Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc  that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.   Thank you, Tom! Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach. Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time. The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework: She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale: Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific. She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now. Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site. Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand. Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked: How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ... Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design: Unclear call-to-action Too many choices Asking for too much info Too much text Not keeping your promises Visual distractions Lack of trust We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Dana LookadooThis post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races. Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman." When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway. Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself. From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between 1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP." The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained: You have to be seen as a brand. You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name. You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs. Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface. Image results don’t always match image SERP's order, i.e. images for the artist "manet." Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration. Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay. The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image." Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size: Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased. So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text. Video SERPs It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking: Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit Step #4: PROFIT $$$ See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more. Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor: "If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO." 2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained: Straight from Google’s mouth: Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010) And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.) Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now: Craigslist Twitter FaceBook Citysearch Google Products Mobile devices Garmin GPS Wikipedia Virtual Augmented Reality Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary: Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites. Local SEO is about optimizing locations. Takeaway: "It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy." "Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!" Resources to claim your listings: Google Places Bing Local Listing Center Yahoo! Local Business Center "The Big Three" major data providers: infoUSA Localeze Acxiom Citations - David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org. 3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.   Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three: Takeaway: Don’t talk about  yourself so much. Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself! Takeaway: Try to stay positive. If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful. Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower. Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate. Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words: Timing for retweets: Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate. Tip:  Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR? Put a bit.ly link in the browser. Type a plus sign after it; Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through. Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism. Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ... He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.) Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable. Check out Dan's set of social media tools. 4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin. I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by SuzzicksSo here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically. All One Index Soon? Why does this happen?Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content - like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a 'one index' solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively…. Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones But I have gone astray – We were talking about 'mobile'. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google's ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows! As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone. There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order. You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like 'site:' and 'link:' work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search - a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes. Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone. If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer,  and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing. Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it! You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results. Mobile Usability Options: Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages Only: One set of pages that has two or more style sheets – One for traditional web rendering, usually called ‘screen,’ and one (or more) for mobile web rendering, usually called ‘handheld.’ An important note is that the iPhone will automatically pull the ‘screen’ stylesheet, unless you give other instructions. Since looking at a traditional website on an iPhone is really not a great user experience, I recommend creating a specific stylesheet that can be pulled by the iPhone. You can get very granular with this, and create separate style sheets for all different kinds of phones. You would then simply have them called in based on the screen size of the device that they target._Traditional Pages for Computer and Mobile Pages for all Phones: Two sets of pages – one to be shown on traditional computers and one to be shown on mobile phones. The file structure of the mobile pages should be an exact replica of the traditional pages, with the addition of the ‘.m' or '/m'. User-agent detection and redirection should deliver feature phone users and smart phone users to the mobile pages automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page.Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. _Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages for Traditional and SmartPhone, Mobile Specific Pages for Feature Phones: Two sets of pages; one set of pages that are the mobile/traditional hybrid pages that use separate external stylesheets to be rendered on traditional computer screens and smart phones. The second set of pages are mobile specific pages, hosted on an ‘m.’ or a ‘/m’. The file structure should be an exact replica of the traditional file structure, with the addition of the ‘m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page while they are on a feature phone.Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone._Traditional Pages for Computers, Graphical Mobile Pages for Smart Phones, Text Mobile Pages for Feature Phones: Three sets of pages. Traditional pages for traditional computers, touch-optimized pages for smart phones with touch screens, and mobile-optimized pages for feature phones and smart phones without touch screens. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users with touch screens to the touch-screen pages if they click on a link while they are on a touch-screen phone. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users on feature phones and smart phones that don’t have a touch-screen to the mobile-optimized pages if they click on a link while they are on one of those types of phones. In this scenario, you will need two mobile-specific subdomains or subdirectories. I recommend using ‘touch.’ or /’touch’ for the touch-screen pages, and ‘m.’ or /m’ for the mobile-optimized pages.Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. All sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on either version of the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead. It can also be used to send FeaturePhone or SmartPhone users to the version of the site that is best suited for their phone. Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Tom_CWe all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let's mash those two things together. In this post I've collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained...... :-) Which Are My Top Folders The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I've been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com: Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget. Creating Geo Link Maps Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled's backlinks: Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep's wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic.... I can but dream :-) Pretty Tag clouds Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website.... These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let's you make the pretty pictures. Visualising Directory Links When quickly scanning a site's backlink profile there's a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It's not that the non-quality links don't work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in: =IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N") This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn't catch everything I've found that it get's you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this: Venn Diagrams Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor's links that looks a bit like this: Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here. Broken Links I know this tool has been written about before and it's not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole's chrome extension "SEO site tools": Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it's useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools: I like this view, especially when I'm looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently. SEOmoz Labs While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to: Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishToday I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below. 50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities) You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page's importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We've been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google's rankings and Domain Authority. This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn't have time to make an updated chart) _  You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We've heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don't make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I'll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain's top Page Authority URLs. New Partnerships Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge's enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they've shared a few screenshots with us: Like our beta web app, Brightedge's software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec). They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you're getting). This isn't yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves! You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" - something we haven't done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly. We're also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including: Flippa - the web's leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper Raven Tools - an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section We've previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you're interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki. Improvements to Anchor Text  If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below: We've gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape's API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text: SEO Seo seo Following tonight's update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-) Index Stats This month, as always, we've got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows: 41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages 366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains 96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains 409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links Some other interesting numbers this month include: 5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical - the highest yet! 3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive 2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain) 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains) 84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain) 87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year's end. And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you've got!p.s. We're taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:We believe our testing for this index wasn't robust enough -we've now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren't logical moves.While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.We're taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I'll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP.  Thanks for sharing this information with us.p.s. Update #2 - I've added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We're working hard to make this better.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement. View statistics for this video Embed video <object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_165206" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/fc143d15ac99339a41b6d6c829d995f9c89446c5.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/7a2299aa12dd0c85338da0b2507fcf737a0da4e4.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_165206&mediaDuration=531.78"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_165206" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/fc143d15ac99339a41b6d6c829d995f9c89446c5.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/7a2299aa12dd0c85338da0b2507fcf737a0da4e4.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_165206&mediaDuration=531.78"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed('wistia_165206',640,360,{videoUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/fc143d15ac99339a41b6d6c829d995f9c89446c5.bin',stillUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/7a2299aa12dd0c85338da0b2507fcf737a0da4e4.bin',distilleryUrl:'http://distillery.wistia.com/x',accountKey:'wistia-production_3161',mediaId:'wistia-production_165206',mediaDuration:531.78})</script> <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz - SEO Software</a>   Video Transcription Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites -- it doesn't matter what you're selling consumer products, B-to-B products, in this case, I am doing an office supplies example -- you've got a big problem in that people just don't want to naturally link to those pages. The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product, your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think this can be a big, big positive. So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example. Here's Acme Store. They've got the standard manufacturer's picture that the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly. Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add to Cart" button. You haven't added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I don't know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price. But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I have some vested interest. The search engines don't like to count those kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to every other ecommerce provider. Let's take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I'm going to walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much more exciting, and they're not that much additional effort. Right? To some degree, but that's what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page, everyone would be doing it and you couldn't have the competitive advantage. Here I've got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I've sort of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there. But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are searching for it, you probably don't want to change up the title dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure, maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don't have to do this. I could just keep the standard title if that's what it takes, and I can add uniqueness in other places. Let's start with the images. If you just take the one image that the manufacturer suggests, you're really losing out. A great example of this story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single angle. They've got the shoe. They've got the side of the shoe. They've got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom. They've done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The great part about this isn't just that these images are now yours and yours alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say, "Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page. You've got tons of opportunity. I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images. Sometimes you'll see websites where you click a different one of these and the URL changes. You don't want that unless it's in a hashtag, because it will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL. Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well. It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people, who weren't interested in the products at all and probably never bought something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we're aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who are passionate about it, you're going to get such better content there. Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the popularity in a specific category. I think that's a good one. It lets people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on Amazon, they can see how well they're performing in the category. Other people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats. There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they buy them at the end of summer? I don't know. Let's see. Those sales trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product. Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your customer database, that are anonymous. It won't be sharing privacy issues, but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link to it and make this page more unique and valuable. Number five, I love the comparisons. If you've ever been to a site like CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn't have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are a real unique value proposition, because now you're not just the source for where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they'll buy from you. Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don't Like." The comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What's your experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we're an office supply store. Let' see if we can get everyone to rate the usability of this, whether it's travel worthy versus whether it's rugged and durable versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable. All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don't know. We'll see how long it takes to develop. Hopefully you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care. Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Dr. PeteGoogle's recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let's look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here's a summary of what that results page looks like today:Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google's argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?Unraveling Search IntentOne of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It's nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple": "itunes" "facebook" "youtube" "apple" "best buy" "apple store" "google" "craigslist" "itunes download" Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn't get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don't succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there's also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.Bing Search FunnelUnfortunately, Google doesn't have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing: "bestbuy" "ebay" "ipod" "dell" "appleipod" "circuitcity" "apple vacations" "apple.com" "sony" "target" Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown's Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn't want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.What Do We Want?Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there's a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it's obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.Do you like this post? Yes No

clickz Google, Adobe, and Intuit's Mint.com demonstrate that corporate blogs can thrive.

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clickz Digital marketers have access to insights that can help their business weather tough economic times.

clickz The best websites of 2010 all offer a unique take on their respective content category and the ability to attract millions of engaged Internet users.

clickz Before marketers allocate bigger budgets for mobile advertising, there are lessons to learn from "traditional" online advertising.

clickz Is click-through rate a better success metric for e-mail marketing campaigns?

clickz Mass customization does not spell certain death for analytics. Quite the opposite.

clickz Ad networks and exchanges offer ways to reach qualified consumers and gain consumer insights. Consider these three ways.

clickz Mailbox providers don't think of "engagement" the same way that marketers do. Consider these six approaches to better connect with your subscribers.

clickz Some businesses blindly spend money on paid search advertising without giving any thought to search engine optimization. Here's why they are throwing away money.

clickz Marketers and researchers size up geo-location services, mobile, and the blurring of lines between search and display advertising.

clickz We are so concerned with moving the online consumer to the mobile channel that we forget we're assuming that consumers are online/Web customers first.

To do better in search this holiday season, marketers need to spend less on search. Here's why. ...

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SMBs generally have relatively tight marketing budgets. Here's how you can quickly figure out when you'll see a return on your SEO or PPC investments. ...

These seven common types of prospect keywords will expand how you think about link prospecting and help you become a smarter, more strategically agile link builder. ...

Catch up on the latest: Google Reports, Google Campaign Experiments, and Facebook's "Broad Match Targeting." ...

Need help deciding where to invest your limited time in social media? Use these tips on how and where to create online conversations about your SMB. ...

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Real-time search has introduced new experiences to standard search. Are these new result types causing a shift in user behavior? This Explido/Search Engine Watch eye-tracking study analyzes the SERPs and search engines by the numbers. ...

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A little over a month ago, we reported this story "Facebook In Early Stage Search Engine Tests?" and detailed some of the changes we were noticing. Well, today, based on another tip from bloggers at All Facebook, we can confirm that Facebook is indeed displaying 'liked' news content in it's search result drop down. In fact, further to what All Facebook reported, they are also displaying content shared by your network of friends that matches the keywords you are sharing.Click to read the rest of this post...

The Isreali start-up AOL bought three years ago to compete in the Q&A market has been rebranded as AOL Answers this week. The site is similar to Answer.com, Yahoo Answers and Ask Answers.Click to read the rest of this post...

Only two years ago, the Associated Press tried to stop bloggers from using their content. Threatening to charge sites that used their content and demaned that The Drudge Reports pull headlines and story briefs from their site. But now AP is singing a different song - saying this week that they will credit bloggers for any stories they break.Click to read the rest of this post...

Seems the privacy advocates see Google as 'evil'. Or at least the animated cartoon aired by Watchdog on the Times Square jumbotron suggested that yesterday. The clip below shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt gathering information from children as they attempt to buy ice cream from his Google truck.Click to read the rest of this post...

If you haven't already seen it YouTube has recently added two targeting features which enable advertisers to have more control on what videos their ads are placed on. Age restriction and video or channel URL restriction. Age restriction is not a self service feature, and will require you to work with your official Youtube representative but URL restriction is a feature you can enable yourself.Click to read the rest of this post...

Today Apple launched Ping. You can get the full story on ClickZ who covered the announcement. Were you expecting apple to launch a music social network today?Click to read the rest of this post...

At some point during the crush of Connected Marketing Week, Experian Hitwise announced the launch of two new premium Search Intelligence products that can improve your search marketing performance. I just found the press release in my email, so I hope you don't mind if I finally get around to reporting the "news."Click to read the rest of this post...

Following their new computer to phone calling service Google have launched a new beta feature for Gmail users, called priority inbox. It ranks your email according to what you read.Click to read the rest of this post...

Hot on the heels of the organic results integration in the US, Yahoo & Bing both announced today that now is the time to begin preparing your paid search accounts for the final integration, in which Microsoft Adcenter will power all paid search ads on Yahoo! Search in the U.S. & Canada.Click to read the rest of this post...

One of the events that was part of Connected Marketing Week was a one-day forum on the "Future of Display: Ad Networks and Exchanges," which was co-programmed by the IAB Networks and Exchanges committee.Click to read the rest of this post...

Webmaster Level: AllNow there’s a new way to see just the messages for a specific site. A new Messages feature will appear on all site pages. The feature is just like the Message Center on the home page, except it‘ll show only messages for the currently selected site. This gives you more freedom to choose how you want to view your messages: either for all your sites or for just one site at a time.Alerts (formally known as SiteNotice messages) will now be more prominent in the Message Center. These messages tell you about significant changes we’ve noticed related to your site which may indicate serious problems. For instance, alerts may warn you about an increase in crawl errors, an increase in 404 errors, or about possible outages. With their newfound prominence comes a new name: what used to be “SiteNotice messages” will now simply be known as “alerts.”Messages containing alerts will be marked with an icon to make them quickly distinguishable from other messages. Each site’s Dashboard will display a notification whenever the site has unread alerts. The Dashboard notification will lead to the new site Message Center with a filter enabled to show only alerts for the current site.You can also enable the alerts filter yourself. On the home page, enabling the alerts filter across all your sites is a great way to see alerts you may have missed and may help you find problems common across multiple sites. Even with these changes we recommend you use the email forwarding feature to receive these important alerts without having to visit Webmaster Tools. We hope these new features make it easier to manage your messages. If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.Written by Steve Geluso, Software Engineering Intern

Webmaster Level: AllSince the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared to one year ago. Here are three recent product updates.Testing tool improvementsDespite the healthy adoption rate by webmasters so far, implementing the rich snippets markup correctly can still be a major challenge. To help address this, we’ve added new error messages to the rich snippets testing tool to help you better identify and fix any problems with the markup.If you’ve added markup in the past but haven’t seen rich snippets appear for your site, we encourage you to take a few minutes to try testing the markup again on the updated testing tool.Rich snippets markup for breadcrumbsLast year, Google announced a modification to search results to begin showing site hierarchies (typically referred to as "breadcrumbs") rather than standard URLs in cases where it helped users to better understand a website:We are now adding support for a Breadcrumbs markup format that allows webmasters to explicitly identify the breadcrumb hierarchy on their pages.If the breadcrumbs UI is already showing for your site, we'll continue to show it even if you don't do the markup, so don't worry about any existing UI disappearing. Note that this new format is experimental. Based on feedback and on other available standards, this format may be modified or replaced in the future. As with other rich snippet types, while markup helps us to better understand the content on your site, it does not guarantee that the breadcrumbs UI will be shown for your web pages in search results.EventsIn January, we added support for rich snippets for events. If a web page containing events listings showed up in search results, up to three links to specific events could be shown in the search result snippet.This works well for general queries like [concerts in seattle], but we also wanted to improve the search experience when searching for a specific event. We will now show rich snippets when pages containing a single event show up in search results. Single event rich snippets now contain the date and location of the event:For instructions on adding events markup, refer to the events page in the rich snippets documentation.Posted by Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta, Search Quality team

Webmaster Level: AllYou can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.Posted by Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata, Software Engineers

Webmaster Level: AllToday we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results. We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.Written by Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllNobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you're ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They're very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today.You can now use a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to verify ownership of your website. If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button.This only works with the newer asynchronous Analytics JavaScript, so if you haven't migrated yet, now is a great time. If you haven't set up Google Analytics or verified yet, go ahead and set up Google Analytics first, then come verify ownership of your site. It'll save you a little time — who doesn't like that? Just as with all of our other verification methods, the Google Analytics JavaScript needs to stay in place on your site, or your verification will expire. You also need to remain an administrator on the Google Analytics account associated with the JavaScript snippet.Don't forget that once you've verified ownership, you can add other verified owners quickly and easily through the Verification Details page. There's no need for each owner to manually verify ownership. More effort and time saved!We've also introduced an improved interface for verification. The new verification page gives you more information about each verification method. In some cases, we can now provide detailed instructions about how to complete verification with your specific domain registrar or provider. If your provider is included, there's no need to dig through their documentation to figure out how to add a verification DNS record — we'll walk you through it.The time you save using these new verification features might not be enough to let you take up a new hobby, but we hope it makes the verification process a little bit more pleasant. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.Written by Sean Harding, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllYou can now check your Video Sitemap for even more errors right in Webmaster Tools! It’s a new Labs feature to signal issues in your Video Sitemap such as:URLs disallowed by robots.txtThumbnail size errors (160x120px is ideal. Anything smaller than 90x50 will be rejected.)Video Sitemaps help us to better crawl and extract information about your videos, so we can appropriately feature them in search results.Totally new to Video Sitemaps? Check out the Video Sitemaps center for more information. Otherwise, take a look at this new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools.Written by Jackie Lai, Video Search Team

Webmaster Level: AllIf you want to add video information to a Sitemap or mRSS feed you must specify the location of the video. This means you must include one of two tags, either the video:player_loc or video:content_loc. In the case of an mRSS feed, these equivalent tags are media:player or media:content, respectively. We need this information to verify that there is actually a live video on your landing page and to extract metadata and signals from the video bytes for ranking. If one of these tags is not included we will not be able to verify the video and your Sitemap/mRSS feed will not be crawled. To reduce confusion, here is some more detail about these elements.Video Locations DefinedPlayer Location/URL: the player (e.g., .swf) URL with corresponding arguments that load and play the actual video.Content Location/URL: the actual raw video bytes (e.g., .flv, .avi) containing the video content.The RequirementsOne of either the player video:player_loc or content video:content_loc location is required. However, we strongly suggest you provide both, as they each serve distinct purposes: player location is primarily used to help verify that a video exists on the page, and content location helps us extract more signals and metadata to accurately rank your videos. URL extensions at a glance:Sitemap:mRSS:Contents:<loc><link>The playpage URL<video:player_loc><media:player> (url attribute)The SWF URL<video:content_loc><media:content> (url attribute)The FLV or other raw video URLNOTE: All URLs should be unique (every URL in your entire Video Sitemap and mRSS feed should be unique)If you would like to better ensure that only Googlebot accesses your content, you can perform a reverse DNS lookup.For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search for answers check out our Help Forum.Posted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager, Video Search

Webmaster Level: AllWhen Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we're now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don't want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon

Webmaster Level: AllWe know that some of you, or your clients or colleagues, may be new to online video publishing. To make it easier for everyone to understand video indexing and Video Sitemaps, we’ve created a video -- narrated by Nelson Lee, Video Search Product Manager -- that explains everything in basic terms:Also, last month we wrote about some best practices for getting video content indexed on Google. Today, to help beginners better understand the whys and hows of implementing a Video Sitemap, we added a starting page to the information on Video Sitemaps in the Webmaster Help Center. Please take a look and share your thoughts.Posted by Amy MacIsaac, Content Partnerships

Webmaster Level: AllHave you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1" xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc> <image:image> <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc> </image:image> <video:video> <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc> <video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title> </video:video> </url></urlset>Here's an example of what you'll see in Webmaster Tools when a Sitemap containing multiple content types is submitted:We hope the capability to include multiple content types in one Sitemap simplifies your Sitemap submission. The rest of the Sitemap rules, like 50,000 max URLs in one file and the 10MB uncompressed file size limit, still apply. If you have questions or other feedback, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content -- something that lets your expertise shine -- people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and "spread the word." Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site's reputation in a positive way.Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We've seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site's source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them. Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it's important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easilyFinally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users' attention.As usual, we'd like to hear your opinion. You're welcome to comment here in the blog, or join our Webmaster Help Forum community.Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin

Webmaster Level: AllWe'd like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txtSometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:PlaypageContent and playerThumbnailMore information about robots.txt.Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played inIs your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don't need to include this.Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can result in the search engine's index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn't exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards. To signal that a video has been removed,Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages. Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the <video:expiration_date> element) or mRSS feed (<dcterms:valid> tag) submitted to Google.For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search answers check out our Help Forum.Posted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager, Video Search

It’s time for an update on my 30 day challenges. Here’s what I’ve done the last few months: June: I didn’t respond to email after 10 p.m. and I read the New Testament of the Bible. Both were interesting in different ways. It turns out that 10 p.m. is a pretty good time for me to [...]

“Don’t think. Just walk.” — a fellow hiker. Last week I returned from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. I’ll start with the bottom line: I made it to the top! That’s three of us at sunrise on the sixth day. We took the Machame route, which takes seven days. In theory, you could march [...]

If you’re on Linux (say Ubuntu 10.04, also known as Lucid Lynx), you can switch between the developer (dev) and beta channels of Chrome like this: Switch from Beta to Dev: sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstable Switch from Dev to Beta: sudo apt-get install google-chrome-beta That’s easier for me than going back for the .deb file and doing something with it. Also, [...]

I’m leaving Tuesday to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If you want to show your support, please donate at charity:water. Anyone who wants to give is welcome. Mt. Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa, at 19,340 feet (5895 meters). It’s hard to climb Kilimanjaro, mainly because of the altitude. I’ll be completely without [...]

Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potential customers, VCs, people at big companies). It’s good advice. Paul Graham also wrote in 2008 about startup ideas he’d like to [...]

About a year and a half ago, I asked for suggestions for webspam projects for 2009. The feedback that we got was extremely helpful. It’s almost exactly the middle of 2010, so it seemed like a good time to ask again: what projects do you think webspam should work on in 2010 and beyond? Here’s the [...]

This month I made my 30 day challenge be “Don’t respond to email after 10 p.m.” I’ve done very well overall on this challenge, and I like the results a lot. I’ll probably try to keep up this behavior. Now I need to pick my next challenge. I read through the 350+ suggestions and comments that [...]

Have you given Buzz a try recently? Robert Scoble just asked if it was time to reconsider Buzz. Coincidentally I said almost the same thing in a question and answer session with Danny Sullivan last week at the SMX Advanced search conference. I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started [...]

In this webcast, representatives from iProspect, Searchandise Commerce and comScore will discuss the results of a July 2010 research study that analyzed the various paths that online retail shoppers take to research and purchase products - both online and offline. You will discover how search engines and site search on retailers' websites work together to engage shoppers. The webcast will also address what users of retail site search consider to be premium positioning within the site search results, and the value they place on that positioning.

In Q4 of 2009 representatives from iProspect, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft hosted small, intimate events for online marketers in 8 cities around the U.S. At these events there were no Powerpoint slides, no scripts, no prepared content – just a commitment to answer any and all questions that marketers had about paid search and online display advertising. This webcast is a byproduct of leanings from those events: what was on marketers’ minds, where their pain points were, and what interested them most. It is also intended to be a virtual version of those events – enabling those who dial in to ask questions about paid search and display advertising directly to the experts at iProspect and the search engines.

Google has famously stated that all you need to get started with paid search is five minutes and a credit card. While that’s essentially true, to avoid wasting money and to achieve optimal results from your paid search campaign, you need to test, experiment, and test again.

For six weeks during the Fall of 2009 executives from iProspect — in partnership with executives from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft — traveled to 10 cities around the U.S. hosting events for 15-25 search engine marketers in each city.

In this webcast, we will give the audience a chance to ask the experts about paid search advertising. Senior management from iProspect, the Original Search Engine Marketing Firm, will open the floor to questions from attendees on what it takes to compete with the biggest and the best when it comes to paid search.

In this webcast, Chris Sherman explores how to blend offline marketing with online search marketing for maximum effectiveness. He'll discuss strategies and techniques, such as ways to coordinate online and offline campaigns; he'll also explore how to overcome the obstacles that can come up when trying to integrate the online and offline channels in a large organization.

Learn how to balance buying listings and optimization - and how you can achieve the right mix. We'll discuss the paid/optimization interaction and how to craft the right message based on each type of listing. Sponsored by iProspect and presented by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land.

The worldwide reach of search engines offers bountiful opportunities for search marketers to run global search campaigns. But running a successful multi–national search campaign involves more than just translating your web site or enabling ecommerce platforms that can handle multiple currencies. In this webcast, Chris Sherman explores how search marketers can be successful in the global arena. Attend this webcast and find out how you can maximize the effectiveness of your global search marketing efforts.

In the study sponsored by iProspect and Searchandise Commerce - and conducted by comScore - you'll learn about the various paths that online retail shoppers take to research and purchase products - both online and offline. You'll also discover how search engines and site search on retailers' websites work together to engage shoppers. The study also uncovers what users of retail site search consider to be premium positioning within the site search results, and the value they place on that positioning.

Discover the extent to which Internet users perform searches after exposure to online display advertising. Learn how to leverage search engine marketing to capture the demand created by display advertising and learn about the existing relationship between the two channels that affords marketers the opportunity to boost the efficacy of both.

Learn the extent to which search marketing efforts are integrated with a variety of offline marketing channels and the specific search marketing and integration techniques in use, as well as how to identify obstacles to the integration process.

Learn how search engine users behave when they conduct different types of searches and are presented with different types of search results within the three largest search engines (in terms of market share): Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Learn which offline channels drive Internet users to search online for information about your products or services, what types of keywords they use to perform those searches, and which of those offline channels are most influential in causing searchers to eventually make a purchase.

Learn what percentage of search marketers measure ROI and have their own job performance evaluated by the results they produce.

Learn which social networking sites search marketers are using to influence and close purchases, drive traffic to their websites, and create brand awareness.

By Kym Hannaford, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Erica Conner, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Beth Ringer, Client Relationship Manager, iProspect

By Tim Saccone, Client Services Manager, iProspect

By Krista Moller, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Lindsay Benson, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Amie Hutton, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Jennifer Cooper, Client Services Manager, iProspect

By Natasha Yemelyanova, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

We’re counting down to find out who will take home a Moon Man at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 12, 2010. This year, Yahoo! is partnering with MTV to launch “Behind the Lens,” a video hub where you can see this year’s nominated videos with pop-up Flash overlays that help you discover [...]

We’re making Search more intuitive by taking user context and applying it to the search experience. Today we are introducing an enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist, providing suggestions geographically closer to you as you type your query.  Sitting here in our Yahoo! headquarters at Sunnyvale, if I type “santa” from Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California,  I get [...]

The US Open is heating up on Yahoo! Search. This week we are launching the US Open Shortcut to help you find the information you want when you search for the championships. Whether you’re a dedicated fan or just want to check out Maria Sharapova’s outfit, simply search for ‘US Open’ or your favorite player. You [...]

It’s summertime and the livin’ is easy, but at Yahoo! Search we’ve been busy fielding queries about everything from Kermit the Frog to Zsa Zsa Gabor. Early in the month US users showed interest in Ramadan, the month of fasting which began on the evening of the 10th. Searchers looked for the meaning of Ramadan, activities [...]

I’ve heard some innuendo that with Yahoo! Search transitioning certain back-end functions to Microsoft, we are no longer a “search engine.” I find these comments amusing, but a little irresponsible. What it comes down to is that the search industry is not widely understood, so I’d like to take this opportunity to draw a few [...]

First let me say, wow, what a week! As I hope everyone saw our post from last week, Yahoo! began transitioning certain back-end functions for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft’s search platform. Well, I am proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete (for more information, check out [...]

Today we are announcing a partnership with TIM Brasil, one of the country’s largest carriers, to power the search experience on TIM’s enhanced mobile portal. Our partnership with TIM Brasil builds on our existing relationships with Telefónica’s Vivo and América Móvil’s Claro in Brazil, and more than 100 other OEM and carrier partners globally. Yahoo! Search [...]

Last month we shared that we had begun limited testing of displaying organic search listings from Microsoft on Yahoo! Search result pages.  As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’re reaching some additional significant milestones that we want to share with you today. Later this week, we will begin transitioning [...]

We’ve been very pleased with the benefits that the SearchMonkey Program has provided to Yahoo! Search users over the last two years and want to share our plans for SearchMonkey with respect to the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.  Some of the amazing improvements that SearchMonkey has enabled over the past two years include: Enhancing results [...]

Today we’ve shared our latest milestones in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. We want webmasters to know that the Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible. The information that you provide about your website and its structure using [...]