How to Increase the Odds of Your content Going Viral – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let's talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I'm talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it's in a blog format and it's got nice width. It's not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it's in a separate type of format. So let's say you've got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, "You know what? I'm actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that's the focus of the page." So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they're looking for, that there's compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they'll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you've got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you're going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that's interesting, that draws in the reader, that's relevant, you're going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you've learned that you're putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you've got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that's shared on major media websites, where it's the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It's almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I'd also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you've got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you'll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, "Oh, let's make this content say inbound startups, and that'll be my slide share presentation." So now you don't have to remember some long URL. It's just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can't control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You 're going to shrink down the title so that it's easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, "Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool."

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I'll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, "Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We've got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that's happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?" And I wrote back and said, "Yeah, I really love this. I think it's excellent. I don't even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I'd be happy to share it." This person didn't specifically ask me for a share and I think that's why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that's your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They'll also give you feedback like, "I don't really think this is going to play well," or "If you did this, it'd be very interesting, but I don't see what you've done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn't share it." Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you're not hitting it out of the park with this content. You're going to have to do something else, try something else. That's great to know before you hit that publish button.

There's a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you're thinking, boy, I just can't get these people to share what I'm producing. I don't know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I'm going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I'm going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I'm going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it's produced because you write back to them and you say, "Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live."

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can't directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they've tweeted, said on their own blogs, you're getting quotes from them, you're getting data they've shared, you're using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, "Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we're going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it's appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?" That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you're doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, "Oh, I'm going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much." Or, "Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you." Then when you publish, you can say, "Hey, we hit publish. It's now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that'd be great. Here's the shortened link or here's a tweet you could retweet." This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I'm going to mention here - topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that's from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what's going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it's being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let's say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there's usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you'll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you'll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you're emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, "Kenny, I know you've got a small Twitter account. It'd be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask." Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you've hung out in a bar before, you've bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you're going to get that. I think that's a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that's not B2B Facebooking. That's personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that's going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don't do Monday. Don't do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That's when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don't necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you're sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who's reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It's going to be different for everyone. So don't just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you're going to share with this one guy and he's going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+'s ripples, where you can actually see, it's almost like this. It'll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you're carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 27, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Content, Friday, Going, Increase, Odds, Viral, Whiteboard · Posted in: Seo

How to Increase the Odds of Your content Going Viral – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let's talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I'm talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it's in a blog format and it's got nice width. It's not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it's in a separate type of format. So let's say you've got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, "You know what? I'm actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that's the focus of the page." So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they're looking for, that there's compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they'll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you've got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you're going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that's interesting, that draws in the reader, that's relevant, you're going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you've learned that you're putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you've got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that's shared on major media websites, where it's the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It's almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I'd also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you've got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you'll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, "Oh, let's make this content say inbound startups, and that'll be my slide share presentation." So now you don't have to remember some long URL. It's just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can't control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You 're going to shrink down the title so that it's easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, "Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool."

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I'll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, "Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We've got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that's happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?" And I wrote back and said, "Yeah, I really love this. I think it's excellent. I don't even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I'd be happy to share it." This person didn't specifically ask me for a share and I think that's why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that's your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They'll also give you feedback like, "I don't really think this is going to play well," or "If you did this, it'd be very interesting, but I don't see what you've done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn't share it." Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you're not hitting it out of the park with this content. You're going to have to do something else, try something else. That's great to know before you hit that publish button.

There's a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you're thinking, boy, I just can't get these people to share what I'm producing. I don't know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I'm going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I'm going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I'm going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it's produced because you write back to them and you say, "Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live."

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can't directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they've tweeted, said on their own blogs, you're getting quotes from them, you're getting data they've shared, you're using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, "Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we're going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it's appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?" That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you're doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, "Oh, I'm going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much." Or, "Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you." Then when you publish, you can say, "Hey, we hit publish. It's now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that'd be great. Here's the shortened link or here's a tweet you could retweet." This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I'm going to mention here - topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that's from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what's going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it's being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let's say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there's usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you'll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you'll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you're emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, "Kenny, I know you've got a small Twitter account. It'd be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask." Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you've hung out in a bar before, you've bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you're going to get that. I think that's a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that's not B2B Facebooking. That's personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that's going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don't do Monday. Don't do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That's when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don't necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you're sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who's reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It's going to be different for everyone. So don't just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you're going to share with this one guy and he's going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+'s ripples, where you can actually see, it's almost like this. It'll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you're carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 27, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Increase · Posted in: Seo

Are You Wasting Budget With Online Press Release Distribution?

Posted by Tim Grice

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The title of this post may come across a little contentious, however I hope by the end of it you understand where I am coming from.

Over the years, I have been privileged enough to work with some large businesses that can afford to throw big budgets at online marketing. One of the first tasks I undertake is a meeting to discuss previous strategies. As my main focus is natural search, one of the things I always find interesting is discussing link building strategies carried out by previous agencies and internal SEOs. This can be quite enlightening, but really worrying at the same time, you begin to realise fairly quickly why SEO gets such bad press.

One of the things that always makes my head spin is companies who invest in pumping out online press releases through well-known services for the sheer purpose of building links!

"So, what's your link building strategy?", "Well, we send out press releases every week and get thousands of links!” fantastic. You realise at this point the road ahead is a long one.

This is my opinion and you can disagree with me in the comments, sending out press releases through services such as PRnewswire or Marketwire is not a link building strategy, in fact paying for these services alone is nothing but a waste of time and money.

So, I did a little research as I wanted to confirm my long held belief, asking 20 different SEOs to give a rough figure as to how much each of their clients spend on Online press release distribution. I have to say even I was shocked by the figures (a quick thank you to all those who responded, cheers guys).

Press Release Spend

As you can see 40% of clients were spending £2000 – £3000 a month on press release distribution alone, even at the most expensive rates that’s 6 – 10 per month. Do you really have that much to talk about? On top of that, 2.5% were spending over £5000 per month on press release distribution, that figure is staggering!

I work with some very big brands and they would struggle to fulfill that quota. When I asked why this amount was being spent each month, the same answers came back, "The MD/CEO/Marketing Director believes it to be a solid link building strategy". I know this isn't large enough to be a meaningful sample, but it gives you a slight insight into the minds of some fairly big organisations.

Why is it a Terrible Strategy

I'm sure you're all aware that a good link building strategy should:

Follow natural linking patterns
Be aimed at acquiring links from unique domains
Incorporate social signals

So let's go through this step by step:

Is it natural?

You're sending the same content out to multiple hubs, with the same links in the same anchor text which automatically updates within seconds. Natural? Nah, at least not on its own.

Links from unique domains?

Sure, the first time you send a press release out all your links will be from unique domains. Maybe if you use multiple distribution services you will get plenty of links from unique domains. However if you use these services month after month, all you're doing is acquiring low quality links from the same domains over and over again.

Incorporating social signals?

Erm… nope. The only way this could develop social signals is if someone actually read these releases and referred back to your site through twitter or Facebook etc…

So alone press releases are not a good link building strategy. To emphasise the point a little more I monitored a recent press release that I distributed:

press release results

Out of just over 300 hubs precisely 299 were in my report from the distribution service. A month later I checked OSE where I found 36 unique linking domains, out of these only 11 were indexed in Google and my Google alerts account only picked up on four of them. Personally I think this is some indication as to how Google value these types of links.

It's not All Doom and Gloom

I guess I better get a little more positive before I start receiving nasty emails from some of these distribution services and press release fan boys . I honestly believe that press releases can be used to benefit rankings!

I am sure some of you won't agree, but I am a firm believer in creating 'noise' links, but we'll go into that in a little while. Press releases can be used effectively as part of an integrated link building strategy.

pres release link strategy

Now I know there are other elements but I just want to cover a few of the basics:

1) Creating the Bait

So many people think link bait has to be absolutely amazing, never before seen, wonderfully awesome content. Slight exaggeration but let’s continue… Link bait in my opinion has more to do with the site publishing the content than the actual content itself. Sometimes really average content can garner tons of links simply because the site publishing it has some authority. I have seen terrible content flying around Twitter or Facebook for the simple reason that it was published on the Telegraph or New York Times etc…

So as budding SEOs, the first step to creating link bait isn't thinking up the idea, instead it is making relationships and reaching out to the right people. Getting great content on the right publication just about guarantees some decent links, of course the article published will have to refer/link back to the site you are targeting.

2) Creating noise links

What's the first thing that happens when you get an article published on a well read and well respected publication? It gets scraped hundreds of times.

A very quick example:

I had a link from the White Board Friday on 'Links in Old Content' (Thanks Cyrus). My site went on that same day to receive over 50 pingbacks! Up to date it is over 100! Thanks SEOmoz

In my opinion all these type of links (scraped links) help to raise the link profile and authority of my site. So what is the harm in giving them a push once in a while?

Google knows these popular websites get scraped and creating more of them if you have a link from a strong site, is not going to harm you and in my opinion it helps.

So provide some unique commentary of your own on the article and publish to your favourite newswire, article directories and content hubs. My personal advice would be to use plenty of variation with your anchor text as not to upset any of the algorithms.

3) Guest posting

Yes it's old news, but a really important aspect of link strategy; you should be constantly building a list of blogs you can write for whenever you want to push a new peice of content/link bait. Be proactive in reaching out to relevant bloggers. Feed them genuine content, not just a rewritten article you copied from ezinearticles. You want to make sure that when your story goes live on Fox News you have plenty of friends who will cover it and link back to your site as well as the publication. Guaranteed link bait

4) Social signals

Last but certainly not least is creating the right social signals and utilise all your resources.

As well as regularly reaching out to bloggers you should also be reaching out on Twitter and Facebook. When the time comes your new friends will be more than happy to tweet, stumble and share your ultra link worthy content.

You will also notice that content on highly authoritative resources is almost always more likely to get shared, and more sharing = more links.

So back to press releases…

Using them as a one dimensional strategy = waste of time, money and energy.

Incorporating them into an overall link building strategy, utilising them only when the content is worth sharing = winning formula.

Heading a team that builds thousands of links every month through viral and social promotions gives me some tremendous insights and I have seen the above strategy work time and time again in boosting rankings and overall organic traffic to a website.

One caveat I'll add – If you're the super industry authority and have a large readership, keep your best content for yourself.

There are lots of tools, tips and techniques out there that will help enhance a link building campaign. However we need to figure out how they fit into our overall strategy and not just throw budget mindlessly at well sold services.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 26, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Budget, Distribution, online, Press, Release, Wasting · Posted in: Seo

Face-off – 4 Ways to De-personalize Google

Posted by Dr. Pete

Just over a week ago, Google launched a massive change to search personalization, Search Plus Your World. Along with this change came a new toggle switch to shut off personalization. Below the Google search box and above the results, you’ll see something like this:

Google De-personalization Toggle

The default, person icon is personalized results, and you click on the globe to shut off “your world” (I won’t comment on how little sense that makes). Of course, we already had personalized results and a handful of ways to shut them off before, so what does “personalization” mean now, and do any of these de-personalization methods actually work? I thought it was time to put that question to the test.

The Methods

I actually started with 6 ways to de-personalize, but ended up excluding two of them for the final test (more on that below). The original 6 were:

De-personalization toggle
“pws=0” parameter
Signing out
Signing out + “pws=0”
Incognito (Chrome)
Incognito (IronKey)*

I’ve already discussed the new option (1) above, but I thought it might be a good review to talk briefly about the other options. Here’s a quick primer:

(2) “pws=0” Parameter

If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you’re familiar with the “pws=0” de-personalization parameter. By adding it to the end of a Google query URL (“&pws=0”), you can theoretically remove history-based personalization. A simplified URL would look something like this:

URL with &pws=0 parameter added

(3) Signing Out of Google

This one’s pretty straightforward. Just sign out of your Google account. Unfortunately, the Google interface has been changing a lot lately, but if you have Google+, click on your avatar in the top bar, and you’ll see an option for “Sign Out” at the bottom of the menu.

(4) Signing Out + “pws=0”

Option (4) just combines (2) and (3). Sign out of Google, run your search, and then append the “&pws=0” parameter to the URL.

(5) Incognito Browsing (Chrome)

Google’s Chrome browser has a built in “incognito” mode that supposedly removes any traces of your browsing activity, such as cookies or search history. In Chrome, click on the wrench icon in the upper right, and you’ll get an option for a “New incognito window”:

Chrome's Icognito feature

(6) Incognito Browsing (IronKey)

While Chrome’s incognito mode does seem reliable, there’s something about trusting a Google product not to pass Google data that just makes me itch. So, for my “control” condition, I used another incognito browser, a version of Firefox that runs directly off of my IronKey USB drive.

(x) Stand-alone Crawler

Originally, I was going to use a stand-alone crawler (PHP-based) as the control condition. Unfortunately, my crawlers all run out of a different state from a different C-block of IPs, so I decided to confine the test to only methods I could use directly from my office setup.

The Dry Run

I’ll discuss the search queries and metrics more below, but I initially did a dry run of 5 queries, and I ran into a couple of issues and insights that caused me to scrap that data and start over. Briefly, here’s what I learned:

Google’s Toggle <=> “pws=0”

As I was collecting data, I realized that switching Google’s new de-personalization toggle was actually adding “pws=0” to my query URLs. If you add it manually to the URL, the toggle switches itself. Options (1) and (2) are functionally identical, so I only used the de-personalization toggle in the final test.

Queries Change Frequently

I originally ran each option one-by-one, recording the data. By the time I was done (15-20 minutes), the Google results for the control had sometimes changed. I realized that I would need to run all of the versions of each query as back-to-back as possible and then collect the data. In the final experiment, I ended up using multiple windows and 2 PCs on the same connection.

Signed Out Data Didn’t Change

There was no measurable difference between options (3) and (4) in my pilot data. Adding “pws=0” to a signed out query didn’t seem to have an impact. So, I dropped option (4) in the final test. This left 4 methods:

De-personalization toggle
Signing out
Incognito (Chrome)
Incognito (IronKey)*

The Data Set

Given the labor-intensive nature of collecting this data, I decided to use a set of 10 popular queries, pulled from Google Trends Hot Searches list for 1/17. I purposely picked popular queries so that they were more likely to be personalized and/or have social results. The point wasn’t to measure how much results are being personalized, but how well methods to remove personalization work. The query list was as follows:

paula deen
jerry yang
seattle weather
victor martinez
mary tyler moore
betty white
jenelle evans
wisconsin recall
wikipedia blackout
girl scout cookies

The original #10 on the list was “school closings”, but I decided that had too much of a local SEO aspect, so I bumped up #11. Localization is a completely different issue these days (shutting off “personalization” doesn’t shut off localization), so I decided to avoid any searches that had clear local intent.

The Metrics

To compare the SERPs across methods, I tracked three different metrics, as described below:

(1) Total Results

This was a count of all non-paid results – organic, universal, and social. News, images, and TV/movie results all counted as +1 each. In other words, if news had 3 items, it was +3. If there were 6 images displayed, it was +6. I did this for two reasons: not only are these counts variable, but Google is now mixing in social images with regular image results. For example:

Social image results for Jerry Yang

Here, a search for “jerry yang” (former Yahoo CEO) shows 9 image results, but 4 of them are coming from the new social integration.

(2) Social Results

I did a separate count of social results – anything with the person icon next to it. As with total results, social image results each counted as +1. So, in the Jerry Yang example above, that set of image results would count as +9 total results and +4 social results.

(3) Ranking Change

Finally, I calculated the shift between each pair of organic rankings. This ranking “delta” could range from 0-100, and was calculated with 3 simple rules:

Result in same position = +0
Result moved positions = +|change|
Result fell off entirely = +10

So, if the #2 result in the control SERP ended up in #5 on one of the other de-personalization methods, it would count as +3 (change was always positive, regardless of the direction). If the #2 result fell out of the Top 10 on the comparison SERP, it would count as +10.

The Final Test

Sorry, that took a bit of explaining. So, in the end, I measured 3 metrics across 4 methods (counting the control) and 10 search queries. There are actually 5 “methods”, since I also measured personalized results, for comparison. The following table shows mean total results, social results, and change for each method:

Method	Total	Social	Change
Personalized	18.3	0.7	13.0
Toggle/pws=0	18.0	0.0	4.5
Logged out	18.0	0.0	3.1
Incognito 1	18.0	0.0	4.3
Incognito 2*	18.0	0.0	0.0

So, what does it all mean?

(1) Logging Out Won This Round

Logging out seemed to de-personalize results the most. Granted, this came from only 10 queries, and the difference between logging out and Chrome’s incognito function was only 1 query – where logging out matched the control. I should also note that I had to run the logged-out queries on a different machine (same network and IP). So, practically, I'd call logged out vs. Chrome's incognito a tie.

(2) Chrome’s “Icognito” May Not Be

I’m hard-pressed to trust a tool Google built to be free of Google’s influence. That’s not conspiracy theory – it’s just common sense. Two of the queries showed different results for Chrome’s Incognito browser than my IronKey control. You could argue that my IronKey browser wasn’t actually a “control”, but in both cases, the Chrome Icognito results mirrored the de-personalization toggle results. Ultimately, no de-personalization method 100% matched the control condition.

(3) Social Results Are Limited (For Now)

Every method of personalization shut off the new social results, but even with a solid Google+ presence, my social results were limited. Four of the queries returned social results, ranging from 1-3 results (including personalized/social images). Keep in mind that these were all trending queries with a much higher than average likelihood of having social mentions.

(4) Universal Results Are Independent

The total result count only varied in one query – universal results (news, images, etc.) appeared and remained fairly stable for all forms of de-personalization. When personalized/social images appeared, these seemed to displace regular image results, keeping the count consistent. The same happened with organic results – social results replaced the organic results.

The Verdict

Google's new de-personalization toggle does seem to remove social results, and it's fairly effective for de-personalization, but it's not foolproof. Unfortunately, no method seems to be completely personalization free, and I'm willing to bet that situation only gets worse. It's interesting to note that, no matter what method I used and how radically I cleared my history, ever method still localized me to the Chicago area (even the IronKey incognito). While I didn't cover localization in this experiment, it's yet another way that what you see may be different from what your clients see.

Third-party tools and crawlers should still remove most personalization, and provide one way to standardize the numbers you use for reporting. My best advice is to pick an outside source (or even more than one) and stick to it over time. At the same time, supplement ranking information with search traffic and conversion metrics. You can't trust any one method to show you "real" rankings, and the very idea of "de-personalized" results may become little more than myth over the next few years.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 26, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Depersonalize, Faceoff, Google, Ways · Posted in: Seo

Comparing the Top 4 Retargeting Companies

Posted by JoannaLord

For the past year retargeting has been getting some serious attention. I've been fortunate enough to speak on it at a variety of shows, brainstorm over coffee with some cool companies and even blog about how to use it and how to leverage it for SEO. No matter who I am talking with or what the venue the number one question asked is "Who should I use for retargeting?"

Over the past two years some retargeting companies have really emerged as leaders. While we haven't used them all personally here at Moz, I thought it would be valuable to compare the companies in case any of our readers are considering retargeting. I really wanted to focus on what services each offer, what separates them from the pack and what they have planned for 2012. Luckily for us quite a few worked with us so we could really jump in with some great screenshots and specifics. For those that didn't reply to my tweet (ahem) or my email (double ahem) … I tried to fill in best as I could based on my "research via the Web" skillz.

Okay let's get on with it. Below we compared the following companies;

AdRoll
Retargeter
Fetchback
Chango

If there is anyone you'd like to give feedback on that isn't on the list (or is for that matter) feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!

Who are they?
Adroll has been around since 2007 rocking the display advertising world and pushing the limits on targeting capabilities. They have a hot shot team with decades of experience in optimization and creative strategy. They are based out of San Francisco, and have been making some serious waves in the retargeting space.

What do they offer?
On their basic plan they offer site retargeting with both contextual and behavioral targeting build in. They have a complete self-service interface, transparent conversion tracking, and excellent customer service.

How much do they cost?
Their Starter package has no minimum spend, if you are going to go with Plus (which gets you a dedicated account manager) you have to be around 10k spend, and if you are going Pro with them (you get creatives, an engineer, and product development help) you need to be around 20k spend.

What's their secret sauce?
They are best known for their dashboard offerings and experienced team. They are truly focused on providing complete transparency into your campaigns (which a lot of other vendors are missing the mark on) and coupling it with lots of controls and options. Last year and the year before when many companies were still trying to make their platforms easy to use, AdRoll raised the bar by launching a platform chock-full with metrics and top-notch reporting options. The buzz around AdRoll is they are founded by targeting junkies who are striving to bring complex, sequence targeting capabilities to the masses. Impressive to say the least.

What's the downfall?
For those that are looking to do site retargeting this isn't really their bag. They focus mainly on retargeting and contextual targeting (which is targeting based on category of your site and similar sites rather than search query). I also think it's worth noting unless you are spending at least 5k a month in media spend you don't get a dedicated account manager, much creative guidance, or A/B testing capabilities. All of these are available at the Plus and PRO levels, but those come with higher spends. For those just starting out if you go with AdRoll you'll need to do a lot of those things yourself.

What's up for 2012?
When I asked AdRoll what they were working on they sent over a laundry list of specific action items they have set their sights on. I really appreciate the transparency. Main things include – focusing on making their UI even more friendly, making the dynamic creative opportunities easier to use, adding more reports to keep up their high bar of transparency excellence, and continuing to grow the team so each advertiser has the attention they deserve.

Some screenshots for the curious cats out there…

AdRoll Campaign Manager
Excellent visibility into each ad's performance, and the data you need to succeed.

AdRoll User Tracking
Tons of options to help you intelligently build out audiences you can sequence.

You can tell from the screenshots that AdRoll has done a great job of making the data the heart of the platform. As they continue to add features it will be interesting to see how they keep the platform uncluttered and streamlined. I think it could prove challenging.

With that said, we currently use AdRoll and are loving the product and team. I think for your moderate to advanced paid marketer, AdRoll is a great option for retargeting. You have a robust product with an innovative team of minds behind it. Exciting to say the least.

Disclaimer: SEOmoz does currently use AdRoll for our search retargeting efforts.

Who are they?
ReTargeter was founded in 2009 by Arjun Dev Arora, and in three short years they have really made a name for themselves. While their roots are in site retargeting they spent the last year really branching out and now offer services around social retargeting and email marketing. They also have chosen to integrate closely with a number of other big-name products out there like KISSmetrics, and SlideShare. Also based in San Francisco, the ReTargeter team has big hopes for 2012.

What do they offer?
They have two main packages — one for site retargeting and one that is most display focused for visitors that are targeted via demographics, location, or content verticals.

How much do they cost?
Both packages start at $ 500 for a base, and scale up from there based on the number of visitors you target and impressions you serve up.

What's their secret sauce?
Time and time again when you hear their name come up you hear they have amazing customer service. Arjun and his team are best known for being available and willing to help you out every step of the way. In fact, every client, regardless of their spend level, will have access to a dedicated Account Manager. They have taken leaps and bounds this past year in product, but their bread and butter is their dedication to account management. You can see this reflected in this awesome Thank You Letter their CEO issued at the end of 2011.

What's the downfall?
I've actually used ReTargeter in the past and enjoyed working with the team, however I did have pain points with the platform. They lacked transparency into the revenue model on their side which left me weary. I know they have worked hard over the past year to work more transparency into the platform, but they still have a bit to go here. I also should mention their pricing is a bit off putting. While they only start at $ 500 (which is great) they scale up very aggressively. For a site that has 50k visits a month you are at the $ 2,500 range. For bigger sites, you better be ready to spend some serious coin to be working with Retargeter.

What's up for 2012?
I asked ReTargeter what they will be focusing on and was happy to hear they are hoping to streamline their display and retargeting services into one platform, for multiple devices. Companies have told them how exasperated they are working with multiple online partners, dashboards, etc. and they are planning to give that issue some serious time this year. I, for one, and super excited to hear this. I know we see this quite a bit internally and we are always look for ways to be more efficient in our channel management.

Okay here is some dashboard eye candy for you (please note this is there "soon-to-be" released dashboard:

ReTargeter Campaigns Manager
This is a great summary view, I wish there was some more cost data in there though.

Retargeter Campaign Insights
It's nice to see the different reporting and view options.

Who are they?
The Fetchback guys have been around since 2007 under the direction of Chad Little. They've been growing the brand steadily with lots of great content and conference appearances ever since. One of my favorite things from their site is this little nugget of gold: "Let's be honest — you don't put dogs all over your Website if you take yourself too seriously." I think that very much embodies their culture, and it's refreshing to see. They also pride themselves in working under seven pretty great core values, we of course can relate with out TAGFEE tenets here at Moz. *Highfive* FetchBack.

What do they offer?
They are all about site retargeting. They even have a patented technology named FIDO, which promises to analyze information on your visitors sent by smart pixels. Ohhh fancy.

How much do they cost?
You have to contact them to get a quote. I contacted them to get a ballpark range but they said they are so customized to the advertiser that would be a challenge. I have my doubts but they did say they have a variety of pricing models available, and they even work on rev-share if it makes sense. Sounds pretty flexible over there.

What's their secret sauce?
They are often praised for their full-funnel approach to campaign management. They take a pretty aggressive stance that retargeting works best when integrated with site behavior and full-picture strategy rather than just serving ads at the end of the sales cycle. They call this "1 to 1 creative," which I can only assume means each creative is tailored for that specific visitor based on their behavior, location, etc. FetchBack is hyper focused on this detailed approach to management, which for more experienced marketers is a really exciting selling point.

What's the downfall?
First off, no pricing on their site. Man that gets under my skin. If you are going to sell a solution on the Web, you should allow me to research you in my discovery phase, instead of force me to call you guys or fill out a form. </end rant> Other than that the only thing worth noting is they really have positioned themselves as an enterprise solution. For those just getting started or for those that never plan to invest too heavily into retargeting, Fetchback probably isn't for you.

What's up for 2012?
I reached out to hear from them what was on the 2012 horizons. I was a bit surprised to hear they will be focusing on "As display grows from a direct response mechanism to include branding, we are focused on being able to provide solutions for not just conversion based campaigns, but also branding ones as well." Uhmm. Sounds a bit odd to me. In my experience display advertisers are too caught up in branding buys and maximizing impression share, while not focusing on conversions enough. It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out in their services, and platforms. It could be useful for the ever growing social retargeting applications.

I couldn't get you a screenshot but you can click here to watch a live demo.

Who are they?
Chango is a media buying platform that speclializes in Search Retargeting (rather than Site Retargeting like the above vendors). Want to know more about Search Retargeting? Here you go. Basically rather than target those who have come to your site already you are targeting visitors that have performed recent searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They are based out of Toronto (aye!) with offices in NYC and San Francisco.

What do they offer?
Full-service search retargeting options, with limited site retargeting and engagement retargeting capabilities as well.

How much do they cost?
Unfortunately, you have to contact them for a quote as well. I did find out they minimum IO (including media costs) is 10k, and they have some clients spending up to 500k a month. Wowzers.

What's their secret sauce?
Well they really are the only end to end solution for search retargeting available right now. So there is that. At least I had a hard time finding one out there, let me know in the comments if I missed someone. They collect data, optimize, and bid on media at the keyword level which could make a strong argument for some really awesome targeting options. They also claim to have a 90% renewal rate on clients, with over 30 of the top 500 retailers out there. I'm gonna go ahead and give them a high five for that…speaks volumes about their product and service. When you ask the Chango what makes them special they all say "the people working there." They've staffed the team with agency types with a passion for innovation.

What's the downfall?
Honestly for those considering search retargeting it sounds like Chango is one of the first places you should look. With that said, I often tell advertisers they should play in site retargeting before they jump into search retargeting. With site retargeting you get self-service platforms, data visibility, and the controls to test creatives and messages so much easier. Chango is a full-service option. There is no platform you log into, and you are putting a lot of trust into them. Before you commit your budget there I'd get more familiar with what works for audiences through site retargeting and walk into search retargeting with a better understanding of the landscape.

What's up for 2012?
While they do offer some site retargeting, Chango is committed to pushing the innovative limits on search retargeting options. They believe "Search Retargeting 3.0" is already here and their 2012 plans revolve around pushing targeting options, data reporting, and more. Also something cool they will be expanding is called "Instant Search" for Search Retargeting, which allows you to target individuals immediately after arriving from Google, Yahoo or Bing based on the search they just performed. Cool stuff huh? Me thinks so too.

Since i couldn't get you a screenshot I thought I would get you something just as fancy–Chango's infographic on the Seven Types of Retargeting. They have advertising options for all of them, but focus mainly on (1) Search.

Chango Seven Types of Search Retargeting
How many of these are you trying? #getafterit

So Let's Wrap It Up

When it comes to picking the right retargeting solution for you there are a lot of great options out there. There are a number of questions you should be asking yourself. In fact there are so many, I have compiled a list of "Interview Questions You Should Ask When Picking a Retargeting Agency/Vendor." This list can be your nudge to really investigate who is best for you. I cover topics like reputation, services, set-up, pricing, innovation, and resources. Hope you find it useful!

Whatever your needs are around retargeting, there is an option out there for you. The industry has matured and its time to expect more from both the tools and the services. The four companies above are just a few of the companies out there, but they are great starts. If you have other questions about the companies feel free to leave them below. Also if I left out your favorite company, please add those too! I'm excited to hear what you are using and what is working for you.

* It's worth mentioning I didn't run through Google Remarketing because we just launched this internally for a test and we are going to be posting some juicy good stuff soon enough. So sit tight!

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 25, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Companies, Comparing, Retargeting · Posted in: Seo

Video Sitemap Guide for Vimeo and YouTube

Posted by jhammack

Videos Indexed in the SERP

Did you know that major search engines want you to make video sitemaps for all of your embeds, even if you're hosting on Vimeo or Youtube?

Not only does it help them spider your website by giving the search engines clues as to where to look for video embeds, it may also earn your site a click through boost by giving you a picture in the SERP. Below I'll show you how I managed to index my Vimeo video embeds to include a thumbnail. Don't worry, the same steps should work for Youtube as well.

Example Video in SERP

Benefits of a Video Sitemap

There are several reasons why you'll want to add a video sitemap.

It makes it clear to Google what your content is.
You have the opportunity to provide a range of details through schema.
Additional presence on video.google.com search.
RAD picture thumbnail, which is a pretty great call to action.

Video Embed Code

It's important to pay special attention during this part. Video embedding is largely done using iFrames these days and that poses a problem if you want the search engines to index your videos. For whatever reason Google doesn't currently spider iFrames. This is frustrating as iFrames are great for playback compatibility on mobile devices, iPads, and the like. There is a workaround, but first, let's discuss how a video sitemap works.

A video sitemap is simple guide for the search engine bot. Think of it as a map to treasure, it just makes it easier for the bot to find the treasure. If you use an iFrame, the bot can't find the video making the video sitemap useless. However, Google can find and spider standard object embeds, AKA the old fashioned way of doing things. With this in mind, I'm going to describe the safest way to get your videos indexed by using old embed code still available on Vimeo and Youtube. Here is a picture to help you find it:

Vimeo and Youtube Old Video Embed

Embed Code

If you found it correctly your embed code should look something like this. (vimeo example)

Example Video Embed Code

You don't have to cleanup your code like I did above, I only did it so we could easily see what's happening. Pay special attention to the embed src line, the URL inside looks like this..

vimeo: http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=35117351

youtube: http://www.youtube.com/v/VMeXGE_a8Gg

This is the RAW video player link, it tells google/bing where to find the original video file. We'll need this information later when building the video sitemap.

Nested iFrame/Embed OPTIONAL

There is one thing worth mentioning. Some people have developed a technique to trick google and still use an iFrame. I haven't actually tried it myself as I'm happy playing it safe with the old method and showing up in the SERP.

Anyhow, the idea is that you use the new iFrame code and the old embed code at the same time with the noframes tag. This essentially nests the two videos, such that end users will see the new html5 iFrame version and google is served the old embedded version.

A couple drawbacks worth mentioning.. First, this is technically cloaking content as you're serving one thing to the user and giving google something else. Second, your page will take longer to load as the original embed starts to fire up before the iFrame gets control. Lastly, noframes wasn't designed to work like this, it's a hack. With that in mind here is what it'd look like:

Noframes nested in iFrame

Video Sitemap Requirements

Now that you have your embed code all sorted out, it's time to start working on the video sitemap. Google requires that your video sitemap MUST contain the following information and that it should MATCH what is on your webpage.

Title – This should be the same as the title of the page your video appears.
Description – Make this exactly match the meta description of your page.
Play page URL – The canonical URL of the page your video appears.
Thumbnail URL – By thumbnail they mean a high resolution image up to 1920×1080.
Raw video location – This is the embed src link noted from above pointing at the clip.
More Details: Google: Creating a Video Sitemap

Example Video Sitemap

The best way to learn how a video sitemap works is to see one. First start by creating a new file, name it something like: video-sitemap.xml

Then fill it in so that it looks like the example sitemap below, except replace the white text with your own information. For every video you have copy/paste the <url></url> block. In the example below there are two video URL blocks, the top block has descriptors for the fields, the bottom block is exactly what my video sitemap looks like. I prefer to keep mine in chronological order with the newest video on top. Once you're done you'll upload it to the root of your website ex. http://yourdomain.com/video-sitemap.xml

Tweak Robots.txt

This isn't absolutely necessary, but it doesn't hurt. Add your sitemap to your robots.txt file. Don't worry about being redundant, you can have a video sitemap describe the same page as a standard article sitemap. To add your sitemap to robots.txt place the following line at the top:

Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/video-sitemap.xml

Update Google Webmaster

Once you're ready with your sitemap head over to Google Webmaster Tools and submit it under site configuration. Google will crawl it and report if there are any errors. If everything looks good the videos will be queued to be spidered and you should see them online after about a week.

Conclusion

This is actually the bare minimum to get you started. There is a lot of depth to the schema and you can include a range of details in your video sitemap including tags, categories, and author just to name a few. Hopefully with the above information you can get your embedded vimeo/youtube videos indexed with a picture. Feel free to contact me if you get stuck or check out my video sitemap at http://winefolly.com/video-sitemap.xml

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 24, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Guide, Sitemap, Video, Vimeo, YouTube · Posted in: Seo

Answers to 43 Questions About Search, Social, Content, Conversions and More

Posted by randfish

Earlier tonight, I sent out the following tweet:

Have any questions about search, social, content, conversion or analytics you want answered? I'm taking requests for the Moz blog tonight

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 24, 2012

I was clearly under-prepared for the amazing responses. In order to tackle such a magnitude of great questions, I'm giving myself some rules for replies.

If I don't have a good answer, I won't tackle the question. For example, Nathaniel Deal asked a good one on .NET viewstates impacting SEO, and while I'd love to reply, I don't know enough about them to provide solid suggestions.
No answer can be longer than two paragraphs (plus maybe an explanatory image/graphic).
Everyone who asked a great question gets their tweet embedded in this post (using Twitter's nice, new embed functionality), which also gives a spiffy followed link to their tweet.
Where possible, I'll provide links to content for more detail so those who are particularly interested can follow up.

Let's get started!

@randfish What single site on the web would you most want to see the analytics for?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Tough decision. It would probably be between YouTube and eHow, mostly for the putting-to-rest-conspiracy-theories value. But that's with my blogger/search news hat on. If I think more strategically and web-wide, I'd say Amazon's analytics would be fascinating to open-source ala Wikileaks. I suspect folks around the world could study the last decade of data and discover remarkable traits and trends about what we care about, buy and sell as a society.

@randfish not a lot of coverage on enterprise b2b content out there. What differences in strategy should these companies use?

— Jack Jones (@Mafuba) January 24, 2012

I think there's some pretty good stuff out there about Enterprise SEO (though, in all fairness, Moz hasn't been doing a great job on that topic lately – I'll try to fix that). Some recommendations:

The columns at SELand on Enterprise SEO are often good (Ian Lurie's latest in particular)
Tom Critchlow gave a solid delivery at Mozcation Peru on this topic, and his slide deck is on Slideshare.
Speaking of Slideshare, Bill Hunt, who's a brilliant enterprise-level marketing tactician, also has a good deck there.
A pair of good pieces from Aimclear and Raven covered enterprise sessions at conferences.

In terms of my personal recommendations – the key is to think at scale. Oftentimes, the "little stuff," like fixing title tags, getting URLs right, making it easier to use the CMS so more people at the company blog, etc. can have huge impacts at big organizations but would do little for SMBs. There's also larger strategies like content licensing and adding specific inbound marketing roles to a team. E.g. for a five-person team, you could have a content strategist, a full-time writer, an SEO/analytics data junky a, a marketing-focused graphic designer and a marketing-specific developer. That combination can often do AMAZING things, even in very large organizations.

@randfish Booh, the Filthy Linking Rich are getting some link Juice..? bit.ly/22IyMo

— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) January 24, 2012

I suppose linking to Twitter is giving a link-rich site more juice, but I'd worry about saying I'll link to everyone's individual domains, as that could create some more manipulative/non-authentic questions, especially considering the sphere we're in

Oh, and BTW, if you haven't read the article Dennis links to in his tweet (from the brilliant Mike Grehan), I'd check it out. I wrote about it again a couple years ago, because it's a concept that every marketer should know and embrace.

@randfish conversion: how many people really click on related posts lists at the end of a post?

— Brankica U (@BrankicaU) January 24, 2012

It totally depends on how it's implemented and what you put there. I've seen/heard of CTRs on "related" as high as 10% of visits (usually on hyper-targeted blogs that include images/graphics in the related section) and under 0.1%. My advice is to test the formats you think will work best against one another, using some A/B testing software like Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce. Given the task you're aiming for has relatively higher conversions than a traditional purchase funnel, you can likely see results fairly quickly.

@randfish Do you think Google is using or will use 'author trust' as a highly relevant ranking factor?

— David Cohen (@explorionary) January 24, 2012

Right now, I'd say it's a strong factor for earning those amazing rel=author style rich snippets in the SERPs (as seen below):

In the future, I think it will depend on the degree to which the data format is embraced and used across the web, and whether they see a strong correlation with increased searcher happiness/relevancy when they test implementations. If you've not yet read the interview with a Google Search Quality Rater, check it out. To my mind, that clearly illustrates the process by which Google's Search Quality team determines whether an algorithmic shift is positive (and worth releasing) or negative (and thus, shut down).

@randfish been thinking of doing a crowdsourced post about the state of affiliate marketing this year (with GSPYW, Panda, social signals)…

— Jason Acidre (@jasonacidre) January 24, 2012

I think it's a great topic. Sadly, for a lot of affiliate marketers, I think Google's intent is to put them out of business, or at least make things much tougher for them in search/SEO. If I were doing any form of affiliate stuff, I'd be thinking extremely hard about how to build a unique value proposition, a recognizable, memorable, beloved brand and earn enough press and awareness, particularly in the tech community, so as to limit the potential damage of future Google updates targeted as eliminating these types of operators. I'd also try to diversify my traffic to get no more than 40% of visits from search (which likely means investing in a lot of content marketing, social media, blogs, etc).

@randfish What kind of difference should I expect in conversions if I require a credit card for a free trial, vs open registration?

— Adrian Pike (@adrianpike) January 24, 2012

We actually studied this one at Moz! Our findings, from talking to a bunch of folks in the sphere, were that the numbers come out very similarly either way. If you take a credit card upfront, you have a higher barrier to entry and fewer free trials, but a higher post-trial conversion rate. If you don't require a credit card, trials go up, but conversions at the end of the period go down to approximately the same.

We based our decision on the fact that there are substantive costs associated with crawling a site, fetching data, etc. in our web app and tools (including social data, which we pay for based on usage). Thus, fewer trials with a higher conversion rate would give the business better overall margins.

@randfish Could you write up a post about the science of sharing? I.e. best practices to get your readers to share your content?

— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) January 24, 2012

I'm going to defer to the expert on this one and point over to these 10 excellent posts by Dan Zarrella. In fact, just go read all his stuff. Here's his posts on Hubspot and his Slideshare decks.

If you want even more, I did a Whiteboard+ video that went up just today on the topic of sharing across multiple platforms.

@randfish While SEO Moz lays out some fantastic best practices, can you think of any sites succeeding by doing the exact opposite?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Many of the daily deals and subscription commerce sites actually do very little inbound marketing. Here's a cool infographic from the folks at Kiss Metrics showing off the impressive growth many of them have experienced:

Subscription Services Infographic

Some of this is based on the product alone, some is the virality of the concept, some is highly successful advertising and a few, to be fair, do a good job with inbound channels like content, search and social. Other great examples are Craigslist and Reddit. There's lots of ways to skin the web traffic cat, and while I'm biased to organic/free sources, I'm also keenly aware that it's not the only route.

@randfish love to know more about canonical issues with site redesigns. When to use them or do I 301 bunch of weird urls?

— Ken Savage (@kensavage) January 24, 2012

If possible, most SEOs generally like to use 301 rewrite rules. They scale nicely – even if you have 500,000 pages of product URLs that all need to change, a single 301 rule through .htaccess can often address the problem – and they're still a best practice. I'd lean more towards canonical when you have a specific reason to want to keep the page accessible to users in multiple formats, e.g. print/mobile-friendly versions of articles or the same product with different image views.

@randfish What I mean is the best ways to implement sharing (i.e. social buttons) in your content to increase social traction.

— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) January 24, 2012

Oh… Interesting. I think this would be worthy of some testing and research, but one cool data point I'd check out comes from the OKTrends blog. You might remember that they used to have multiple sharing buttons that dropped-down from the top of the page using CSS once you reached the bottom of an article. After testing, my understanding is that they found having a single Facebook like button (as per the image below) worked best.

Perhaps less is more when it comes to sharing. I know that personally, I'm often overwhelmed by, for example, what Mashable or Huffington Post do with share buttons. Though, I do like having at least Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

@randfish Google is pushing G+, Search Plus your world in it's SERP! What's the future of #SEO? Or do we just need to push content on G+?

— Aakar Anil (@aakarpost) January 24, 2012

I think they'll only get more aggressive with pushing Google+ into the SERPs and into non-traditional results areas as with what we see below:

I did a video about this last week, and I'd also recommend AJ Kohn's sublime SEO Guide to Google+ for more depth.

@randfish when doing outreach, what's the best way to improve response/overall content conversion rates?

— Xiaohan Zhang (@xiaohanzhang14) January 24, 2012

My top 5 things to get improved conversions through outreach are:

Have a pre-existing relationship w/ those you contact
Be a recognizable, trusted brand (or have an association that they'll know and trust)
Make requests that benefit both parties (e.g. it's easy to get me to share great marketing content, because I know that if I do, I'll earn more followers/blog readers/circles/fans/etc)
Make your content source (blog/website/infographic) as beautifully-designed, clean and ad-free as possible
Be incredibly relevant – reference things that show you know the person you've reached out to, point to content that's recent, useful, interesting and "up their alley," and be authentic in your request (i.e. explain how/why your request and content are relevant if it's not truly obvious)

Mike King also offered some great suggestions in his blog post on the topic here.

@randfish Hi With HTML 5 and long 1 page websites. What are the recommendations for Hx tags and for "inner" linking ?

— Khalil Maaouni (@kmaaouni) January 24, 2012

I like internal anchor links a lot, and I don't just use them for long pages, but also to split up pages in a long document (e.g. our Search Ranking Factors). For those long one-pagers, do be aware that Google may rank specific portions from those internal anchors separately (which can be a good thing), and that you can also get the mini-sitelinks, ala below:

Boromir Search Showing Internal Anchors

You don't need to do anything fancy – clean, classic internal anchors and substantive content + good external links usually does the job.

@randfish For @seomoz blog – These Google shenanigans, how much will it affect their activity? Will Bing/Yahoo see an increase overtime?

— Bill Springer (@billyspringer) January 24, 2012

Probably not. I'd say that for logged-in users of Google accounts, Gmail and Google+, Google already has those users "in their pocket" as searchers and it will be very tough to go over to Bing. Core relevancy, particularly in the long tail, is still a weak spot for Bing, and Google's still relatively religious in their testing around user experience and click activity. If they see any hint of a real hit to usage, they'll tune things up very quickly. My guess is that the SPYW rollout wouldn't have even happened unless they saw some good data suggesting it would improve the metrics they care about.

@randfish Do you see Pinterest ever playing a big role in the social marketing other than "putting the button on my site"?

— Colby Almond (@colbyalmond) January 24, 2012

I think long-term, Pinterest may be more than it is today. Twitter started out as a place to tell people what you were eating. Facebook was just a place college students went to hook up. I'd guess Pinterest has a real shot at disrupting e-commerce and online shopping from a social perspective.

@randfish What are the best options to integrate a mobile-optimized site with an existing desktop one?

— Ryan Ricketts (@RickettsFish) January 24, 2012

My favorite is simply to have a mobile stylesheet. The content stays the same. The URLs stay the same. The social sharing and SEO isn't affected. It just makes it easier to read on tiny devices.

@randfish in PPC setups, before people ever get the chance to see your content, what are some of the best ways to increase CTR / conversions

— Bryan Pellegrino (@PrimordialAA) January 24, 2012

Help me Joanna Lord! You're my only hope. Seriously, we should get her to write a blog post about this. I bet it would be amazing

@randfish any opinion on which SEO plugin for wordpress is "best"? (IF there is good content and if not)

— Aly & John (@hopandjaunt) January 24, 2012

I'm a longtime fan of Yoast's WordPress plugins. They're powerful, flexible and nearly easy enough for beginners (at least, with a little light reading). He also keeps them updated regularly and allows for some of the cool, new functionality like rel=author (to be fair, you can do this without the plugin, too).

@randfish Twitter vs. Facebook. Which link raises a page one result faster? (My tests say Facebook every time) wondering what you see.

— Amanda MacArthur (@amaaanda) January 24, 2012

My understanding, which comes straight from Google is that neither influences search rankings directly (at least, not anymore – Twitter did from 2009-2011). However, they both spread content to users who search, click, like, link, +1 and perform all other manners of activity, some of which may indeed be directly influencing the rankings.

In terms of which one's more powerful, I'd say it's about your network and your users. For example, on Moz, we have far more success spreading content using Twitter than Facebook. And for me personally, the same is true. For others, though, Facebook may be much more influential. You have to know your network and your audience.

@randfish I once heard that Google takes the length of a domain registration into account as one of their ranking/authority factors. True?

— Lennart(@LennartDam) January 24, 2012

I've heard the same thing, and I believe it's based on a webspam-related patent Google filed many years ago. Bill Slawski recently re-visisted the patent and his coverage is worth a read. Personally, I'd guess that if it's a signal, it's a very small one, and potentially limited to use only for network spam detection. That said, I'd still register domains for multiple years, because it sucks royally when you forget to renew them

@randfish in the music lyrics industry, what's the best competitive advantage a site can get – considering all "content" is the same

— Jonathan Dingman (@Dingman) January 24, 2012

Check out the brilliant work of Rap Genius. In my opinion, they set the gold standard for adding value in an industry/nice where few thought that could be done.

@randfish Which books taught you the most about the Web?

— Ryan Ricketts (@RickettsFish) January 24, 2012

I've got a list for you right here! Some of them are just enjoyable works of fiction, but the rest should be up your alley.

@randfish Is there such a thing as a scalable link building strategy?

— ROImedia (@ROImedia_LLC) January 24, 2012

Definitely. UGC is scalable. Content licensing is scalable. Embedded content is highly scalable. Data APIs are scalable. Even media coverage can be scalable. Heck, if you're really good at it, blogging can even be scalable. A good post on the topic comes from Distilled.

@randfish Hi Randfish, I would like to know how to leverage on Twitter / Facebook to increase the Klout rank

— Writing-Unleashed (@17OnlineIncome) January 24, 2012

Hmm… I don't think I'd worry much about Klout's ranking. It's a lot like toolbar PageRank in that there's not much point in attempting to inflate it. I'd concentrate more on social metrics like these.

That said, I've heard that if you have lots and lots of @ reply conversations (particularly with a diverse set of folks), it can bring up your Klout score quite a bit.

@randfish hey…if multiple accounts on FB and G+ link to a website (not to the FB page of the brand)..wud that improve the rankings?

— Srikanth Ch (@srikanthch10) January 24, 2012

Potentially yes, though probably not by a huge amount unless they're accompanied by all the other nice signals that a group of social influencers often bestow on a site they all share (e.g. SEOmoz has quite a few powerful Twitter/Facebook/G+ accounts linking to it, though the benefits are probably more second-order impact than direct).

@randfish- with radically differing serps by region is it neccessary to measure campaign performance on rankings anymore.

— rbnfsh (@rbnfsh) January 24, 2012

I don't think I'd go that far. Rather, I'd say it's important to measure rankings for specific engines in specific regions, e.g. Google.co.uk AND Google.ca AND Google.com (US).

@randfish as a small biz online, what should you focus on the most? Blog, newsletter, landing pages, social, other?

— Robert Rolfe (@rrolfe) January 24, 2012

Unfortunately, the best advice I can give is the hardest to implement: You have to test. If you try a channel honestly and with authentic effort for 3-4 weeks, then compare against other things you're doing, you'll have real data about the value of that source for your brand. If not, you'll probably miss some.

That said, if you do nothing else, have a blog you update religiously every week (or every day if possible), occasionally targeting keyword phrases for SEO, and get accounts on Facebook/Twitter/Google+ where you share your posts. It doesn't work for everyone, but it's a content+social strategy that often yields consistent rewards.

@randfish How would you quantify, in $ , the value of a single link with the purpose of comparing net roi of competing linkbuilding efforts

— Dylan Whitman (@DylanWhitman) January 24, 2012

You ask for the impossible, sir.

Links can almost never be measured in dollar value, unless it's an affiliate link with a tracking code and you know every visitor that came and their behavior over the next 3 months (and even then, you're probably missing some of the value). Rather than trying to come up with an arbitrary formula, I'd think holistically about the value of links – they send traffic, they help with branding and awareness, they likely provide some SEO benefits (if they're from good sources) and they build relationships with the linking site. Hard to measure is a good thing – it means the competition probably underinvests

@randfish A question: What has the most value, a "mention" of a URL or a no-followed link?

— Mikael Rieck (@mikaelrieck) January 24, 2012

I would LOVE to run some tests on that If anyone does it, we'd be thrilled to publish your findings here on the Moz blog.

My total guess is that nofollow links probably do, but it's very hard to say and could even be on a case-by-case, e.g. link mentions on Wikipedia might be worth more than nofollow links on a random blog (but can't say for certain).

@randfish Many software co's leverage post-blog CTAs in the form of whitepapers, free trials, & the like. Why does SEOMoz choose not to?

— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) January 24, 2012

We sorta do… This is what you'll see if you're logged-out of your account:

Moz Blog CTA

Being honest, there's a natural tension inside SEOmoz about not pushing our products too hard in our community. It's part of our commitment to TAGFEE (specifically Authenticity). We believe there's a ton of value in building up trust and a relationship with our members prior to asking them to buy our stuff. So far, that's worked out well

@randfish As search engines become more intelligent with their search results do you think SEO will be as effective as it is today?

— Mac Segura-Cook (@MacSegura) January 24, 2012

Engines have gotten tremendously more intelligent over the last decade, but I've only ever seen the effectiveness and value of SEO go up. Granted, it's become more complex and nuanced, but that's actually made it a more worthwhile investment, IMO.

@randfish We have a ton of user-generated content, and as such, lots of inbound links. How can we leverage that info for greater exposure?

— Greg Childs (@NICOclub) January 24, 2012

Target good keywords! And encourage folks who contribute UGC to do likewise (and to link to their profiles and their content in scalable ways, such as badges or direct-embedding, like I did with your tweet above). You can also try taking older, out-of-date content and redirecting it to more relevant, high quality, updated pages, thus consolidating some of the spread-out link juice and providing better value to visitors.

@randfish What factors does Google use to define what an ad is? How does it know it's paid and how many is too many? [Above the fold]

— Nathaniel W Deal (@NathanielDeal) January 24, 2012

Ads on the web follow extremely similar patterns such as tracking URLs and IDs, sizing formats, delivery through CDNs, etc. I'd guess that Google likely has a machine-learning based algo that has human editors tweaking it semi-regularly when any new ad network gets to scale.

What's the best competitive benchmark for social ROI? RT @randfish: Have any questions… you want answered? I'm taking requests tonight

— Bryant Tutterow (@BTutterow) January 24, 2012

There's only a few metrics you can really get publicly for the Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. accounts of your competition. Check out this post to see more.

@randfish When on-page has been done all wrong for large WP Blog what path do u take? Fix 200 posts, go hard creating new ones done right?

— Sha Menz (@ShahMenz) January 24, 2012

Depends. If the content was targeting good keywords and is high-value/useful then just clean up the on-page, perhaps update the content a touch and then re-share (particularly the good stuff) on social networks/featuring on the homepage, linking to it in new posts, etc. If, however, there's a lot of old junk in the blog, I'd worry less about reviving it and more about upgrading quality, SEO-targeting and share-worthiness moving forward.

- @randfish Do search engines read URLs as separate words? Are dashes in URLs SEO friendlier? www. ThisURL .com vs www. This-URL . com ?

— Sarah V. (@nettyboops) January 24, 2012

99% of the time, they do. But be careful if you make up words. For example, SEOmoz itself may not get the benefit of having "SEO" in the domain name, because "moz" isn't a word. Likewise, something like "Everywhereist" might not rank for "Everywhere" because the engines interpret "ist" as part of the word, not a separate one. However, if you have a domain like "greetingcards.com" that will certainly be seen as the words "greeting" and "cards."

@randfish is it possible to cost effectively outsource article creation (non-spun, non-spam) for non-tech businesses (eg. restaurants/vets)

— Iain Dooley (@iaindooley) January 24, 2012

It is, but there's a bunch of pitfalls and shortcuts that lead many down the wrong path. My best advice is to outsource to those who are already blogging/content-creating passionately and authentically. For example, if you're a travel site seeking content, don't hire folks who've never written about travel before (or who do it through a content agency for $ 5 an article). Go find 50 travel writers on the web who aren't monetizing their sites well. Reach out individually and offer them $ 50-$ 100 per post. You'll get a lot of takers and way more value – because those bloggers will (oftentimes) SHARE the content they write for you, bringing far more value than just the words alone.

@randfish How should one go about forecasting weekly organic search results to show ROI in order to obtain dev resources and budget?

— Jonathon Colman (@jcolman) January 24, 2012

This deserves its own post, Jon. Excellent question though – I will try to tackle in some future content (maybe a WB Friday or a blog post).

@randfish do paid website directory listingsoffer any SEO benefit anymore?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Sadly, the answer is sometimes, but usually not permanently and on rare occasion, it can get you a penalty. I'd use extreme caution here (which means, I'd never do it personally, but some folks with higher risk tolerance do and get rankings from it).

@randfish As SERPs become more personal & harder to influence en masse, what metrics will become more important for measuring SEO success?

— Mollie Vandor (@mollierosev) January 24, 2012

Visits from search, # of keywords sending traffic, performance of keywords, # of pages receiving search traffic, rankings for key terms using non-personalized search (even if many are logged-in, the "natural" results still usually hold some sway in what gets shown, especially on Page 1).

@randfish How about the parallel between search and usability and how the new generation of mobile users are influencing this

— Jack Plouse (@jplouse) January 24, 2012

I'm not sure that mobile has added a ton here (though having content that's easy to consume + share on mobile devices is certainly a win, don't get me wrong). However, usability/UX has always been critical to SEO – it increases the likelihood your content will be seen, shared, liked, linked-to and all the other signals engines measure. Given how aggressive Google's been about user-experience style algo updates of late, I'd say a great UX is more important than ever, and it's something I'd nail even before worrying about broader marketing efforts.

@randfish Would love to have data on the impact of images to link to as we market @Shutterstock.

— David Fraga (@davidfraga) January 24, 2012

Links from images definitely appear to have an impact, and the alt attribute seems to act like anchor text. However, we did run some tests about 18 months ago showing that image links seemed to have less of a rankings influence than straight text links, so if possible, I might try to get the attribution to images in a caption below the image rather than just having the image itself click-able.

Thanks to everyone who sent questions! This has been tons of fun, though a lot of work.

I'm sure many of the comments will have more detail and probably some even better responses than those I gave above. That's the great part about this community – it scales. Someday soon, I suspect I'll be more of a question-asker than an answerer here, and that will be a wonderful day.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 24, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: about, Answers, Content, Conversions, More, Questions, Search, Social · Posted in: Seo

SEO Monitoring Tools and Tips

Posted by willcritchlow

In the real world, things go wrong. While we might all wish that everything we did was "fix once, stay fixed", that's rarely the case.

Things that were previously "not a problem"(TM) can become "a problem"(TM) rapidly for a variety of reasons:

someone changes something unrelated / without realising it would impact you or just screws up (e.g. deploying a staging version of robots.txt or an old version of a server config)
the world changes around you (there was a Google update named after a black and white animal a while back)
the technical gremlins gang up on you (server downtime, DDoS etc.)

In all of these cases, you'd rather know about the issue sooner rather than later because in most of them your ability to minimise the resulting issues declines rapidly as time passes (and in the remaining cases, you still want to know before your boss / client).

While many of us have come round to the idea that we should be making recommendations in these areas, we are too often still creating spectacularly non-actionable advice like:

make sure you have great uptime
make sure your site is quick

Today, I want to give you three pieces of directly actionable advice that you can start doing for your own site and your key clients immediately that will help you spot problems early, avoid knock-on indexing issues and quickly get alerted to bad deploys that could hurt your search performance.

#1 Traffic drops

Google Analytics has a feature that spots significant changes in traffic or traffic profile. It can also alert you. The first of these features is called "intelligence" and the second "intelligence alerts".

Rather than rehash old advice, I'll simply link to the two best posts I've read on the subject:

Here on SEOmoz by Rebecca Lehmann - 7 essential google intelligence custom alerts
Over on Blueglass by Annie Cushing - stay alert with google analytics

This is the simplest of all the recommendations to implement and is also the most holistic in the sense that it can alert you to traffic drops of all kinds. The downside of course is that you're measuring symptoms not causes so you (a) have to wait for causes to create symptoms rather than being alerted to the problem and (b) get an alert about the symptom rather than the cause and have to start detective work before paging the person who can fix it.

#2 Uptime monitoring

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realise that SEO is dependent on your website. And not only on how you optimise your site, but also on it being available.

While for larger clients, it shouldn't be your job to alert someone if their website goes down, it does no harm to know and for smaller clients there is every chance you'd be adding significant value by keeping an eye on these things.

I have both good and bad reasons for knowing a lot about server monitoring:

the good: we made a small investment in Server Density in May last year (and scored our only link from Techcrunch in the process)
the bad: we've been more enthusiastic users of our portfolio company's services than we might have hoped – some annoying server issues have resulted in more downtime for distilled.net than I care to think about. To add insult to injury, we managed to get ourselves hit with a DDoS attack last week (see speed chart below)

There are three main elements you might want to monitor:

Pure availability (including response code)
Server load and performance
Response speed / page load time

Website availability

There are two services I recommend here:

Pingdom's free service monitors the availability and response time of your site
Server Density's paid service provides more granular alerting and graphing as well as tying it together with your server performance monitoring

Here's what the Server Density dashboard looks like:

And here is the response time graph from pingdom:

You can see the spike in response time during the DDoS attack and the lower average response time over the last few days after we implemented cloudflare

Incidentally, you may not have noticed (it had passed me by until Mike gave me the heads-up the other day) that Google rolled out site speed to all analytics accounts without the previously required change to the GA snippet so you can get some of this data from your GA account now – here's the technical breakdown from some of Distilled's pages:

Site speed in GA

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

This was the most ambitious of my ideas for SEO monitoring. It came out of a real client issue. A major client was rolling out a new website and managed to deploy an old / staging version of robots.txt on a Saturday morning (continuous integration FTW). It was essentially luck that the SEO running the project was all over it, spotted it quickly, called the key contact and got it rolled back before it did any lasting harm. We had a debrief the following week where we discussed how we could get alerted to this kind of thing automatically.

I went to David Mytton, the founder of Server Density and asked him if he could build some features in for you lot to alert when this kind of thing happens – if we accidentally noindex our live site or block it in robots.txt. He came up with this ingenious solution that uses functionality already present in their core platform:

Monitoring for any change to robots.txt

First create a service to monitor robots.txt – here's ours:

Monitor robots.txt with server density

Then create an alert to tell you if the MD5 hash of the contents of robots.txt changes (see a definition of MD5 here):

robots md5 alert

If you copy and paste the contents of your robots.txt into an MD5 generator you get a string of gobbledegook (ours is "15403cbc6e028c0ec46a5dd9fffb9196"). What this alert is doing is monitoring for any change to our robots.txt so if we deploy a new version I will get an alert by email and push notification to my phone. Wouldn't it be nice to get alerted in this way if a client or dev team pushed an update to robots.txt without telling you?

Spotting the inclusion of no-index meta tags

In much the same way, you can create alerts for specific strings of text found on specific pages – I've chosen to get an alert if the string "noindex" is found in the HTML of the Distilled homepage. If we ever deployed a staging version or flipped a setting in a wordpress plugin, I'd get a push notification:

Server Density homepage noindex monitoring

Doing this kind of monitoring is essentially free to me because we are already using Server Density to monitor the health of our servers so it's no extra effort to monitor checksums and the presence / absence of specific strings.

#4 Bonus – why stop there?

Check out all the stuff that etsy monitor and have alerts for. If you have a team that can build the platform / infrastructure, then there are almost unlimited things you could monitor for and alert about. Here are some ideas to get you started:

status codes – 404 vs 301 vs 302 vs 500 etc.
changes in conversion rates / cart abandonment
bot behaviour – crawling patterns etc – given how disproportionately interested I was in the simple "pages crawled" visualisation available in cloudflare (see below – who'd have guessed we get crawled more by Yandex than Google?), I feel there is a lot more that could be done here:

Cloudflare crawl stats

PS – today is the last day for early bird discounts on our Linklove conferences in London and Boston at the end of March / beginning of April. (There's also a sign-up form on that page if you want to make sure you always hear about upcoming conferences and offers). I hope to see many of you there.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 23, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Monitoring, Tips, Tools · Posted in: Seo

How To Get The Equivalent Of $100K in PPC Ads For Free

Posted by scanlin

We launched our site in July 2010. By the end of 2011 we ranked on page one organic results for 108 relevant phrases. During 2011 we went from four phrases in the top three results to 44 phrases in the top three. Here are the SEO tactics we used to get the equivalent of $ 100K in PPC ads in 2011 for free.

Starting in early 2009, we took 18 months to build a subscription-based information service for investors. Half way through that process we started thinking about marketing and joined SEOmoz to learn about SEO. (First and foremost, thanks to the SEOMoz team and community for educating us on how to do SEO, as we were total novices!) Based on what we learned we made changes to our site architecture, URL naming conventions, image naming conventions, and content strategy before we launched.

Because we are a self-funded startup we knew we wouldn't have a big (or any, really) PPC budget. In our sector (financial services) many of the phrases we wanted are $ 10/click because we are bidding against well funded competitors (online brokers mostly). Given our conversion rates and lifetime customer value we can't make money by buying visitors at $ 10/click. We had to rely on organic traffic and SEO.

SEO Results

We made solid progress with our SEO in 2011. We are analytical types and like to graph the number of phrases we have in Top 3 and Page 1 organic results each week.

For Page 1 results we went from 14 phrases at the beginning of 2011 to 108 phrases at the end of 2011:

For Top 3 organic rankings in 2011 we went from four at the start of the year to 44 at the end of the year:

The impact of these ranking improvements was significant. We quadrupled our Google referred organic traffic during the year. At the start of the year we were getting 2000 visitors per month from Google organic visits. By the end of 2011 we were getting 8000 visitors per month from Google organic visits:

For us, this increase in organic search traffic helped us grow our business nicely during 2011.

Over $ 100,000 Of PPC Ads Equivalent

We wanted to know how much that organic traffic was worth to us in terms of equivalent PPC ad spend. So we went to the Google Keyword Tool and looked up the Exact Match estimated CPC for each phrase where we ranked. Then we multiplied that number by the actual visits we received for that Exact Match phrase.

For example, we rank for "call option" which has an estimated CPC (for Exact Match) of $ 13.66. We got 286 clicks from that phrase in 2011, which would have cost us 286 x $ 13.66 or $ 3907 if we had purchased those clicks via PPC. Do that same exercise for all of the phrases that sent us organic traffic during 2011 and you get a number in excess of $ 100,000. Those are visits we got for free because of our SEO. (Did I mention how much we appreciate our training from SEOmoz yet?)

Cool. So How Did You Get Those Rankings?

Ah, yes. The secret sauce. Because we are grateful to the community here, we are going to share our tactics. None of this is rocket science or breaking new ground. But rather than vague assurances, we can say for certain these tactics worked for us.

On-page optimization. We created an Excel file and mapped our site so we knew which phrase was mapped to which URL. We limited ourselves to one phrase per URL (okay, maybe two phrases if one was the plural of the other). Then we used the Report Card feature of the On Page tools here until we got an 'A' grade for every phrase/URL pair. We did this for about 200 phrases we care about. Yes, it took a while (a little bit of time each day spread over six months).

Internal linking. If a blog article on one concept mentions a concept we have another blog article for then we make sure the first points to the second with appropriate anchor text. We also interlink our Tutorial with our Blog. We actually repeat this process about once every 90 days, so to make sure that older content is referring to newer content (and vice versa) as we add more content pages.

New content. We add at least one page of unique content per week to the site (300-500 words written by us and relevant to our audience). We have a list of phrases we'd like to rank for that we don't currently rank for and tend to create content around one of those phrases each week.

Link building. We build deep links to every page. For some pages, optimized for long tail phrases, it only takes 1 or 2 links with appropriate anchor text to get a decent ranking. But for most of our phrases it requires many more links than that. We wrote a ton of guest blog articles and article marketing articles (non-spun, non-spammy) and posted them on themed (investment related) blogs and sites. An example is this guest post on a PR5 site.

BLU. Blogger Link Up is a free email list where people post requests for articles every day (there are a few of these kinds of sites). If you write something they will give you a link back. Before spending time creating new content for someone else we always check their traffic stats and look at their site. If their site is spammy looking then forget it. But many of them are quality, well-curated sites that will provide a decent link in exchange for quality content.

HARO. If you aren't using HARO you should be. It stands for Help A Reporter Out. You sign up (free) and then get a daily email from journalists looking for sources on articles. If you are relevant to the article they are working on and offer them some expert answers or content they may cite you in their article (and give you a link back). Major publications use HARO and we have successfully gotten links on sites like American Express's OpenForum (PR6 site) through this process. It's not the same as having an expensive PR firm, but it will give you at least some access to the same kind of publications a PR firm would.

Press releases. Never underestimate the links you will get if you issue a press release. We use PRWeb but there are others. Make sure the release is SEO optimized (put in a few links to deep pages on your site). Seems like no matter what you issue at PRWeb there are dozens of sites that will republish your release, creating dozens of new links. Yes, you have to pay for the releases. Do it a couple times a year, minimum.

Forum participation. This does not mean posting spam in forums. This means find where your audience hangs out and provide meaningful participation. After you've established yourself as credible (posted a certain number of non-spam postings) then most forums will let you have a do-follow link in your signature line for each post. Yes, it takes time to read and participate in the forums. You will not only get some link love (for the bots) but eventually but you will also get human visitors who just like what you're saying in the forums and come check you out.

YouTube videos. We weren't sure about this one until we did it, but it's totally worth it. Create a channel on YouTube (which will get you one do-follow link from a PR9 site) and post some videos. We saw a noticeable increase in rankings once we did this. We think that PR9 link really helped.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+: Set up profiles and every time you write a blog entry post it to these outlets.

You Had Better Like To Write

The bottom line is we spend a ton of time writing. Writing for our own site, writing guest blogs and articles for other sites, writing to answer HARO requests, answering questions in forums, etc. We probably spend half our time on new content creation and writing in general. Yes, you can outsource the writing but (1) it costs money, and (2) much of what you get back won't be of high enough quality to use (at least, within our financial niche that has been our experience). Better to write it yourself.

We've definitely come to realize that SEO is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Even though we made good progress in 2011 we have another hundred phrases we want to rank for in 2012. That's over eight per month. Time to get back to writing!

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 21, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: $100K, Equivalent, free · Posted in: Seo

What to Do When You Need Boring Content to Rank Well in Competitive SERPs – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

What happens when you have a page that ranks very well, but it isn't the page that pulls in the sales that you need? Often times the page that does convert very well is "boring" and subsequently ranks poorly.

In this weeks Whiteboard Friday, we are going to go over some strategies you can use to get those classically "boring" pages to rank well. Don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

The transcription for this video will be coming soon.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

January 20, 2012 · tomo · No Comments
Tags: Boring, Competitive, Content, Friday, Need, Rank, serps, Well, Whiteboard · Posted in: Seo

« Older Entries

Video Transcription

Video Transcription

Why is it a Terrible Strategy

Is it natural?

Links from unique domains?

Incorporating social signals?

It's not All Doom and Gloom

1) Creating the Bait

2) Creating noise links

3) Guest posting

4) Social signals

The Methods

(2) “pws=0” Parameter

(3) Signing Out of Google

(4) Signing Out + “pws=0”

(5) Incognito Browsing (Chrome)

(6) Incognito Browsing (IronKey)

(x) Stand-alone Crawler

The Dry Run

Google’s Toggle <=> “pws=0”

Queries Change Frequently

Signed Out Data Didn’t Change

The Data Set

The Metrics

(1) Total Results

(2) Social Results

(3) Ranking Change

The Final Test

(1) Logging Out Won This Round

(2) Chrome’s “Icognito” May Not Be

(3) Social Results Are Limited (For Now)

(4) Universal Results Are Independent

So Let's Wrap It Up

Videos Indexed in the SERP

Benefits of a Video Sitemap

Video Embed Code

Embed Code

Nested iFrame/Embed *OPTIONAL*

Video Sitemap Requirements

Example Video Sitemap

Tweak Robots.txt

Update Google Webmaster

Conclusion

#1 Traffic drops

#2 Uptime monitoring

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

#4 Bonus – why stop there?

Video Transcription

Categories

Archives

Meta

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Nested iFrame/Embed OPTIONAL