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

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

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

Out of all the blog posts I've read this year, one has stuck in my mind more than any other: Why [the] open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems. He takes on Drupal and KickApps for their lack of usability and then moves on to Wordpress. He's right. Even Wordpress usability sucks. It's generally regarded as the best of the Open Source projects in terms of usability, but even it sucks. Read more...

My apologies for the lack of blog posts here over the last few months. Between the Open Source Matters board and getting a new company off the ground with Open Source Training it's been a hectic year. In the last few weeks I took a working vacation to  Germany for JandBeyond and then back home to England. I've been blogging but my limited time and energy has gone into Joomla.org rather than here. Still, there are quite a few things I'd like to write about that aren't appropriate for Joomla.org so look for some new articles here in the next few weeks. Here's a recap of my Joomla.org posts: Read more...

This week's tutorial is the second of a two-parter. We've had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors ... blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal's default handling of nodes. In the first part we covered how to give people easy to a list of their own nodes, using a module called workspace. In this second part we're going to create a workflow, allowing you to choose who has control over a node. A newspaper website is a great example - a writer may submit an article which is then passed to the copy-editor for checking and then to the editor for approval and publication. In Part 1 we used the "Workspace" module. This time we're using the "Workflow" module. Read more...

As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free. :D Sure that can make sense for seasonal promotions, but you could do the same thing by having subdomains and sister websites. Dell.com can be the main site, Dell.net (or deals.dell.com) can be the deals & promotions website, and Dell.org can be the good karma charity site. No paying someone else for brand you already spent to build. Beautiful. But I digress... In October of 2008 Google's CEO revealed which ad Dollars they were chasing, and what loophole they were opening up in their relevancy algorithms "Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." That led to the brand update, and now Google even recommends specific brand modifiers when you search for words like "digital cameras." ...and here is the problem... Less than 2 years after Mr. Schmidt's prophetic brand drivel, the Financial Times is doing a series on Google, in which Google's Amit Singhal is blaming brands as being a major issue: Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By “pointing” to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence. ... Google’s Mr Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition”: where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect, he adds. No mention (of course) that it was Google which put excessive emphasis on domain authority, or how Google gutted the link graph, or how Google funds most of the content mills with AdSense. Those are all irrelevant details, just beyond Google's omniscient view. :D The other thing which is absurd, is that if you listen to Google's SEO tips, they will tell you to dominate a small niche then expand. Quoting Matt Cutts: "In general, I’ve found that starting with a small niche and building your way up is great practice." And now brand extension is somehow a big deal worth another layer of arbitrary manual inspection and intervention? Meanwhile scraper sites are still clogging up Google, and they claim they need to write better algorithms to detect them. It isn't hard to see the sun at noon! If sites which expand in scope deserve more scrutiny then why is there so much scrape & mash flotsam in the search results? What makes remixed chunks of content better than the original source? A premium AdSense feed? Brand?

Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms. Content farms, such as Demand Media's eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry "concern". "Industry" being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being "competitive threat". A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled "Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout". They talk about "job threatened journalists" and "diminishing content standards". Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press! :) The pundits have also weighed in. So many journalists, eh. Looks like an over-supply if you ask me :) Some of them could learn a thing or two from SEOs. For starters, many seem to be working on the false premise that Google returns "quality" results. Since when has Google ever been about "quality" results? Google's aim is to return links the searcher finds relevant. "Quality" and relevance may not be the same thing, and thinking in terms of an arbitrary notion such as quality is to misunderstand what Google does. For example, if a searcher, with a below-average level of reading in English wants a quick answer to a question about the common cold, then who's to say a simple, peer-produced bullet-point explanation is less relevant than a doctoral thesis on the same topic? Everyone benefits when the answer is factually correct, of course, but there's nothing to say the content mill won't offer factually accurate content just because the production process is low cost. If geared towards rankings, the content may also offer the facts in a format the user finds more useful. Google is mostly about utility. It's about providing value to the end user. "Quality" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Let's also not forget Google argue that Adwords - advertisements - are content, which are also rewarded by a relevance algorithm. I'm guessing the council won't be arguing that advertisements can be a form of quality content any time soon. And what does quality mean anyway? And who defines it? I think I can guess what the elitists at the ICSC may argue - they know what it is, and they will define it! Nice work if you can get it, I guess. Solutions To The Content Crisis One solution they offer to this perceived "content crisis" is to create a set of public guidelines for internet content, or an accreditation process for syndicated content. Heh. Reminds me of the SEO "best practices" debates of years past. The result will be the same, of course - they'll end up talking to an audience that consists entirely of themselves. Everyone else will be getting on with the job of producing content. What concerns us is that most of these new content syndicators are producing low-quality articles that are link based,” said Tim Duncan, the ICSC’s recently installed executive director. “They are designed to score high on search. That drives down high quality content. Wikipedia, and white hat SEOs, might not agree, of course. Content can both be ranked well and be highly relevant. This is, after all, Google's aim. Some ICSC members have even advocated reaching out to Google to urge the search giant to tweak its algorithm to give more weight to content quality in its search results Hilarious. I think they mean "any content they think is quality" Perhaps Google can send them a regular cheque each week, too! I suspect money is the true driving force, as opposed to any real concern for editorial standards. Have you seen some of the trash the MSM serves up? Quality stuff, certainly. At the end of the day, quality standards arguments are pointless. Besides the confused frame of journalistic news vs Q&A-style content, the end user decides the level of quality they will accept and pay for on the internet. The real problem traditional publishing and the mainstream media is facing is that their business model is screwed. Their content production costs are simply too high, and they are being undercut. If they think that people want higher quality, then the answer is simple - produce it and let the visitor decide. And get some good SEO advice, so they don't inadvertently bury it. Google Joining In? In a further twist, Google might be looking to join the content mills at their own game. An interesting patent, "Identifying Inadequate Search Content" identifies keyword areas where there is search demand, but low levels of relevant content. That's essentially what Demand Media does. Assuming Google don't/can't get into publishing for every vertical in existence, Google would do well to make this information publicly available. Especially to their hordes of Adsensers ;) How You Can Create A Successful Content Mill Ignore mainstream media journalists and whiners who like to form councils. Understand that Google is looking for relevant content. "Relevance" is, in the end, deemed by the searcher. If there are a lot of searches for "pay levels for doctors" and you publish a page that shows "pay levels for doctors", then you are producing relevant content and Google will reward you. Google are, no doubt, measuring how relevant visitors think the information is, and there are various signals that could be used to determine this. These signals will not come from a council of elitist, self-interested old media. The signals will be based on user activity and user voting patterns. These signals must be scalable i.e. links, visits, timeliness, recommendations, frequency of appearance, re-quoting, etc. Increases in "quality" i.e. content depth and accuracy - will come from end-user voting. If users want deeper answers to search questions, either Google will deliver it, or users will abandon Google and go somewhere that provides it. Perhaps that's what ICSC should do - start their own search engine ;) Having said all that, a lot of samey, lightweight content won't survive in the long run, because Google likes to provide variety in their result sets. Look for ways to differentiate your content. Quality is only one - arbitrary - point of differentiation. You'd be better concentrating on aspects such as ease of access, readability, findability, relevance and freshness. Keep the end user firmly in mind.

Widgets Video content Video games Product comparison Travel eBooks They might prefer to use different labels (so as to minimize fear in the marketplace & slow down regulators), and they might claim that aggregate statistics control the investments & thus they are not really publishers, but they plan on skimming a big piece off of the top of many big markets. AdWords was just the start! Videos, maps & product search...look how Google self-deals in each while managing to call it a value added feature (or some such). If Google collects data, hosts data, sorts data, recommends personalized consumption habits, and then makes small investments in new content from proven past performers (and then give them a bit of stealth promotion on their network)...how is it possible for Google to lose money? (Outside of lawsuits)? Google can claim they are "democratizing" media while showing a string of successful partnerships based on investing using real time data that nobody else as access to. Meanwhile if you are a publisher they are gutting your business model through paying people to snag your content and wrap it in their ads, while they also redirect user attention to the companies and acts they have invested in. "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market... and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that." - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO Note that there was no moral debate on the table. Their only internal limitation to setting up a hedge fund and swaying the markets to increase the profits of their trades would be that they thought it was illegal. How much of the online ecosystem can Google consume before publishers promote other views of the web? One way to fight this sort of strategy is Yahoo!'s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy. It increases short term margins, but in the longrun it makes one that much more vulnerable. Google can always buy the partner of choice and then ride off the free promotion & validation that the acquisition gained from earlier partnerships. Sure adding more noise to a noisy market can bring in eyeballs, but fleeting ones. Death by a thousand compromises. The other is to work in markets too small for Google to be interested in. Or to define & create a new vertical, like Zynga did. Even with as shady as Zynga's founder is, longterm that company is in a better position than Yahoo! is.

In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn't tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location. Words which have a low discrimination value may have a higher discrimination value when combined with neighboring words. Hot and dog might have a different meaning when they are next to each other. As explained in this Wired article: Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.” But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.” The concept of discrimination value also has value outside of search. If you get feedback from an anonymous person on a third party site it gets so much weight (maybe none). If you get feedback from someone who is not anonymous it gets more weight. If you get feedback from a paying customer it gets much more weight. One of the most powerful levels of discrimination is indeed payment. If a person pays you the (typically) you know who they are & they have expressed significant interest beyond what most people will do. I think online business models which require payment from the typical user are not hyped and are not considered sexy because those sorts of models are often slow growth due to the penny gap and the requirement of greater trust to convert. Whereas a programming marketer can hear of a new network (say Pippers) and create 40,000 bogus accounts in an hour. The owners of Pippers can then talk about their explosive growth rate in the media, which earns them media coverage. In turn this increases their ability to raise capital and continue their "growth." But many of the social networks end up being a bag of smoke that will fade because they aim to bucket people as beings in a database and are so broad as to have little discrimination value. I have been reading You Are Not a Gadget and he compared the depersonalization on the broad social networks to the beauty of an oud forum he is a member of. Much like charging for admission, obscurity is a filter which improves the level of discourse. Compare the comments on *any* niche topic site to what you find on Youtube. If you can show me a site which is consistently worse than Youtube (outside of site like 4Chan which specialize in creating campaigns to try to make epileptic people have a seizure) I will buy you a beer then next time we meet. :D My wife deleted her FaceBook account because she was annoyed at some people's behavior on it. Part of the problem with the social networks is that they are so broad and so frictionless that your activities on them really don't matter. As a marketer there are a couple ways to play such networks largely ignore them be friends with everyone use bots As a marketer the first of those options means you are saving your time for higher paying areas, and the second of those options means more people seeing more distribution of whatever content you create. But many of the helpful aids are at best dubious short term opportunistic ploys. The third option means you are one of the people who is going out of their way to make the web worse, but many will. ;) Generally any given month I haven't been on Facebook for more than 5 minutes outside of writing & targeting ads, or approving a few real "friends" and hundreds to thousands of other people who claim to be my friend. But if you message me on FaceBook there is a precisely 0% chance of getting a reply. :) When FaceBook launched Beacon a few years ago they wanted to sell peer pressure as an ad unit. If brands can show that your friends did something then maybe that can help lead to a cumulative advantage sort of environment which has you follow along. Beacon was such a flagrant violation of user privacy that it was quickly shot down by the market. But with the new FaceBook like button, they are trying to use like button clicks to put your name on ads: "Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. "That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time." In the short run it may work, but in the longrun I don't like the concept. The reasons are many. You can agree with one particular thing a person says and like it while being nearly diametrically opposed to their general philosophy on life. For example, when we launched that "How Google Works" infographic last week one of the reporters who wrote about it also mentioned how sleazy and nefarious the SEO industry is, and yet he was willing to promote the efforts of an SEO because it was published on a blog with a sister acronym in the domain name. :D ... Of the 3,000+ people who voted for us likely less than half of them know anything about me, or even my association with the site. You can like one product from a company, but not like their other products. I have worked with GoDaddy as a registrar for years. And I have had no complaints on that front. But they also sell some search engine submission service that I would cringe to see my name promoting. You click the like button once on one page. Years later the business you liked is trading in another area...they moved from remnant inventory to spyware, and you recommend them. ;) An individual can have multiple lines of work. You might like Thom Yorke's role in Radiohead, but you might not like his political views or his solo work. Imagine when someone buys a car that you passively recommended which has a manufacturer defect. One of their loved ones gets killed and you eat the blame. Just like businesses, people change over time. This is especially true in the area of business, where a former partner or friend goes out of their way to betray your trust and screw you. How do likes work with 301 redirects? How do they work when the content of the page shifts from genuinely useful to hawking trash with a hyped up sales letter? A like doesn't have much discrimination value. And it shouldn't last very long. Why did you like something? When did you like it? Who knows. Did you like Toyota right up until the brakes didn't work? After you get out of the hospital, how do you feel when your friend asks you why you are still promoting their products? Did you work for a digital sharecropper overlord like Jason Calacanas who required you to push their junk elsewhere? How did you feel when your friend asks you why you are promoting his trash after he canned you with 1 week notice while boasting how they are nearing break-even and have over 8 years of cash in the bank? Once people experience that will they become jaded and stop recommending things? And if there isn't a backlash against the like button then given enough time one of your friends will like almost anything. It doesn't matter the product/service/offer ... if your pool of "friends" is wide enough then one of them is receiving an affiliate commission for pushing something, one of them owed a favor to the merchant, and one of them liked the merchant because they picked up a tab in the bar last month. A wave of 100 million blond hair 18 year old girls who are lonely have joined FaceBook friending up with the desperate and then promoting scammy wares to them via automated clicks of the like button. And then of course there will be services like SpikeTheVote. Sure a fad might work in the short run, but given enough time and there will be friend recommendations for almost anything. Once the novelty wears of does any of it matter? In time any database record can be an ad targeting mechanism. Will I be promoting some of the products my thousands of "friends" create or endorse by a click of the mouse which changes purpose after the fact? At first online petitions were powerful because they seemed to have mobilized swaths of people. But then people realized that a vote represented nothing more than an automated form submission and clicking send. 2 clicks of the mouse. Not much discrimination value.

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more "move on please" rather than "let's go!" types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign. Competition is usually a good thing, it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to "Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47." Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable. It isn't so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics. Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there! However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low. Certainly I'm not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them. There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists: Business Sports Personal Relationships Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind: The best team is not unbeatable The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they're good. However, it doesn't mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it's quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor's site. You can't win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose :-). Look at is as a learning lesson. What could you have done better? Where could you have pushed harder? Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities? The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don't torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it's a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data - not a bad deal. Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull. So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently. Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox, you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you'll want to consider are: Number of backlinks from unique domains (don't be *wowed* by the total link count) Anchor text distribution of external links Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links) Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com .Edu Links .Gov Links Is the exact match ranking? Is it all big brands? Are there lots of interior pages ranking? The on-page optimization of the site/page PageRank and so on... There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools : SEM Rush Compete Keyword Spy SpyFu iSpionage Alexa We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums. So while you shouldn't ignore the competition completely you shouldn't be consumed by it, particularly if it's just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing. Studying a competitor's on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for "The Fountain of No Competition" promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from :-). And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site's visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance. And so they never got a response. :D It is the same reason I don't use services like AddToAny on our websites. Given that we live in "the information age" it is surprising how little people value data & how little they expect you to value it. But there are still a lot of naive folks online! Google has a patent for finding under-served markets. And they own the leading search engine + the leading online ad network. At any point in time they can change who they are voting for, and why they are voting that way. They acquired YouTube and then universal search was all the rage. Yes they have been pretty good at taking the longterm view, but that is *exactly* why so many businesses are afraid of them. Google throws off so much cash and collects so much data that they can go into just about any information market and practice price dumping to kill external innovation & lock up the market. Once they own the market they have the data. From there a near infinite number of business models & opportunities appear. Google recently became the #1 shopping search engine. How did they respond? More promotion of their shopping search feature. All those star ratings near the ads go to a thin affiliate / Google value add shopping search engine experience. Featured placement for those who are willing to share more data in exchange for promotion, and then over time Google will start collecting data directly and drive the (non-Google) duplication out of the marketplace. You can tell where Google aims to position Google in the long run by what they consider to be spam. Early remote quality rater guidelines have highlighted how spammy the travel vertical is with hotel sites. Since then Google has added hotel prices to their search results, added hotels to some of their maps, and they just acquired ITA software - the company which powers many airline search sites. Amongst this sort of backdrop there was an article in the NYT about small book shops partnering up with Google. The title of the article reads like it is straight out of a press release: Small Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market. And it includes the following quote Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners. “I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.” He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.” If they have all the sales data they don't need to make recommendations. They let you and your customers do that. All they have to do to provide a better service than you can is aggregate the data. The long view is this: if Google can cheaply duplicate your efforts you are unneeded duplication in the marketplace. Look at the list of business models Google publicly stated they were leery on: ebook sites get rich quick comparison shopping sites travel aggregators 3 out of 4 ain't bad. But even on the one they missed, they still have an AdSense category for it. :D

This image might need updated in the years to come, but it does a great job laying out how Google works when you type a query into their search engine. Search is so easy to do that it is hard to appreciate how complex it is unless you take a look under the hood. Which is exactly what this graphic does :D Click the image to get the full sized beefy image :D A side benefit of this graphic is that it should help prospective clients realize how complex SEO & PPC campaigns can be. So if anyone is trying to be an el cheapo with their budget you can use this to remind them how complex search is, and thus how time consuming and expensive a proper search marketing campaign is.

There are so many blogs on search marketing. Then there are so many forums. And Tweets. So much SEO noise, and so little time. So how does anyone make sense of it? The deluge can be overwhelming for the experienced SEO, let alone the poor beginner. If you are just starting SEO, here are the ten areas you should spend most of your time on when you're starting up. 1. Stop reading Blogs/Forums/Tweets/Facebook. Too much noise, takin' all your time :) "SPAM = Site's Positioned Above Mine" - Greg Boser 2. Before you do any SEO, define your niche. What service does your website provide? Who are your readers/customers? What can you provide that your competitors don't? How are you going to deliver your services and make a profit? There's no point ranking well for a business that doesn't work at a fundamental level. "Search is a "reverse broadcast system." In a broadcast system, advertisers spend lots of money to reach a mass audience, hoping to build desire for a product or service. But most of the audience is not interested in their pitches. Search is the reverse. Each search is an expressed desire, something that someone at a particular time actually wants. Advertisers can tune in to the "desire-cast" that’s going on." - Danny Sullivan 3. Set business-specific goals and include a time frame. "I want to make x in 12 months". "I want 20,000 RSS subscribers in 6 months". It's important to be specific. It's difficult to measure goals that aren't specific i.e. "be popular". Never let your ads write checks that your website can’t cash. - Avinash Kaushik 4. Create interesting content. If you know your audience, you already know what content they will find interesting. If you don't, revisit #2. I’m not even sure myself - Matt Cutts 5. Links. You need links Not just the Google-juice, PR-passing kind. Links are the arteries of the web, Traffic travels across links, so all links, crawlable or not, no-followed or otherwise, are valuable. Asking for links from people you don't know is pretty much a waste of time. It's a better idea to create fantastic content, then link out to the popular people who can spread the word. They'll follow their inbound links back to you. Make sure that what they find is remarkable. The urgent can drown out the important. - Marissa Meyer 6. Do SEO. All that stuff you're no longer reading in #1? It all boils down to this: put keywords in your title tag, write on-topic content, make sure your site is crawlable, get links to that content, get people to talk about you. Repeat. We're trying hard to find user needs that aren't being met at all- Larry Page 7. After a month, look at your keyword referral logs. Take those terms and plug 'em into keyword research tools. Create a list of 30 keyword terms that your audience would find interesting. Those are your article headings. Write 30 articles. Repeat. 8. Look at your competitors. Your competitors are ranking well for a reason. They're being mentioned elsewhere for a reason. What are they doing that you're not? Reverse engineer their sites i.e. who links to them, find out what articles they publish and find out who is talking about them, and why. Emulate them, then go one better. Either that, or stop competing with them directly i.e. define a slightly different niche. We are currently not planning on conquering the world - Sergey Brin 9. Get social. Social media is often over-hyped, but the principles, and numbers behind it, are sound. Getting mentioned is the new link building. It's about building connections between people. Google has a problem. Using links as a measure of relevant content doesn't work as well as it used to, so you can be sure Google will be using an ever-more complex set of signals. These signals will involve the connections people make with your site. That's really what Google wants to know - who is most relevant. Consider the many different ways people can connect with you, and enable those connections. 10. Start reading the blogs/forums/twitter. The irony, of course, is that I've linked to some truly great resources and thinkers :) If you've followed the ten steps above, you're 80% of the way there. The final 20% will take a while longer, and that's where the minutae comes in. Keep in mind that some of the most lucrative SEO information isn't likely to be published in the public domain. Cultivate personal networks to get this information. This is true of any business endeavor. Network :)

I just read a WSJ article about how some hotel chains are trying to woo people leaving negative remarks publicly about their brand. 'I Hate My Room,' The Traveler Tweeted. Ka-Boom! An Upgrade! Generally speaking, the idea is crap. In essence they are spending resources trying to make the most unsatisfied segment of their market happy, and rewarding people for trashing their brands with free upgrades & other perks. And so it teaches more people to complain & to find arbitrary things to complain about. Hence the friendly article offering the tip on how to get free room upgrades, with tips like: "Have a lot of online friends or followers. Hotels will pay more attention to your requests." Hey Ritz-Carlton & Shangri La ... we have 10,000's of readers and you suck! Please save my complimentary upgrades for the next time I am in town. :D Does anybody think those leading brands got to where they are by tracking complaints on Twitter? The customers who have complaints actually worth listening to will probably give it to you directly rather than Tweeting it. The people who are unhappy are often the type of people who shop by price and have 0 brand loyalty. And no matter what you do it is never enough. About two days after opening up our membership site (nearly 2 years ago) I got a phone call while on the road by someone who couldn't figure out how to log in. I pointed out where it was. That wasn't good enough. I spent about 6 hours digging through the PHP to try to make the login even more intuitive for them. The next day they asked for a refund because I didn't provide 24/7 phone support. The login wasn't the problem. It was just a handy excuse. The problem was that they were cheap and nothing was going to be good enough for them. And just to put a bit more salt in the wounds, about a week later someone else complained about how the login was changed. FAIL! :D Since then we have increased our price 200% (as we have added more tools, more staff, and the value of my time keeps going up every day) and we still have many people who are happy as longterm customers at a higher price point. In fact when some people accidentally cancel their account I can get 3 to 5 emails in an 8 hour period when I sleep because they miss the site that much. But there is the opposite end of the spectrum as well: potential "customers" who demand a free trial, beg for aggressive discounts, or have 50 "one more question" questions before joining. They probably are not sold enough on the solution to be worth the effort of selling to. No matter what you offer them its probably not going to be enough. Their lack of internal value is reflected into their perception of the works of others, and if they buy from you without being sold on you they will probably ask for a refund, or find a way to be abusive to make you want to can them. In our support suite many non-paying non-customers mark their messages as critical. Whereas the people who are paying customers use a less extreme level, like normal. The levels that people can select are almost a filtering mechanism. Have you spent $0 with us & you mark your issue as critical & you use caps lock & rude slurs? Shift-delete. I didn't intentionally plan it, but our old programmer even built another filter into our business model. The people who join and then cancel right away get locked out right away. We then send them refunds, but this level of filtering filters out a major type of potentially abusive customer. The type who generally won't read or research but will ask 5 different questions 8 different ways each every single day until they have annoyed your members so much that you are forced to boot them to lessen the noise. The person who makes over 100 posts in their first 2 days isn't taking any time to read or listen or implement, so they would just harm your community without getting any value out of it. This leads to my theory of filtering: if a person needs lots of support becoming a customer (or before they become a customer) then they probably are not going to become a good customer. And if you take them on as a customer (or spend any money pushing in that direction) you will probably lose money. The person who sends me an enraged email about "why should I install Firefox" just wasted 5 seconds of my life & will never spend a penny with me. And that is fine. Many of the best companies aim to be polarizing. They pick their spots and define what they do, and work hard to make that market segment happy. That is how Steve Jobs views flash, and it is how Marc Andreessen likes to invest. Find out what people smarter than you are doing and find a way to incorporate those themes into your business strategy. The smaller you are the more polarizing you can be, because you don't have to create something that feeds thousands of employees to be profitable. You could spend every day trying to make any unhappy person happy with your offering. ... OR ... What if you took those same resources that were spent trying to appease the angry and spent them on making those who are happy that much happier? Does the free upgrade go further when it is given to an enraged steroid addicted customer, or does it go further when given to someone who has stayed with your hotel multiple times in the past? Where are they on this circle? The concept to think about here is that if someone is already fairly loyal it doesn't take much more marketing or attention to make them *super* loyal. And then they spread the word. There is a concept of fairness which is preached in school, but you should overweight your business toward your best customers. The person who has been a paying subscriber for years is worth thousands to tens of thousands of Dollars to our future business interests. And for clarity purposes, I agree with Chris that their can be great value in being a guide & helping people out. But angry high-maintenance people are rarely where sustainable profit margins come from (unless, of course, you are a divorce lawyer OR a PR firm who gets paid to give hotels bad advice). From the above WSJ article's comment section It wasn't enough. It never is. :D

Internet success stories rarely get any sexier than the story of Johns Wu.  In 2006, while still an undergraduate research student in neuroscience, Johns started a Wordpress blog he named Bankaholic.com. A one-man-show, Johns used an SEO/SEM-focused approach to build traffic and revenue. Just over 3 years later, he sold Bankaholic to BankRate for a reported $14.9 Million. He was 22 years old. Recently, we caught-up with Johns. This proved to be a bit of a challenge, as he is currently enjoying the ability to travel all over the world. He graciously stopped just long enough to answer some questions about his success and what it takes to create a multi-million dollar website these days. So what leads a guy like you from studying neuroscience into SEO? My original inspiration was the story of Anand Lal Shimpi and Anandtech.com. When I was in middle school, I saw a news report about how he became a media-tycoon when he was only in high school. Since then, I have always been fascinated by online media. In college, I was originally on track go to medical school, but the deeper I got into science, the more I realized that I hated it! I explored some computer and business classes on the side, and in 2005, I started a stock blog called thebulltrader.com. I had a good time blogging and running the site, and a year later, in 2006, I started Bankaholic. After getting my first AdSense check of $50+, I became interested in getting more traffic, and the rest is history! ;) Online affiliates tend to do really well in areas that are either directly or closely tied to finance. Do you evaluate the proximity to finance when considering an area or niche where you'd like to build? Not at all. The Internet is huge and there are tons great niches out there. Is topical expertise required to compete in a valuable market? It definitely helps, but it isn't 100% required. What are specific things you feel might substitute for topical expertise? Being Internet savvy definitely helps. More specifically, understanding how SEO and SEM works will grow your business and give you a shot even if competitors have more topical expertise. Do you like to operate in markets where there is passionate competition, or markets where people tend to approach it with less passion? I always steer clear of competitive niches. Always. There is so much money out there that you shouldn't be wasting your time chasing over-saturated/impossible niches like ringtones and online poker. Let's talk a bit about how you grew Bankaholic. What was your original vision for the site? In 2006, it was the peak of the financial bubble. Banks were very aggressive with marketing so they were paying easy sign-up bonuses to new customers. Any average Joe with a social security number could make a couple hundred bucks a month by taking advantage of these deals. My goal was to aggregate the best deals and create a SlickDeals/Fatwallet kind of site that was exclusively about banking. My vision was to create an online cult of "bankaholics" that would come to my site every day for the latest deals. Great domain name, BTW. What led you to create a uniquely brand-focused name opposed to using a direct-match or keyword-rich domain within the finance sector? Picking a domain name was incredibly frustrating because (as you can imagine) all the good names were taken. I remember the day I thought of the word "Bankaholic" very clearly. I was in the neuroscience lab waiting for one of my lab experiments to finish, so I went on the computer and used NameBoy.com to brainstorm some names. I saw the word "Bankaholic" and I thought hey, this sounds alright...so then I quickly registered it on GoDaddy. Given the size of the sale {$14.9 Million}, it would seem you were quite ambitious and narrowly focused to build that much market leverage so quickly. Were you always focused on reaching that level of success? Yes, after I graduated college, Bankaholic became my life. I knew that I was sitting on a goldmine and that it was my one shot in life to make it big, so I took it very seriously and spent every free moment obsessing over how to grow and improve my business. Did you employ any offline strategies to help drive your success? The only offline strategy I ever attempted was printing Bankaholic t-shirts and giving them out. Since the ROI was so dismal, I never did this again!! Did you have any specific priorities that you feel contributed in a meaningful way to your success? Measure and optimize. You can't optimize what you don't measure. Are you still writing regularly on the site? (One of the current authors in particular seems to share your love affair with culinary treats). LOL! I continued writing for a few months after the sale, but after the transition, Bankrate has totally taken over. The social media scene was emerging as Bankaholic grew, but is a much stronger presence today. Has this changed the way you are approaching new ideas or projects? I'll be honest. I HATE social media. I admit, it can be powerful, but it is so unpredictable and uncontrollable that it is more of an afterthought for my online strategy. I personally would much rather spend my time on SEO since it is predictable, measurable, and (most importantly) 100% profitable. However, Twitter and Facebook are valuable tools because they allow you to reach a fresh demographic that hasn't yet descended into the 'conversion funnel'... So in that respect, yes it is important to have a level of fluency in SMM depending on your niche and business model. If new to a niche with limited resources, how does someone tackle bigger, more challenging markets? Experience is everything. Learn from your mistakes, and don't be afraid to fail your way to the top. Do you feel a success story like yours is something that anyone can do, or what makes the difference? Not just anyone can do it, but there are many who can. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to be a jack of all trades. You gotta be able juggle and excel at many disciplines: creativity, design, business, project management. You can only pick one: which is the most valuable asset for a young webmaster starting a competitive website (with all things being magically equal): capital to invest, passion for the subject matter, expertise on the subject matter, SEO savvy, technical/graphic/content development skills Definitely expertise. If you are a true authority in your niche and you create remarkable content, your website will naturally attract links, advertisers, and business development opportunities. How has the money affected the way you're approaching new business interests? I'm very active in domaining because it is a great place to put my money. I think premium domain names are great for my situation. Since I understand the Internet better than anything else, I know what valuations are attractive. Buying domains also leaves me the option to get into more web development in the future. You've created an amazing "Rags to Riches" story with this entire effort. How does this affect the way you're viewing future challenges? Unfortunately, I have a lot less motivation these days. I am a lot less 'hungry' for success but it's okay... eventually I will get back into my Internet marketing groove. So what's next for Johns Wu? These days, I've just been traveling and relaxing. Once I get the travel bug out of my system, there is no doubt that I will continue chugging away at domain acquisitions and development. Thanks for taking a moment to talk, Johns - safe travels, and here's to your continued success! Marty Lamers owns a Freelance SEO Copywriting company you can visit at Articulayers.Com. Since 2001, Articulayers has been fixing the world, one word at a time.

It's bad enough having to compete with Google's engineers. But to win the search game, you need to out-compete your competition, too! Back in the dark, distant past - around the turn of the century - there was an "us" vs "them" mentality in search. "Us" being webmasters, and "them" being search engines. Back then, in those simple times, in-the-know webmasters gathered in dark forums to discuss and share cunning strategies to crack the algorithms. There was a time when the postings of the secretive GoogleGuy were a big deal. Imagine - a search engine rep actually fraternizing with the enemy! How strange was that! Times have changed. These days, webmasters are more likely to work with the search engines, in the form of Adwords and Adsense. GoogleGuy is now the non-mysterious Matt Cutts, who helpfully announces indexing changes before they happen, even if he is still rather vague on detail. Unfortunately, the collective "us" - webmasters - do not share the same level of camaraderie we once did. As search marketing is now above radar, competition levels have become fierce. It's more dog eat dog. Winning The Search War Against Your Competitors Once we've figured out what Google wants, or we think we know what Google wants, we then need to out-compete everyone else who thinks they've figured it out, too. Typically, webmasters reverse-engineer competing sites. Who is linking to them? What pages are linked? How old are the links? What keyword terms are they targeting? What are their most popular keywords? What Adwords are they running? What meta keyword tags are they using"? ;) Good questions - apart from the last one, obviously - and a legitimate strategy for emulating high ranking sites. Tools like SEMRush provide a valuable insight into what our competitors are doing. BTW: Not pimping, I've been using SEMRush a lot recently, and I think it's a great tool :) However, there's more to it. We also need to look at some other, non-technical factors that reveal something much more lucrative and interesting. Competitive Analysis Competitive intelligence is an ongoing, systematic analysis of our competitors. The goal of a competitor analysis is to develop a profile of the nature of strategy changes each competitor might make, each competitor's possible response to the range of likely strategic moves other firms could make, and each competitor's likely reaction to industry changes and environmental shifts that might take place. Competitive intelligence should have a single-minded objective -- to develop the strategies and tactics necessary to transfer market share profitably and consistently from specific competitors to the company. The essential question underlying competitive analysis is this: "why do some web businesses do a lot better than others?" In terms of search, we not only need to look at the technical aspects of the sites positioned above us, but we also need to analyse the markets in which they exist, what our competitors goals are, their pricing and products, and even obscure details, such as who they are hiring and firing, and why. As you can see, it's not just about getting ranked higher for a certain keyword term. It's about getting ranked higher in terms of overall business performance. It's about seeing what market they capture, and where that market is heading in the future. Once you've figured out that, you might be able to discover new keyword streams that your competitors have missed, and may never think of. Ok, so how? How To Undertake Competitive Analysis It would be nice if you could call up your competitors and ask them exactly what they're doing, and where they are heading. But we all know that's not going to happen. We have to do a little investigative digging. The problem is we don't want to do too much digging, as it is time consuming and can be expensive. Thankfully, a lot of the answers we need are sitting right in front of us. Ask these questions: What is the nature of competition? Where does the competitor compete? Who does the competitor compete against? How does the competitor compete? The nature of the competition is the overall market, and market forces. Take a look at Google Trends, trendwatching sites and other market research tools to figure out where their market is now, and where it heading. Does the market require significant resources? Why are these competitors in these markets? What related markets have they avoided, and why? A concrete example. A few years ago, many SEOs competed as service agencies. Market trends showed that a lot of SEO was moving in-house, particularly at the top end. As SEO moved in-house, demand rose for training. A lot of SEOs are now engaged in training. Ask yourself where your market will be in five years time. Where does the competitor compete?For example, are they limited to a certain geography? Culture? Language? Do they have an offline presence? Who does the competitor compete against? Make a list of the, say, top ten competitors in a niche. Compare and contrast their approaches and offerings. Compare their use of language and their relative place in the market. Who is entrenched? Who is up-and-coming? Who has the most market share, and why? Can you grab some of this share? How does the competitor compete. What are the specifics of the products and services they are offering. Lower prices? High service levels? Do they provide information that can't be obtained elsewhere? Do they have longevity? Money, staff and resources? Are they building brand? Whilst we could go into great depth, the value of even a basic competitive analysis is considerable. By doing so, we can adjust our own offering, like altering price and service levels or by targeting a specific niche. We may slice a new niche in order to avoid direct competition with a highly resourced, entrenched market leader. We might make a list of all the things we need to do to match and overtake that fast rising new challenger. We then position against keywords aligned with the competitive realities we face. There's much more to search competition that algo watching, keywords and links. And many more diverse ways to compete, too :)

In 2008, Eric Schmidt let slip that Google would use brands as a signal to clean up the "internet cesspool. SEOs ears twitched. Quoted by CNET at the time: Web crawlers aren't particularly good at making judgments about the truthiness of digital matter, and the wisdom of the crowd can't keep up with the river of data streaming online. Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool... Schmidt was talking to magazine executives who were concerned about competition they faced from low-cost publishers, like you and me :) Whilst we can't know exactly what aspects Google's algorithms will reward, it's not difficult to see brand factors becoming increasingly influential in search results, both directly and indirectly. Schmidt may be talking about a level of authority that the brand possesses, so is therefore trusted as an "editor", but there may be something else going on, too. It might also be a question of clear subject/topic focus. Establish A Brand If your site has a very clear focus, in terms of brand identity, a number of search and social media benefits naturally follow. On-topic linking, context, and more. I'll discuss this shortly. A brand is more than a name, graphic or logo. A brand is everything you do, from the way your position yourself in the market, to how you answer your emails. Brand is the total sum experience you offer. It's also a collection of keyword terms people naturally associate with you and your site. Whilst it is expensive to create a national or international brand, you can create well-known brands in niches. Consider SEOBook, Webmasterworld.com and SEOMoz. Those brand identities are clear, and I'm sure that a number of unique qualities for each brand springs to mind when those names are mentioned. Ways To Establish A Brand Philip Kotler, Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, identified the steps to developing a brand. Amongst those steps were: Develop The Value Proposition Choose A Broad Positioning For The Product This sounds like marketing guff, but what does it mean in practice? The Value Proposition No one can be good at everything - there isn't enough time and resources - so what is the one thing you are really good at? Is this a value people are willing to pay for? Broad Positioning Kotler identifies three alternatives: the product differentiator the low cost leader the nicher Which one are you? It's possible that a business can be all three, but such generalist businesses tend to be outgunned by businesses that are superior in one way. For example, Versace *could* do cheap items, but it would compromise their focus and confuse their brand identity, which equates to luxury. Here's how to translate these brand ideas into an SEO advantage. The value proposition is based on the demand you identity. For example, if a business owner found keyword demand for the phrase "SEO services in Los Angeles", then the value proposition is: A locally focused SEO service provider The business owner would be suited to providing "SEO services in Los Angeles", presumably by virtue of their location, contacts, focus and experience. The broad positioning would be "niche". A catchphrase/byline may emphasize regionality, locality and accessibility for clients located in Los Angeles. The terminology used in the copy should reflect this niche approach - again, use words and phrases associated with both the service and the locality. When people link to such a site, they would naturally use terms that reflect locaility, because it's an intrinsic part of the brand identity the owner has established. When people talk about this business on Twitter/Facebook etc, they will hopefully use the terms consistent with the brand identity. Whenever people talk about your site in a certain way, Google will surely follow. All the ducks are lined up. Business focus, keyword text, link text and the frame of reference in which people can talk about the business. Simple, right? But how many sites lack this type of focus, and thus miss out on keyword associations? Brand can also be about personality. Danny Sullivan may know a lot about general tech, but to most people, Danny is "the search guy". He gets keyword-rich links, without having to ask. Aaron is "the SEOBook guy". It's hard to not link to Aaron without using the term SEO. Whenever people talk about them, people will naturally use search terminology in the same breath - in their keyword copy, link text and so on, which all flows through into SEO advantages. This benefits flows from having a tight brand identity. The alternative is to be all things to all people, and this doesn't work so well in 2010, either online or off. There's just too much noise. Building a brand is about building a a clear and established identity, and in terms of SEO, it's about being associated with a specific list of keyword terms relating to that identity. Could you sum up your brand identity as a list of keyword terms?

I spoke to Loren from Search Engine Journal today and he mentioned a conference he is helping put together in Los Angeles. The conference is BlueGlass LA. It's on July 19/20 in LA. The speaker line up is pretty awesome and takes a business / start up approach on top of the killer search & social media tactics he will be reviewing. Tickets are only $495, and he has put together a 15% discount for SEObook readers/members. It's seobook SEJ is also running a contest to give away a free pass. Many years ago I got my start in going to SEO conferences at the 2003 Boston SES conference by Danny giving me a free pass for help packing the schwag bags. And on the last day of the conference it snowed and snowed & was a scary snowy drive home. Years later I got to pass the free pass favor onto Patrick (who now has a great view). If you have any questions about the conference, you can comment below and Loren will catch them.

In the past when I claimed that the Google Maps insertion in organic search results wasn't more organic search but rather a Google promotion, I was met with skepticism by some, who argued that Google Maps was just another flavor of organic search and visitors would still be able to go to the end ranked website. If you search for something on Google and click on one of the end URLs you can still visit them, but Google made one step in the opposite direction today. If you click on the map now the Google Maps section lists a bunch of places on the maps, rather than giving you the URLs. You then have to click onto one of the locations to see it on the map and open a pop up area which contains information including the URL. More clicks to do the same thing. How long until Google replaces the URL listings in the search results with links to locations on the Google Maps or links to Google Places pages? It is the next obvious step in this transition. Originally Google wanted to send you to the destination as quickly as possible, hoping that in doing so they would encourage you to come back again. This year Google's strategy has changed to one that wants you to stay for a while. There is no better example of that shift than Youtube Leanback: Jamie Davidson, a YouTube product manager, says that the 15 minutes of daily viewing by a user typically involves six videos, with the conclusion of each presenting "a decision point, and every decision point is an opportunity to leave. We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience."

Back when I got into SEO part of the reason I wasn't too into PPC back then was because I had limited cash, but another big reason I wasn't big on it was because it seemed so simple and boring. Over the past couple years that has changed a lot! Today Google AdWords is far more complex than SEO was in 2003. With that complexity there are additional opportunities for some & additional expenses for others. But keeping up with all the changes is easily a full time job. Noticing that trend, and seeing stuff like the below image, I thought it made sense to try to create something great servicing the AdWords / PPC market. Google keeps controlling more real estate, and if you are not leveraging AdWords then there is a chance your business could eventually get pushed "below the fold" - perhaps not for longtail keywords...but certainly for the highest traffic and most valuable keywords in your industry. Google recently launched their vertical search panels, and to some degree you can think of many of these as what will eventually amount to some form of an ad channel (or a channel which promotes content from premium related partnerships with Google). I am decent at AdWords, but my level of proficiency is nowhere near my level with SEO, and so we needed the help of someone else if we were going to make sure that we had bar-none the best product/service on the market. And so we decided to partner with Geordie to turn PPC Blog into a great membership website which mirrors this one. Off the start access costs $179, but Geordie and I wanted to offer SEO Book blog readers a recurring 30% discount off of that, by using this code EF0 This coupon will work for the first 100 subscribers, and then after the discount will no longer be available. You can join here http://ppcblog.com/member-tour-seobook/ Just like with SEO Book, you can cancel anytime and are under no obligation to stay any longer than you find it valuable to do so. If you do any serious amount of PPC it is quite easy to find a few tips that help you save $5 or more a day, especially when you consider how much PPC stuff Geordie has done (he has managed millions/yr in ad spend for the past 4 years & has brain dumped everything he knows) & how high quality the membership will be. 60+ training modules and a friendly PPC focused forum await you :D

The third reason we really like [eNom] is because the data, right. Almost 10% of the entire web hits our servers. At least 10 million domains. In a world like the web, where everybody is everywhere, trying to figure out what people are doing, particularly in the longtail this is a really exciting source of data. If the domain name data leakage from eNom & BulkRegister is "exciting" for him that means sharing it must be "not exiting" for their customers. One more from the "competing against yourself" series. ;) A few other recent examples: giving away your analytics data, giving away your most valuable keywords, and doing link research for competitors.

This video is a review of one of our online SEO tools - the keyword list comparison tool, which makes it easy to compare up to 10 keyword lists against each other. This can be used to help determine the quality of keyword data sources, to pool data into a handy unified list, or to help understand the overlap in keyword strategy from competing sites when using competitive research tools.

Want to Live Strong? You have to look strong. Start with a nice manly high & tight haircut livestrong.com/business_barber/ You have to be strong. Drink propane. 3 times daily. livestrong.com/propane/ You have to bulk up. Not steroids! Feed the search engines their own search results. livestrong.com/business-don-and-tennas-hair-place_563-326-2277/ I think Google is getting the message on what the search results would look like in a couple years if they let the above continue. Sure they own the search category, but if they let the rot set in too much then people will shift to other modes of discovery. Google realizes that search may splinter - its why they bought Youtube, why the offer a mobile operating system, etc. Google may not be 100% responsible for the above trend. But they will be 100% responsible for cleaning it up. I won't be surprised to see a lot more of this in the near future. Such a shame, as Jason is such a great guy. :(

When Google enters a field sometimes they do so quietly, but when they decide they want to own something there is nothing quiet about their approach. They are not content to pick one niche and one model (the way that Netflix does): Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down. Google wants to turn Youtube watchers into mindless drones who are spared the expense of thought: “If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder. ... “We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says. They want Youtube to be like television, because the TV ad market is far larger than the web ad market, and they already own search. They are desperately searching for new markets for avenues to grow. Google spent $106 million buying On2, and then open sourced their V8 video codec: It’s the “first one is free” approach that a drug dealer uses, and it’s not a “free” play, it’s a “we are the new railroad” play. For one-tenth the amount they paid for that crappy old codec, they could have paid Firefox’s licensing fees in perpetuity, if being a sugar daddy is what they want. They don’t want it. This is a “in your face, Apple” play, and a monopoly play. And in addition to owning Youtube, tons of dark fiber, and their video codec, Google announced their Google TV effort. The person who controls the set top box has the market data. Mark Cuban highlights the gaming that will occur in manipulating the rankings The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV ? Like Google said, there are 4 billion TVs and growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does. but if Google is passively monitoring the network they are far better than a guide. It becomes easy for them to see when their recommendations were not relevant & adjust. And if a network screws them multiple times they can always provide a dampening factor in their rankings. If successful their TV efforts can tear down the walls between different types of content: Google will do what it does, and that’s insinuate itself between information and the user. And the fretting will be minimal. As for the impact of Google TV, this has the potential to challenge the TV hegemony. By blurring the lines between TV and the Internet, Google TV has the potential to destroy classifications of content. No more “TV shows,” just “content.” No more “Web videos,” just “content.” And, once the distinctions are completely undermined, then direct distribution via the Internet becomes more viable. Google TV could replace Big TV as the aggregator, then it just becomes a matter of who offers the fattest pipes. Once Google has the aggregate usage data they can use it any way they like. The concept applies to any market. Economies of scale advantages breed more economies of scale. Apple and Amazon want to have proprietary ebook formats? Fine. Google will assist publishers in creating the default common e-book format. It is not just regular algorithm updates that can whack your traffic. A couple years out these additional content formats will be a big issue for many web publishers because if Google gets a significant sample size & market leverage in any of these parallel markets then some of these other content formats will start bleeding into the search results. And that (along with market competition) can quickly drive margins into negative territory for many publishing business models.

Yesterday someone emailed me this quote "People that pay for things never complain. It's the guy you give something to that you can't please." ~Will Rogers and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage. But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value. What a lot of SEO professionals don't realize is that when they rent text links many of them are paying for their own demise. If you go through a central link broker that operates at scale you are telling them: what areas your business is focused on what keywords are important to you what links you are buying how much you think you will make from the marketing That is fine if you are a huge company with tons of other quality signals which can't be replicated. But if you are a smaller company, what happens when that link broker is also a web publisher? Hmm... xyz is spending $5,000 a month with us to promote that site...well they must be making some good money off it - lets clone it. ;) The equivalent to trusting most your link buying to a single link broker would be doing a public export of all your bids and conversion data for PPC. You wouldn't stay profitable very long with that strategy, and if you share your link purchase data with some of the shadier (and more well known) link brokers you can expect the same result. A friend of mine recently mentioned buying some links and then seeing a number of sites pop up which seemed suspiciously associated with people who work behind the scenes at their link broker. Oooops! Buying links from a central network is not only risky from a Google risk management perspective, but also from a "thanks for the data, fool" perspective.

Now that big media practices keyword stuffing, engage in link selling, are invested in SEO start ups, and are selling SEO services perhaps they won't publish ill-informed pablum when writing about SEO. :D Don't hold your breath waiting on that, but... Now that newspapers are looking to sell SEO services, Google is rumored to be out and about asking them to remove links: We understand that newspapers are currently being contacted by Google and being asked to remove links (especially those placed after the articles have been written – ie comment links and links that are placed for payment in articles weeks or months after it had gone live). As a company, we have been aware that placing links in articles once they have picked up PR is not an uncommon practice in the industry, and we also knew that it would probably come to no good which is why we stayed well away. However, we do have some legitimate links on these sites that were placed as part of a press release or an interview and these are slowly being removed through no fault of our own. So much for all the hard work eh? Google is warning newspapers from linking out and is warning webmasters not to do guest posts. It turns out that any and every link is a bad link in their warped mental model of the web. :D The random surfer must be quite inebriated. And lost. As Google controls more traffic and the value of a #1 ranking increases Google continues to filter filter filter the web graph. The good news is that as Google's view of reality is increasingly warped & their guidelines reflect reality less and less they create a greater opportunity for some competing company to come along and build something better. And for any professional SEO who reads between the lines there is value in Google misleading the rest of the herd. About a decade ago Sergey Brin stated they didn't believe in spam. A decade later they don't believe in the media and don't believe in links. What happened?

Wordstream Review Wordstream is a suite of online marketing tools which cover Keyword Research and Management for PPC and SEO Campaigns. They also offer a Firefox plug-in which we'll cover in a bit. Wordstream gives you access to three free tools: Free Keyword Niche Finder Free Keyword Suggestion Tool Free Keyword Grouper While there are many free and paid keyword tools on the market Wordstream does offer more in the way of integration with industry leading products like Google AdWords and Google Analytics. Recently Wordstream earned the Editor's Pick award in the Google Analytics Application Gallery: Google Marketplace Award Wordstream's keyword data is produced via "blended" data which they acquire from multiple sources. The discuss their data sources on the FAQ section of the Free Keyword Tool. It's important to note that they do not simply pull keyword data from Google like many other "keyword research" tools do. Both PPC and SEO campaigns can fall victim to poor organization which leads to poor site or campaign architecture which eventually leads to poor results as data becomes more and more difficult to accurately manage. Wordstream aims to aid in your keyword research, PPC campaign management, and SEO execution. Free Tools Free Keyword Niche Finder The Keyword Niche Finder attempts to find niches of a core keyword. In this example I chose insurance. Usually, I've had better results with this tool by using really broad keywords. The longer you get into the tail the less associations the tool can perform hence the less niches available for you to analyze. You can choose to have the niches emailed to you (you'll get a zip file of all the niches shown on the screen, not all the available ones so be sure you've got the ones you want, and they come as separate .csv's within the .zip) and you can get started sorting through the niches shown to get an idea of what part of the insurance market you may want to pursue. Let's say I'm not interested in travel insurance. So I click the X to get rid of that and another niche pops up, "uk" insurance. Note the number of niches has gone down and I'm left with a new niche to evaluate, "UK", within the insurance market. So after sorting through the available niches I've narrowed it down to the following niches: So I've decided to pursue the life insurance market so I click on the bucket and I'm shown 774 keywords for that niche. As you can see, there is a filtering option but that is available to paid subscribers. Relative frequency refers to their "blended data" approach meaning the term life insurance quote typically is searched more often than life insurance exam in aggregate. If this is the only niche you want to target simply remove the other niches and request the emailed .csv (need to leave at least 2 active niches for export though). This way you'll receive the keywords you want for further processing in whatever spreadsheet application you use. This tool is somewhat limited as it is a free tool but it can be a pretty useful way to get a broad view of niches available in a specific market when first starting out. Plus, it's a pretty slick way to bounce back and forth between different niches without having to re-query a keyword tool every time you want to look at a different market. Free Keyword Grouper Wordstream's Keyword Grouper tool where you can enter up to 10,000 keywords and have Wordstream group them by category and word/modifier association. This tool can be quite useful when you pull data from something like your web analytics or PPC programs and receive a variety of new keywords back. The Keyword Grouper tool will group using modifiers (cheap, free, buy, etc) which helps you identify new market segments or new keywords you may have been missing out on initially. I think the idea behind the tool is solid but I also think you'd want to spend some time going through your own results to further refine your data. The following screen shot was produced after entering the following data: home insurance 88 auto insurance 39 home insurance company 33 auto insurance quote 28 The groupings are mostly sensible and they also filtered in some modifiers that I didn't originally include but ones that I know are valuable in this industry. Aligning your keywords to your site's structure is always a good idea when doing SEO and this tool can help a bit in that area. The tool (free) is not perfect but it does provide useful, actionable data. Wordstream put out a helpful Keyword Grouping white paper as well.   Free Keyword Tool Wordstream's Free Keyword Tool does exactly what you would expect it to, it gives you keyword data. Their "blended" method of aggregating data can be found here. My Favorite Feature When you export the keywords you are given the top 10,000 sorted from the highest relative frequency to the lowest! Car insurance returned over 45k results and I am now able, for free, to download the top 10k keywords in order of search volume. This is a killer feature for any keyword tool, much less a free one. Consider that: Wordtracker goes up to 1k Google AdWords is less than Wordtracker Even some Competitive Research Tools do not offer the ability to export 10k results with sorting enabled! So that about sums it up for their free tools. I personally like how Wordstream keeps feature bloat out of these tools. So many times you see these keyword tools come out and start making up their own custom metrics which at some point involve: Total number of competing pages Some form of KEI Some made up metric to distract you from the fact that all they are doing is pulling data from Google and recycling it :-( A keyword tool, which pulls data from sources other than Google, has some inherent value as we know that Google's data often has disagreements within their own tools so it's important to have one or three third party sources of data. Paid Tools Wordstream's toolset is broken down into 4 groups of tools: Discover Keywords Manage Keywords Create PPC Campaigns Create SEO Content Discover Keywords Keyword Suggestion Tool A simple keyword tool where you enter your desired keywords and get up to 10,000 results for your search. Wordstream also provides an area where they suggest related words and synonyms which you can easily add to your keyword search by clicking the check mark adjacent to the modifier. The keyword results section offers up your selected results with the following options pertaining to how deep your results will go: 15 50 100 200 500 1,000 5,000 10,000 From here you can whittle down to the keywords you want to add to your campaign (you can add these keywords to your Wordstream database from inside the tool). The speed and depth at which these keywords are returned at are both very impressive compared to other keyword tools. Spy on the Competition Tool Similar to how the Google AdWords Keyword Tool operates, you can place a URL + check all the pages on a website or just a specific page in the search bar and get keywords relevant to whatever site/page you searched on. Where I think this tool falls short is in the categorization data that the AdWords tool returns when you place a URL in their search box. The AdWords tool basically gives you a nice head start into potential site structure options via how they break down the categories and keywords within a URL that you search on. You can use Wordstream's organization capabilities after you are done adding the keywords into your database but I think having the initial breakdown that AdWords provides is slick and something Wordstream may want to consider as they continue to develop their toolset. Enable Continuous Keyword Discovery In a world filled with buzzwords used simply to sell you on recycled products or feature bloat you may look at this as say "riiiiiight". However, this is actually a unique point of differentiation between Wordstream and every other keyword tool on the market. This tool gives your Wordstream keyword database real time access into keywords that are bringing you traffic from either your Google Analytics account or, if you don't use Google Analytics, a custom Wordstream tracking code you can embed on your website. If you make the decision to utilize Wordstream to manage your keyword database then this is a killer feature. No other keyword tool offers such a feature, that I'm aware of anyway. So if you are not overly interested in combing through your analytics reports frequently in order to find additional keywords to target, then this feature will be beneficial to you as the new keywords automatically pop up into your Wordstream database. It's also useful for transitioning these keywords into a PPC campaign you may be managing in Wordstream either as a new keyword to bid on *or* as a negative keyword. So this tool is also handy for being a negative keyword finder as well. Other Ways to Import Keywords Wordstream allows you to copy and paste keywords into your account and initially tag them as either "Paid", "Organic", or "Suggested" keyword sources. You can also download a tool which analyzes your web server logs for keywords You can also upload a CSV or TSV file... So those are the ways you can initially find and upload keywords with Wordstream. The second function of Wordstream's workflow is actually managing those keywords. Manage Keywords Wordstream puts out three options for keyword management: Organize Keywords Find Negatives Prioritize Workflow Organize Keywords At first glance it seems a bit overwhelming, but it's not. You have the following features/options available to you: Automated keyword grouping suggestions on the left side, which you can accept, show, hide, or decline Keywords in your campaign sorted by paid, organic, or suggested (based on tagging you control), new keywords found via your analytics or AdWords tie in, date filtering options, view by keywords that are grouped and ones that are not grouped. The ability to add buckets of filtered keywords to a PPC campaign The ability to use their new SEO Content feature to tie into your CMS and create content for a specific keyword Goals and Action data, available for customization within your settings options Export keywords Keyword Group Explorer The Keyword Group Explorer gives you keyword grouping suggestions based on your keywords. The buckets in yellow are ones which have been accepted by the user as groups and the ones in gray have not been. You can decline the grouping by clicking the gray X or accept it by clicking the check mark. You can hide these suggestions by clicking the light bulb in the bottom of the sidebar. So I'll investigate the puppy suggestion. I click on the suggestions and I'm shown keywords specific to puppy or puppies. This groups all the keywords containing puppy or puppies into one bucket. You can rename the group by clicking "create keyword group" in the right corner. You can also hover over any individual word in the keyword group to delete it and filter out any other keywords containing that modifier. I renamed the group "Puppy Stuff" just to illustrate the ability to customize your groups. So back to the Keyword Group Explorer, turned off other suggestions for now and ta-da, there is Puppy Stuff.   The little arrow indicates the sub-groups Wordstream automatically created with the keywords in the Puppy Stuff bucket (I named this pretty horribly as you'll see in a second). So if you click on the arrow you'll see the sub-groups Wordstream automatically created (I should have left it as Puppy!):   Similar to the main groupings you can click on the check to accept, the X to decline, or the keyword to see the keywords within that group for further grouping and refinement. Hover over a group and see the following: This gives you the top keyword in that sub-group. The stats are as follows: 15.2% represents how much traffic this group could produce, saying the keywords within the puppy stuff training group accounts for 15.2% of the traffic for the main group Puppy Stuff. 16.5% represents the % of keywords in this group accounting for that same percentage in the parent group Puppy Stuff. So this group has 16.5% of the keywords in the entire group. If you right click on a group you get the following options (applies to groups and sub-groups as well) Some of these items are self-explanatory but the de-duplicate option is pretty sweet. Click on that and you'll see duplicate keywords across your groups. This is handy because it really lets you refine your lists pretty quickly and efficiently. You can choose which group to remove duplicates from: Another neat feature is if you click on the jack looking icon in the keyword results you can get options to search Google Trends, the Google Search Results, Bing's xRank, and Bing's search results: You can use this method to keep creating more and more sub-groups if desired but usually 1-2 levels deep is good enough. You don't want to integrate so tightly that someone has to click 17 times to get to an article that could have been easily served on a sub-page within a top-level category. Negative Keyword Selection This tool allows you to search for negative keywords at the group and sub-group levels. It highlights the words that might be irrelevant to your campaign and gives you the option to accept the modifier or deny the modifier via a yes/no option. So what you are saying yes/no to is the highlighted word, not the phrase itself. They also have a checkbox option which keeps potential negative keywords out of this report IF they have previously resulted in conversions (via your AdWords/analytics tie-in data). Once you add a negative keyword in there you can choose phrase, broad, or exact match as negative keyword options. You can manually add negative keywords as well. One option I'd like to see is "add full keyword/phrase or just highlighted modifier" rather than just adding the modifier. They also offer a feature which tries to associate a selected negative keyword with other ones that appear in this report. So for instance, I checked off Chesapeake and hit yes, then I was presented with this:   Prioritize Workflow Wordstream's products play to agency type accounts and workflow is a big part of what they offer. The Prioritize Workflow tool allows you to review workflow information at the group, sub-group, and account level. From here you can: Segment groups with no sub-groups into sub-groups Associate an ad group with a keyword group Associate a landing page with a keyword group or groups Cleanse a group (takes you to the negative keyword tool) De-duplicate groups The columns are as follows: Relevance - A custom score which is derived initially from the amount of keywords within a group and how many visits they have driven. Typically the higher the relevance the more important the group to your traffic levels. Visits - Total number of visits per group of keywords Keywords - Total number of keywords within a group Group Size - If you get the triangle it means you've exceed the group size you set (or was set by default) in the Wordstream Settings panel which is found under the Settings Tab - Wordstream Settings AdWords/Landing Pages - Shows whether or not a group is associated with a landing page or an AdWords account Filthiness - Shows (based on settings that can be modified in Settings - Wordstream Settings) if you've exceed limits set for negative keyword candidates as a percentage of the keyword group. The Relevance field has some customization options: So you can play with this a bit and throw in goals and value of goals as variables as to show which groups are not only driving the most traffic, but are also producing the most goals. Usually you'll find custom keyword performance metrics are not so great because they don't use any relevant data. Here though, Wordstream is using 3 of the most relevant pieces of data when it comes to keywords and keyword importance Actual Traffic Actual Conversions Value of Conversions That was an overview of what Wordstream can do for finding and managing your keywords both on the paid search and organic search side. The third piece of Wordstream's suite of tools is the PPC Campaign Management option. PPC Campaign Management Wordstream's Create PPC Campaign tab takes you right into a nice, clean (dare I say Google like) interface. Here you can pretty much do everything you can do with the AdWords Editor. You can do all of the following here: Download an existing campaign Create a new campaign (for uploading or exporting later) Set your campaign name Set your campaign budget Adjust your campaign status Choose Search and/or Content Network Work with Content Network bids Set a start and end date Work with language and location targeting Assign ad groups to campaigns Interface with Google's Conversion Optimizer Moving Keyword Groups to Ad Groups It is very easy to move one of your existing Wordstream Keyword Groups into Ad Groups. All you need to do is go to Manage Keywords - Organize Keywords right click on the ad group (we'll go with Puppy Stuff) and select "Create Google AdWords Ad Group" Then you are brought to a screen where you select the campaign you want to add it to: Then the group is added to the Create PPC Campaign interface where you can work with just about everything you are use to working with within AdWords. Currently you can only work directly with the AdWords interface but you can export your campaigns in both Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter format. Landing Page Assignment In the same way you export Keyword Groups to AdWords AdGroups you can associate landing pages by simply clicking "Associate Landing Page with Keyword Group" in the Manage My Keywords - Organize Keywords area or in the Prioritize Workflow Area. Adding Conversion Goals If you tie into Google Analytics this is already added automatically added (each time you add a Goal to analytics). You can manage them here and add ones manually. This is managed in the Settings - Conversion Goals tab. So this feature is pretty sweet on the SEO side of the house because with that custom Relevancy data we discussed earlier you can get a real, honest picture of which set of keywords are performing well and perhaps where more sub-groups of that keyword need to be investigated for more content and hopefully more conversions. The goals can be viewed right in the Organize Keywords area and keywords can be sorted by completed goals which is handy when you are refining your campaign. So this is really another piece of their unique feature which we talked about earlier, Continuous Keyword Research. If you choose to manage your campaign within Wordstream it is really a slick set up for SEO (and PPC) and they are looking to beef up the SEO side of things in the near future which is exciting. Create SEO Content and Wordstream Firefox Plug in Wordstream's Create SEO Content feature within your account is a tie in with the Firefox Plug-in. The plug-in is really useful if you utilize blog software for web publishing and especially if you have multiple content authors. The firefox plug-in loads in the left side of your browser and ties into your existing Wordstream database giving you the option to do keyword research as well as create blog entries right from the plug-in in either: Wordpress Blogger Drupal Typepad If you are self-hosting the blogs/sites on WP, Drupal, or Typepad you'll have to provide your login URL and the URL for adding content. You can use your own CMS as well, but you'll need to manually log in to these CMS's/Blogs. The image below shows you how the keywords are presented (in groups similar to the Wordstream tool), the content tie-in to the right, and the keyword options on the bottom: Top Ten Keywords Longer Tail Variations Questions associated with your selected bucket And when you are writing your content the tool will show you instances of the longer tail keywords in your copy as you write it! In the first image the second tab shows "My Keywords". This is the tie in to the existing Wordstream database (your private database) and allows you to start building out your site structure, pretty cool stuff. The "associate content" link indicates that you have not associated a page with your keyword(s). You can also right click on any keyword and get direct access to the following queries:   I stole these images from Wordstream's great piece on their plug-in as they do a great job of showing the CMS integration: Wordstream's Firefox Plug-in A Handy Dashboard Ties it Together In your account you have access to a dashboard that shows the following stats in one spot: Top New Search Queries (from Analytics) My Search Query Database Size New Negative Keyword Possibilites Best Performing Search Queries Search Query Conversions Possible Grouping Options Based on Queries Worst Performing Queries Best Performing Groups Great Wordstream resources can be found here: About Wordstream Wordstream User Guide So What Do You Think? Wordstream certainly has lots and lots of features as well as some nice features not present in any other quality keyword tool (that I'm aware of) such as: Continuous research (being able to bounce from keyword set to keyword set right in the same interface and managing those keywords as well) Being able to research keywords in clusters/groups with a click of the mouse, then automatically showing sub-categories Their database, likely because it pulls from many sources, does a solid job with long tail keywords Using your analytics and AdWords reports to automatically pull in new keywords for you to act on, to track goals on, and so forth is a fantastic feature as we discussed earlier (being able to truly see the more valuable keyword sets within your site's architecture) Overall Wordstream has a robust PPC offering along with a strong SEO toolset offering. In discussing their future plans on the SEO side they did state that they are continuing to improve their UI (which I quite like) as well as continue to add SEO features and tools to their current offering. Their current SEO offering is on par, price wise, with many of the other non-Google tools out there, and offers just as many features as some and more features than others. They have a 7 day free trial available and I think it's worth spending some time with their toolset to see if it fits in with your current workflow. You can manage multiple sites (profiles) so long as you own and operate the sites. You can also get an agency account with Wordstream so you can manage client accounts as well. Each type lets you add multiple users to the account to assist with whatever your workflow needs happen to be. Check Out Wordstream Wordstream Pricing Options

Posted by JoannaLordWe have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes. You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives that you usually discover the data that can change your current course of action. So this post is going to tackle an approach to analytics that is often overlooked and (thanks to Google and their silly naming convention decisions) is rarely used to its fullest capacity. Get excited folks we are going to talk about benchmarking {Woohoo! Insert audience applause here}. All of you excel spreadsheet lovers out there know plenty of ways to extract data and pinpoint specific red flags or recent successes. In fact, most people use analytics to simply analyze the current state of their account. While this is certainly a priority, it really is one dimensional. Instead of stopping there, why not go further? Why not better understand where your data was, and how you are measuring up? In fact, why not use this data to help inform your internal decisions as a company? It’s like an analytical epiphany—“using past and current data to help guide you moving forward.” Glorious. While many of the analytics platforms out there have given us a number of ways to compare historical data to current data, we are still limited to two distinct time ranges (for the most part). It’s great to see those two ranges stack up against each other, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. Without going further you miss the "interaction" between those two distinct time ranges. Benchmarking your data is a great way to discover more about this, often overlooked, gray area. Benchmarking simply means you set a standard at which you compare something else to. When used for data mining, it means you plot two distinct variables (time ranges, metrics, dimensions, etc.) over a period of time and then use these “benchmarks” to infer conclusions when making decisions. You can then see  a more complete picture of your site’s momentum. In my opinion, understanding your site’s momentum is one of the most powerful metrics an analyst can calculate. If you can say with authority that you know how your site is doing and how it will likely be doing in the next week, month, few months, etc., you are in an ideal place. With data like that you can take more calculated risks. *First, I want to throw out a disclaimer—a little over a year ago Google decided to integrate “Benchmarking” into their Visitors tab in GA. This just made things confusing in my opinion. The GA feature actually shows your site in comparison to a {very very very limited} industry pool of similarly {not really} sized sites. There is a lot wrong with the assumptions of this feature, but for our purposes here, when I say “benchmarking” I mean the act of plotting two distinct variables over time to extract insight…not the {ridiculous-I-can’t-believe-they-took-it-out-of-beta} GA feature. The "benchmarking" feature in GA on SEOmoz Okay now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can benchmark your data to hopefully gather some insight into your site’s performance. Know your bottom-line (and your "high-line" –yes, I just made that word up) This is probably the most common approach to benchmarking. It’s a pretty simple way to analyze the current state of your account. You should know your extremes for every metric. For example if you are a company that sells a seasonally successful product, you should know what your lowest conversion rate is for the year, as well as your peak conversion performance. In understanding the extremes you can make better assumptions on how your off season stats are trending. While not the most accurate approach to data mining, benchmarking the extremes of your account enables you to speak intelligently, at any given moment, on how your site is currently performing. Know your ratios & relationships Am I the only one that always reads “ratio” as “radio”? I digress. Knowing your metric ratios and how they relate to each other, is a great way to quickly detect when things are headed south. Often, as analysts, we don’t realize something has gone wrong until we see sales are down. While that is an effective method of pinpointing mistakes, it certainly isn’t ideal. Wouldn’t it be nice to quickly identify issues as they actually become issues? Crazy, I know. Well this is exactly what benchmarking the ratios of your site’s metrics can do. At SEOmoz, we use ratio/relationship benchmarking to keep our traffic stats in check. We don’t just plot out how many visitors each section of the site brings in out of the total visitors; we compare those percentages against each other. This gives us a ballpark value to guide us. An example; “the X part of the site brings in roughly twice as much as Y, which brings in about 1/3 of the traffic as Z.” The great part about this method of benchmarking is you can easily turn it into a visual representation of the different pieces of the pie, and isolate out when things start to shift. Below is an actual example Rand pulled together earlier this week (yes he does that sort of thing for fun! A true data-head!). In this chart we have graphed out the top trafficked pages on our site, and then plotted them against each other to show how they are performing in relation to each other. Also see a larger, detailed version You can see the significant drop in the blue segment (our Tools page), which was due to a redirect mistake we made (oops...Rand talks more about that here). By visually representing these sections, we can easily identify shifts in the relationships, which can guide us on where we should focus our attentions (aka fix our silly SEO mistake ASAP!). Know the norm Okay I know, I know…I talked a whole lot of trash above on the GA benchmarking feature, and here I am talking about “knowing the norm,” but approaching data analysis this way can be insightful. Knowing and using industry standards in benchmarking can efficiently identify low hanging fruit. However, the actual GA benchmarking tab is a poor example of this. Keep in mind that sites have to opt into the benchmarking, so (a.) this feature might not even have your industry represented and (b.) you have no way of knowing how many sites these “standards” are calculated on. Also keep in mind there are only three buckets for website “size” in this feature—small, medium, and large. WTF right? Yeah, since when do all websites fit into those three sizes? What am I ordering a latte over here? With that said, it’s worth knowing the vital metric standards for your industry. If you see that similar sites to your own have a bounce rate of around 40% and you are chilling around 65%, while all the other metrics look closer in range, then you can assume this metric is where you should direct your optimization efforts. This approach isn’t as scalable or as accurate as other benchmarking methods, but it’s definitely worth a mention, if only for peace of mind. Know the limits While benchmarking is incredibly effective for things like trending, projecting, and exploring the data, it’s important to know the limits of the process. It is meant to be a discovery process, not a scientific formula. Just like anything else you take away from the data, it is just an insight, not a guarantee. You are making assumptions based on past performances, and performances change. So one word of caution to all of you data-heads out there—benchmarking is a great tool to add to your bag of tricks, but it is only one of many you should be using. Don’t get so caught up in forming relationships between the metrics and dimensions of your site that you lose perspective on the independent variables themselves. In conclusion Get in there. I mean it, seriously. I know we are all crazy busy, but that shouldn’t translate into a two minute GA log-in, a quick glance at the vital metrics and a few automated reports. Our analytics are meant to be explored. Benchmarking is one of those processes that may take an extra hour or two, but discoveries made during those few hours can be instrumental in guiding your company’s decisions. Confession: At SEOmoz we haven’t always been the best with analytics and tracking, but in the past half a year we have refocused our energies on truly knowing what our users are doing, how our site is performing, and finding opportunities within the data. It’s time consuming, and tricky, and what you discover is not always fun to find out, but it has certainly helped us redirect resources where they are needed. Over the next few months we are rolling out all sorts of good stuff, {the Chrome toolbar launch was just a teaser my friends }. We are using processes like benchmarking to better prepare us for these changes. Taking on new challenges as a company is an awesome thing, but doing it with a little data to steer you, makes the ride even more fun.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. ;-) Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google's Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.   Ask and Ye Shall Receive Whether it's from Twitter, Facebook, email or comments here on the blog, almost every day we get some sort of request for a Chrome Toolbar. We knew there was a high need for it, and wanted to make sure that we didn't rush and put together something unmozworthy. The new toolbar is pretty baller if I do say so myself (which I just did). It works very similarly to a toolbar in Firefox where it displays across the top of the screen, but with the ability to easily drop it down to the bottom of the page as well. The new Chrome toolbar has most of the same features as the Firefox edition, but if you want to learn more... please keep reading. :)   So How Does This Help Me? 1. Search Results Overlay This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.     "I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow 2. Quickly find important SEO information with the Analyze Page Overlay Our analyze page overlay provides quick access to useful data points which include: On-page Optimization Elements – All of the essential SEO on-page elements (title tag, meta description, meta robots, rel canonical) are in one place. Location Data – As local search becomes more important, the value of information like server location increase. Google cache – Want to see exactly what Google saw when it's bot crawled a given site. The link to Google's cache will get you there.   "The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin 3. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain information.   What if I find a bug? Reporting Bugs The best way to report bugs is to e-mail us at customerservice(at symbol)seomoz.org. This is the quickest way to get into our development queue. Known Issues 1. The toolbar overlays some of the page content. We attempted to inject the CSS into the page and push down the page content, but this ended up breaking some useful sites (like Twitter) so we overlay the page instead , but do now offer the ability to display the toolbar at the bottom of the page, which should hopefully help, when you've just got to see the Facebook nav. :) 2. Because of the way the toolbar is rendered as part of the page, it only shows up when the page loads, so if the toolbar is turned on while other windows already have loaded content, you will need to click refresh to see the toolbar. Unfortunately, this is also the case when you open a new chrome window, since chrome shows cached content on open to appear faster. We hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to post feedback in the comments below.   Not yet a Chrome fan? Still plugging away in good ol' Firefox? Well we haven't forgotten about you! You were our first love, and can still be downloaded here.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Oli GardnerThis 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.As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear:  “My name is Earl. My conversion rate sucks, and I can't stop sending expensive PPC traffic to my homepage.” Feel better? You should. You just passed the “unofficial” first test of landing page rehab, and now you’re ready to take 12 little steps that’ll lift you from that river in Egypt (denial?!?) to a higher place on the conversion charts. This is the intervention your landing pages have been crying out for, so take a deep breath... and let’s get started. Study the 12-step infographic to see where each step in the program should be applied to the conversion funnel. (Click to image view full size) View Full size version  |  Download a poster sized version (24"x13") MEASURING YOUR PROGRESS - THE CONVERSION SCORECARD Before we begin, we need a quick breathalyzer test to get some baseline metrics in place and measure how effective your treatment program is. The conversion scorecard can be used whether you’re using a standalone landing page for your marketing campaigns or sending traffic directly to a page on your website (homepage, shopping cart or registration page) - although it is geared slightly more towards the standalone variety. (Click to view or print the full size graphic with the complete set of 20 questions on it.) Scoring your page Answer each of the 20 questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The goal is simply to get a ballpark sense of how good your page is. Then take all of the “No” responses and create a “To Do List” of things to improve on your page. You’ll find some guidance and tips for making these improvements as you follow the 12-step program below. Remember that after you leave the rehab clinic and have made some positive changes to your conversion funnel, you should revisit the scorecard to measure your improvements. View and print out the full sized Conversion Scorecard STARTING THE 12-STEP PROGRAM STEP 1 - Use a Separate Landing Page for each Inbound Traffic Source   The principles of inbound marketing are founded on facilitating multiple streams of traffic. Examples include PPC, email, banner ads and social media. There are two key reasons why you should be using a separate landing page for each source: Each inbound medium has it’s only unique style and limitations. Using separate pages allows you to sync up the visual and tonal qualities  with the source. Email for instance can contain a lot more information that a tweet, so the amount of extra information your landing page needs to communicate is inherently different. Imagine also that one of your inbound streams suddenly requires a different offer (perhaps a 20% discount for an affiliate) - with only one page you would have to show this change to all inbound sources. With measurement comes accountability. With separate funnel flows, you can measure the effectiveness of each inbound stream and focus your efforts on the one(s) that convert the best. Doctors Orders: Start thinking of each inbound source as it’s own mini campaign. You want to have multiple rivers bringing boats to your port (rather than many tributaries feeding one river). Print out the ads for each inbound source (PPC, email, banners, social media) and spend time observing their differences - size, tone, language and visual weight. This will help you design appropriate landing pages.    STEP 2 - A/B Test Your Landing Pages A/B testing is the process of splitting your traffic between a series of pages to see which performs the best. Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com is a fun site that shows examples of A/B tests and lets you pick which version you think would produce the highest conversion rate. On a corporate level, testing helps to remove conjecture and subjective argument from the boardroom and is a great way of understanding your customers (which messaging and design do they respond to best). It should be done as an iterative process - think evolution vs. revolution. FACT: Your landing page can always be better. Just like a plant, it needs ongoing attention for best results. Some online tools/services for testing: Unbounce (landing page platform including self serve A/B) - disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Unbounce Liveball (A/B & Multivariate) Google Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate) Visual Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate) Doctors Orders: Take the plunge and get a tool set up so you are at least able to start testing your landing pages. Then the fun part of trying new ideas and experimenting can come. STEP 3 - Match Your Landing Page Message to the Upstream Ad If the primary headline of your landing page doesn’t match the copy on your ad you’ll be getting a lot of action on your browser’s back button. As an example, consider the following: Bad message match Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro Landing page message: Welcome to Bobby’s Computer Store    Good message match Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro Landing page message: Get 20% off a Macbook Pro at Bobby’s Computer Store Seems obvious right? The problem is that most inbound traffic gets sent to company homepages where the messaging is necessarily generic. Using a targeted standalone landing page is key to reinforcing the customer’s belief that they made a “good click”. You will also get a better quality score and thus a lower cost-per-click from Google AdWords if your message match is strong (this extends to the entire content on the page which should be congruent with the headline message). Bonus tip: If you are driving social media traffic, you can enhance the “social message match” by including an appropriate social icon on your landing page to further reinforce the connection between the source and destination. Doctors Orders: Learning to construct your campaigns in the right order can help you ensure good message match. Start with a concept based on communicating your product/service/offer to your target market. Come up with your promotional headline and landing page content, then work on a series of ads that closely match the headline. If you do it the other way round (ad first), you are forced into building from what might be the wrong foundation.  STEP 4 - Context of Use They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A better picture is one where your product or service is shown being used in context. Salespeople will tell you to sell the fire, not the fire extinguisher - the point being that you need to illustrate the need in order to develop desire for the solution. Effective landing pages use photography and video to provide evidence of how your product or service solves a real problem. A statement like “Our vacuum cleaner is so powerful it can suck up a bag of nails” beside a stock photo of the product against a white background is far less likely to convert than a video showing (and letting you hear) the vacuum cleaner actually doing the job. An example using photography could show a fold-up ladder in two states. Being tucked into a small cupboard by it’s owner, and then extended to show the owner reaching onto high shelves to retrieve something. Simply showing it in it’s intended context of use will improve your sales.  Would you really have bought a ShamWow without seeing it in action? Doctors Orders: Take your product or service and actually use it for real (you’d be surprised how many people haven’t even used the item they’re selling). This will help you to understand and visualize how it should be presented in your photography and videos. If it's an online tool, try observing someone else using it. STEP 5 - Use Videos to Increase Engagement & Conversions According to a study by eyeviewdigital.com, the use of video can increase your conversions rates by as much as 80%. By providing users with a passive engagement mechanism you can keep them on your page longer allowing your brand message to seep into their subconscious. Warning: don’t just throw up a poorly animated Powerpoint presentation - nobody will watch it. If you are peddling a physical product, show people using it as mentioned in step 4. If it’s an online tool, provide a demo of the primary features while narrating the benefits of it’s use (don’t show every step, make it a highlight reel). If you offer a service, put yourself front and center and communicate directly with your viewers. Make eye contact for maximum engagement and make use of directional cues to guide them to your intended conversion goal. Great videos do this by having the host look and point outside the frame towards other elements on the page - bringing the whole page into the experience. Usability best practices say to never auto play a video as the audio shock can make people hit the back button immediately, especially if they are in a sound sensitive environment - like most offices. However, this is something you should test on your visitors. My advice if you want to start the video automatically would be to at least allow a shot delay before it starts, and make the controls very obvious in case someone wants to mute or pause the video. (This is a decent example of a nice pause and transition into video - http://raw.glow.com/dms1825/ - warning: the alerts when you try to leave the page aren’t so nice). Doctors Orders:  If you don’t use video yet, plan to start soon. For online product demos, try recording a screencast using software like Jing. It’s really simple and cost effective. Once you get a feel for it you can upgrade to more elaborate tools with stronger editing and post-production features. Audio is very important - write a script before you record so you’re not bumbling your way through and try to use an external mic for better quality.  STEP 6 - Use Directional Cues to Lead the Way Imagine an airport without the expertly placed wayfinding signs and maps - it would be chaos. If you’ve visited the emergency room at a hospital, you might be familiar with the colored lines they paint on the floor to take you to different departments - follow the yellow brick road. These are examples of directional cues, which can be broken down into explicit and implicit (both of those were explicit). Directional cues are used on landing pages to guide the visitor to your call to action. Here are some examples of ways to do this: Graphical arrows: Take a look at the header area of the lead gen form on this landing page template. When you add a lead gen form to your page, the call to action button is often pushed below the fold. Here, the arrow lets you know that the point of interaction can be found directly below that area. Whitespace: Don’t cramp the style of your CTA. Resist the temptation to fill in every pixel of your page, instead give your buttons plenty of room to breathe. Color: Classic colors for buttons include blue (link color) and orange. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that it stands out clearly from the rest of the page (e.g. don’t make your button blue if your page has a blue background). Contrast: This is essentially the same as the point about color (but thinking in terms of black and white or tonal range). Eye direction: It’s been shown that when using photos of people (or animals), that you can improve conversion by having them look at your intended call to action. It makes sense. If you see someone looking up at the sky while you’re walking down the street, the chances are you’ll follow their gaze in case you’re missing something important. Interruption: Surprise is an excellent way to get someone’s attention. Breaking established design boundaries gives reason to pause and observe. Boo! Encapsulation: Think of binoculars or the viewfinder on a camera and how they focus your vision. You can construct similar experiences using shapes and contrast. Think about archways, holes and windows for inspiration. Pathways: Roads or the earlier example from the hospital floor are examples of pathways. You can use background design elements (lines with arrows generally) to walk someone round your page in the order you prefer. For a more exhaustive study of the effects of directional cues, I wrote a post that uses photography to illustrate each of the methods above: Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages. Doctors Orders: Learn to point. It might be considered rude in some cultures, but in conversionland it’s actively encouraged. Make the intended action of your page as obvious as possible - subtlety is for shy folks. Add at least one directional cue to an existing landing page. If your design is quite restrictive, you can try breaking the visual boundaries by placing an arrow outside of the page edge, pointing in towards your CTA - this disruptive visual tactic can be very effective at directing eyeballs. STEP 7 - Find the Optimal Balance of Data vs. Conversion Rate Lead generation is about two things - the size of the barrier (how long, personal or complicated the form is) and the size of the prize (what you are giving away in return for the data). If these are out of proportion you risk losing customers. It’s a delicate balance to achieve: make the form too long and people walk away from the perceived effort, make the questions off-topic or too personal and you wind up with false data. Conversely, if the form is too short you can skew your leads towards those just seeking a freebie instead of real, determined and relevant customers. It can also result in you not being able to qualify your leads accurately. The other factor that complicates all of this is the giveaway you are offering. If your eBook, coupon or webinar isn’t good enough to warrant the information you are asking for folks will bounce. For a webinar registration keep the info to a bare minimum - name, email and maybe company and role if it’s B2B. If you’re giving away an eBook, it needs to be one of two things: significant in size or significant in it's exclusive data content. Above all, quality is what counts. You can tease people into completing your form to get your super awesome whitepaper, but if it turns out to be smoke and mirrors, you’ll have a lead that’s disappointed and likely to unsubscribe immediately.    Doctors Orders: This is where A/B testing becomes really useful. Set up multiple versions of your form and test them to find where the balance lies. Is it acceptable to remove a few questions in order to get more leads? Does your conversion rate even get affected by the addition of extra questions. Only testing with your target audience can answer these questions. STEP 8 - Be Honest About Your Writing & Edit Ruthlessly Never publish the first thing you write. Unless you are in the business of reportage poetry (I may have just made that name up). Campaigns and their associated messaging need to be refined over time through testing but also through editing. Steve Krug (author of the classic usability book “Don’t Make Me Think”) made the best observation on the subject I’ve heard: delete 50% of your page content, then throw away half of what’s left. Doctors Orders: Try removing 2 sentences from the main body of copy on your landing page. I bet it won’t hurt as much as you think. If you have 5 bullet points, try going with the 3 most important ones. Keep deleting extraneous words and redundant phrases until your copy is as tight as a Scotsman being asked to pay a bar tab. Like everything you change on your pages, you should make your edits on a duplicate page and run an A/B test to verify if it produces higher conversions. STEP 9 - Make it Easy to Share The impulse to share content can be fleeting, so don’t make people work for it. While not applicable to all landing pages, those with special offers or special content (perhaps a great video) - should have a simple way for people to spread the word for you. There are two great ways to make this work: Use Twitter @Anywhere to add widgets that allow people to tweet your offer. Make it part of the contest rules that they follow you and tweet your message in exchange for entry into the contest (free marketing). Place sharing widgets such as retweet buttons on your confirmation pages (see step 12 for more on this) Doctors Orders: Design for your audience. If you’re driving Twitter traffic, retweet buttons are familiar and easy to use. The beauty of Twitter @Anywhere components is that they utilize Ajax style interaction and don’t take you away from the page. Similarly if you are funneling Facebook traffic, add a “Like” button to the page. Most Facebook’ers are logged in all the time and the button will add your landing page into their timeline with a single click.  STEP 10 - Leverage Social Proof & Trust Devices Testimonials work, if they’re real. Avoid stock photos and scripted hyperbole as most people can spot a fake testimonial a mile away. Try a mixture of testimonials that describe how your product or service has benefited someone’s experience, coupled with the enthusiastic style that say “you guys rule!”. I’d only use the latter from a well known industry expert or celebrity. To modernize your landing pages, illustrate social proof by showing your standing in a relevant social network. There are many widgets available that can show how many people like or follow you. Social capital and the herd mentality of network participants can help convince prospects to become customers. Doctors Orders: Ask 10 of your customers for a fresh testimonial and add the best to your landing page. Remember to state your usage intentions and ask for a photo if possible. If you have a decent social network presence, try adding a live feed widget based on a specific phrase or #hashtag search to show who and how people are interacting with your brand. STEP 11 - One Page, One Purpose Imagine a web page that exhibits the same tendencies as a kid with ADD. If your content can’t decide on one thing to do at a time, then your visitors certainly won’t want to take the time to figure it out. The principal of congruence states that each element on your page should support a single focused objective. A good way of looking at this is to imagine a series of arrows all pointing to the center of a circle where there is a big button (your CTA). Each arrow represents a piece of content on your landing page, and you need to ensure that they are all in conceptual alignment. Contrast this to those same arrows all pointing in different directions (conceptually). To maintain focus, don’t talk about other products or services - you can use a different landing page and ad source for those. An exception to this is on an ecommerce product page that provides the ability to add extra products to the cart as add-add-on's to your main conversion goal. Doctors Orders: Try this exercise. Explain the purpose of your campaign to a colleague. Now read the content of your landing page out loud and ask her to stop you if you veer away from the central purpose as previously stated. If this happens, remove the offending content and start over. You will notice a lot more about your writing style by saying it out loud. For visual elements, try writing the goal of your campaign on a piece of paper, then print and cut out the images from your landing page and place them around the goal. Remove or replace any that don’t seem to be in total agreement with this goal. STEP 12 - Post-Conversion Marketing Post-conversion marketing is one of the most overlooked stages of the conversion funnel. The confirmation page from your lead gen form, ecommerce checkout, or registration form is the perfect place to start capitalizing on the positive mood of a newly qualified customer. In the case of lead gen, you achieved the conversion goal of your lead gen page and you are probably going to start sending your new lead a series of email messages to encourage them to step up to the next level. Note that it can take up to 6 or 7 contact incidents to make this happen (according to email provider Constant Contact). To increase your engagement potential, try to add your leads to other channels in your sphere of marketing influence (from your confirmation page). This amplifies the reach of your messages and can be the difference between being heard and being forgotten. Some common examples include: Follow us on Twitter (so they see regular updates) Like us on Facebook (so they see updates and become part of your community) Download our free eBook (to keep your brand in front of them and increase your “thought leadership” score Visit this page (send them to other content they may find interesting) Share this with your friends/colleagues (leverage their network) Bookmark us on Delicious Doctors Orders: Go beyond a simple “Thank you” on your confirmation pages. Start by adding one new link to the page and track how much extra traffic visits that target.  WHAT NOW? Now you have the tools and advice to break those bad conversion habits and rehabilitate your struggling marketing funnel. Did you do the scorecard exercise? Are you on the epic end of the scale or the “I did like, 19 things wrong!” end of the scale? The scorecard is there to provide you with a "to do list" of conversion improvements. Take every question you answered No to and create a personal task to fix it. Then implement a new A/B test to see how well your new landing page fares. SHARE YOUR PAGE & SCORECARD SCORE Show me your landing page and score and see if I agree with your assessment (I’ll run through the checklist too). Good luck with your rehab, and remember, your landing page can always be better. Oli Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by RobOusbeyAt a small or medium sized company, you might be part of a very small team with responsibility for SEO, or you may the only person - and it might not even be your full time job. In these cases, people often tell me that the greatest struggle is finding time and resources to do link building for their site. Rather than pitching your boss to hire a new team member to assist with SEO and link building, you may have more success (and get more value out of) asking for a little time with members of different teams from different disciplines.   These staff may be able to give an hour or two each week explicitly to spend on 'link building', or you may be able to introduce them to the concepts, and help them to build link building in to their regular activities.   In this post, I'll focus on the responsibilities and activities your colleagues may have, rather than specific employee positions, since the person with responsibility for different jobs varies greatly depending on the organization.   I'll also give real examples of tactics used in the past, but collected together for a fictional company - RobTech. This company produces "practice management software" for doctors and dental surgeries; it usually sells direct, and gets a lot of leads through their website. Let's take a look at how different internal activities could support link building.   Sales There's potential to get links from satisfied customers and even people who haven't bought your products/services.   Example: RobTech's sales funnel typical begins with the visitor filling in an enquiry form on the website, then having an online product demo with a member of the sales team. After the demo, people either buy the software, turn it down because they don't like it, or turn it down saying that they like it but can't buy it right now (often because of the cost.)   This third group is often a valuable opportunity for publicity and a link. In response to their rejection, the sales team member replies to say "Thanks, I understand why you can't buy the software at this time. I notice you have a blog on your site; since you liked the software, I was hoping you might be able to do a brief write-up / review for me?"   They also send some screen shots and other resources to make writing the post much easier. Only around 20% actually write a post, but they are from high-quality sites, and always include a link.   Conference Speakers If you company ever attends exhibitions to demo the product, or speaks at conferences, there's a chance that people will want to write about what they saw. The sign of a great presentation is when it was so interesting that attendees are desperate to share it with others - but we can make the process of sharing it (through writing or blogging about the company) even easier.   Example: RobTech's Product Director speaks at five or six conferences each year. He sees many people finish their presentations with a website URL, and maybe even a link to download the slide deck. Instead, he makes sure that all RobTech's presentations are made available with extras. A page on their site contains the slide deck, high quality versions of the images used, full data sources for charts and tables shown, and links to each of the other RobTech resources and white-papers mentioned in the presentation.   He calls this the 'Journalist & Blogger Pack' - it includes a note to encourage people to use and share the contents, but asks them to credit RobTech with a link to the site. It only takes a little time to upload the appropriate content to a special URL each time, but it has increased the number of bloggers and publishers who include RobTech in their 'conference round-ups'.   Public Relations I'm fascinated by the crossover between PR and SEO. You're lucky to be in a very strong position if you have a PR team that is experienced in persuading newspaper/magazine journalists to write about you - but you need to teach them how to use their skills online.   Example: RobTech's PR team began by approaching the two biggest online-only medical news websites, and quickly managed to place an article in both sites. They've since looked at other sites outside the niche, and have received coverage (and links) from a technology news site (in an article about 'The Doctor's Surgery of the Future') and a web design site (which reviewed their new site, purely from a design perspective.)   One PR team member has been spending a few hours a week reaching out to bloggers in different niches to introduce them to a new product demo video; some bloggers linked to it in their 'weekly roundups' and one blogger embedded the video and wrote about it.   Copywriting Many companies have people responsible for writing various official text, from marketing copy, to online product descriptions, to technical and help documentation. There's every chance that they'd appreciated the opportunity to spread their wings and write something for you to help with SEO, so introduce them to the concept of linkbait, and see if they can come up with anything.   Example: The girl who manages the knowledge base for RobTech (basically a very dry list of error messages and how to resolve them) came up with the idea of 'The Top Six Moments of Dr Nick Riviera', which was simply ten embedded YouTube videos, but got to number one on Reddit, and received a lot of links. The guy who writes technical descriptions for the website wrote a short page about "Ten things you don't want to hear your dentist say (while he's peering into your mouth.)" which was well received by bloggers and got a few good links.   Personnel / Human Resources There's a big opportunity for larger companies that are regularly recruiting, since many job ad sites allow links to be included in adverts.   Example: RobTech have updated the standard template for their job adverts; alongside the request to email your CV and cover letter to the HR Director, they also say 'find out more about the company and what's it's like to work here on our recruitment page.' A fair number of these links are nofollow-ed, but a good number do pass value - and this change came from just a 15 minute conversation with two people who'd never heard of SEO before, so the ROI here was technically awesome.   Procurement If you take use the products or services of other online companies, ask them if you they'd be interested in you writing a case-study or testimonial for them.   Example: RobTech used a local removal firm to help the relocate the office last year. They wrote a few sentences about how pleased they were with the service, which the company now uses on the front page of their website, including a link to the site. The company also uses a specialist web service to encrypt and store private patient data; that company's site now has a full case study about how RobTech uses the service, which includes a couple of deep links to useful landing pages.   Designers & Creatives If your company has creative employees that aren't being fully utilized, there's often an opportunity for them to create link-worthy content.   Example: After the new website had launched, RobTech's designer had a few days free. She took some of the rejected designs that weren't used for the site, had a developer turn then into HTML files, and offered them up as free downloads. The page has received a significant number of links from free CSS template sites; they've since added a collection of free vector images which did very well on DesignFloat.   Although the links are not from their target niches, they've usefully contributed to the site's authority.   Corporate Social Responsibility If your organization gives donations of money or time to charities, or undertakes other 'CSR' initiatives, don't just be satisfied with the 'cosmic karma' this provides. Find the person who manages this for your company, and show them how to turn it into 'link karma' as well.   Example: RobTech gives an annual donation to local dog shelter (the CEO is an archetypal 'dog person') - and the shelter now has a badge in their sidebar, thanking the company for their donation. Even more successful has been the 'technology recycling' drive the company runs one weekend each year. This year they put up a page on the site about the event, which received links from a variety of local sites, including the mayor's website.   Summary Many of these example might not be exactly appropriate to your organization, but I hope that you can see at least a few opportunities to bring more employees into your own ad-hoc link-building team. Figure out who you'd like to be involved, and speak to a boss today about getting them to free up just a little time to help do your bidding.    Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishToday, instead of playing in the uber-rare Seattle sunshine, I spent the day polishing off the PRO Training seminar schedule and it looks amazing. I'm excited to see these sessions myself (and I rarely sit through presentations). Check it out for yourself below; if you're inclined and available, we'd love to see you.Oh, and don't worry, I'm not cruelly sharing when we've already sold out. We still do have some seats left. Dates are Monday & Tuesday August 30th + 31st with the tools training half day Wednesday, September 1st. However, I would strongly urge you to register soon, as we've sold out by early August in each of the past 4 years.Top 5 Ways Our PRO Seminar is Different"Tips" Focused Content Many sessions that I attend have discussions and opinions as featured content. Although I think that can be great, our focus is 100% on providing value you can apply back to your sites + campaigns immediately. I've talked to every speaker and reviewed every outline - the sessions at our seminar are exclusively focused on making you smarter, faster and better at your job.Single-Track, Deep Dives by Only the Best Speakers Rather than panels of 2, 3, 4 or more speakers on an hourlong session, we have only a few sessions each day, enabling us to pick only the most talented, compelling speakers for our event. You can't pitch to speak at SEOmoz - it's by invitation only and those invites come because we've seen you speak many times and been seriously impressed. There are only 14 speakers in total at the event and every one is an oustanding presenter - we know because we've watched them.The Same Incentives for all Participants At many events, the real revenue comes from sales of booths, promotional materials or sponsored sessions. SEOmoz has none of these. Our primary goal with the PRO Training isn't to make money (being fully TAGFEE; this year, we anticipate the seminar to generate less than 4% of our gross with relatively slim margins), but to spread knowledge of SEO in a deep, meaningful way and meet many of our community members in person. We also pay for our speakers' transportation and hotels so they don't have the burden of selling to recoup travel costs.Less than 1/2 the Price of Other Events With a PRO membership, the event costs just $649. Add in a hotel for 2 nights and a flight from most US locations and it's still less than a single ticket to many of the larger conferences (e.g. the on-site price for Web 2.0 NYC or SES SF is $1,995).No Vendors, Pitches, Booths or SalesThere's no expo hall, no sponsors, no SWAG in a bag, no salespeople seeking to close a deal at lunch, nada. This event is about learning from experts, networking with peers and coming home with phenomenal, actionable information.The Full PRO Training ScheduleMonday, August 29th9:00am - 9:45am: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP The expansion of new results types in the search result pages has SEOs asking if traditional rankings are dead. They're not, but there are a whole lot more opportunities to get SEO traffic. In this session, Rand Fishkin explores the world of real-time, social, news, images, video & expanded listing results with specific recommendations for how to get included, stand out and win clicks.9:45am - 10:30am: How to Win Rankings and Influence Competitive Local/Maps Results As Google Maps and the 3/7/10-pack results have become more competitive, SEOs have been thinking less about the question "what are the local ranking factors?" and more about "how do I get maximum visibility in local results?" David Mihm explores the answers with specifics about how to draw eyeballs and clicks from the maps listings.10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Break10:45am - 11:45am: The Science of Twitter Success What makes some Twitter updates spread across the web while other languish in obscurity? Hubspot's Dan Zarrella examines the science of tweets, retweets and clicks and provides specific, actionable tactics for how to improve the results marketers derive from promotion of their content on Twitter.11:45am - 12:30pm: Presentation Off: How to Pitch SEO Distilled's esteemed director, Will Critchlow, has never lost against Rand, but they've also never faced off in the US. Watch Rand and Will on SEOmoz's home turf as they break down how to pitch SEO internally to your team/managers or externally, to a potential client. Specific strategies of how to win the battle for marketing dollars will rule the day. Voting to be determined by a show of hands immediately following the presentations.12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch1:30pm - 2:00pm: Earning Direct ROI on Social Media Social media tends to send traffic that clicks once, visits fast and leaves without much engagement. Yet, we know that over time, these branding touchpoints and positive references can lead to awareness, influence and, ultimately, conversion. In this session, SEOmoz's community manager, Jen Lopez, shows real life examples of how social media can lead directly to conversions. She'll also cover how to track clicks to and conversations about your site/brand that happen across the web and map these to the metrics that predict web success.2:00pm - 2:45pm: Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO Large sites frequently struggle against indexation, navigation and organization issues. In this session, Marshall Simmonds, chief search strategist for the NYTimes, About.com, and many other large content-based sites will present solutions for effectively analyzing the problems inherent with large sites, identifying solutions and implementation. Specific topics include controlling faceted navigation, creating index-worthy category and sub-category pages as well as XML sitemap & internal link optimization.2:45pm - 3:00pm: Afternoon Break3:00pm - 4:00pm: Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO You're familiar with optimizing for a keyword by placing it on a page and acquiring anchor-text targeted links, but this session goes in a completely different direction. We'll be pulling back the curtain on a new way to rank higher, and a process to do it! Led by Ben Hendrickson, SEOmoz's Senior Scientist, this session will go heads down in the math and science of how search engines crawl, index and rank web pages.4:00pm - 4:30pm: Constructing Effective SEO Audits As the director of consulting at SEOmoz, Lindsay built dozens of audits for clients like Microsoft, Etsy, SimplyHired and more. In this presentation, she'll share her methodology for delivering a site audit that clients and managers will appreciate and actually use!4:30pm - 5:30pm: Conversion Rate Optimization One of the web's foremost experts in conversion rate optimization, Tim Ash will be sharing case studies and specific tips for how to make more of the visitors who click into customers.Tuesday, August 31st9:00am - 9:45am: 10 Sites the Earned Amazing Links: How they Did It & What we Can Learn Sometimes, the best way to learn is through direct observation. In this session, Rand will walk through 10 sites that achieved top rankings through remarkable link acquisition strategies. He'll explore not just where they earned links, but why those links were created and what other SEOs can take away from the success stories.9:45am - 10:30am: Reverse Engineering Your Competitors' Rankings Why does that page rank above yours? Until you know the answer, you're optimizing in the dark and potentially wasting massive amounts of time, energy and resources on metrics that won't move the needle. In this session, Wil Reynolds, head of digital agency Thinkseer, walks through their process for strategically de-constructing the search results, determining the keys to ranking and executing on those metrics.10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Break10:45am - 11:30am: Manual Link Building: That's Right; It Still Works Picking up links one-by-one may not be highly scalable nor incredibly fun work, but it does work. In this session, Distilled Consulting head of US operations, Rob Ousbey, walks through the power and process of manual link building. If you're ready to put your shoulder to the grindstone, you can have a serious impact on your business with these tactics.11:30am - 11:50am: Top 10 Tips for Community Building The power of user-generated-content and user engagement to build up a site's reach, branding and SEO is phenomenal. SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin walks through his top tactics for attracting an engaged audience.11:50am - 12:10pm: Top 10 Tips for Blogging Blogs are still one of the most powerful ways to build content, draw in links, grow your branding & attract new customers. Ian Lurie, founder of Portent Interactive and Conversation Marketing has a list of unbeatable tips to maximize the value you get from blogging.12:10pm - 12:30pm:Top 10 Tips for Paid Search Optimization Paid search will draw in $25 billion dollars in the US alone this year - a lot of that won't make much of an ROI. Joanna Lord wants to make sure that doesn't happen to you. Join her as she walks through 10 amazing tips to get high value out of paid search without spending a fortune.12:30pm - 1:15pm: Lunch1:15pm - 2:00pm: Designing Your SEO Strategy Formerly the head of technical marketing at Yahoo!, Laura Lippay's responsibility included managing SEO across dozens of the web's most visited sites. In this session, she shares her process from years of experience and her popular blog series on SEOmoz covering the design and execution of an SEO strategy.2:00pm - 2:45pm: Advanced Keyword Selection + Targeting The basics of keyword research are well known, but discovering terms and phrases that are on the verge of becoming popular, in the middle or tail of the demand curve or have cyclical demand can be a huge advantage for your website. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search for Distilled, presents killer tips on how to select the right keywords and use them in the right ways to maximize your search traffic potential.2:45pm - 3:30pm: The End of Analysis Paralysis: Tracking What Matters & Ignoring the Rest Too often, the overwhelming quantity of data we get from tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, Conversion Rate Tracking + Testing Software can overwhelm us. SEOmoz's Joanna Lord is here to put an end to the overload and give striking examples of how to build an analytics dashboard that records what matters and ignores what doesn't so you can make the right decisions about what to invest in.3:30pm - 3:45pm: Ice Cream Break3:45pm - 4:30pm: How to Make SEO Data Reporting Sexy Ready to take your data visualization skills to the next level? Join Distilled's Will Critchlow as he remakes the tedious process of SEO reporting on keywords, links, traffic and SERPs into something not only beautiful, but useful and ready to apply to the real world. Your clients & managers will be head over heels when they see the amazing, actionable data visualizations you present.4:30pm - 5:30pm: No More Secrets: SEO Veterans Spill the Goods on Tactics that Work 6 Expert Practitioners of SEO will share their most powerful & actionable tips for all things web marketing. If you're seeking an unfair advantage over the competition, listen closely - it doesn't come any better than this. Join Ian Lurie, Will & Tom Critchlow, Laura Lippay, Wil Reynolds & Todd Friesen for a remarkable session.7:00pm - 12:00am: SEOmoz Annual Garage Party! Bowling, billiards, beer and more! Don't miss our favorite party of the year, replete with free drinks, food and entertainment.Wednesday, September 1st (Tools Training)9:30am - 10:30am: A Deep Dive Into Link Research w/ Linkscape, Open Site Explorer & Keyword DifficultyThese three tools comprise the most powerful resources available for advanced link exploration, algorithm reversing and competitive analysis. In this hour, Rand Fishkin shows how to apply the full spectrum of data to strategize, measure and acquire links.10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Coffee Break10:45am - 11:45pm: Getting the Most from the New (REDACTED UNTIL LAUNCH)Obviously, I can't provide a description without giving too much away. Needless to say, though, it will be big :-)11:45pm - 12:15pm: Adding Value to Your SEO w/ Q+A, the mozBar + SEOmoz LabsRand walks through the best practices and some hidden ways to employ PRO membership utilities from Labs, Q+A and the mozBar. There's a lot of information and functionality to be found here and with Ran'd guidance, you'll be able to get maximum value from these products.12:15pm - 1:00pm: A Sneak Peek Into SEOmoz's Product Roadmap & Call for SuggestionsJoin Adam Feldstein, head of Product at SEOmoz and Rand Fishkin, CEO, for a look at the product roadmap for SEOmoz over the next 6 months. We'll be soliciting your feedback, too, so please come ready with your ideas!Bonus: Oilman is Our MC!We've employed copious quantities of beer, cookies and B-rated action movies on DVD to compel Todd Friesen, aka Oilman, to MC the event for us. We're honored to have Todd run the show, make sure our panelists stick to their time slots and badger anyone who tries to hold back critical information. In exchange, he's promised to wear his pearliest white hat and make sure every attendee has a phenomenal experience.That smile means he's up to something... (via jenn.matthews)Thanks Todd! We're showing our appreciation by bolstering your follower count on Twitter.Looking forward to seeing many of you at the PRO Seminar and showing off our big August launch too!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover Guess who's back. Back again. Danny's back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week's Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won't see coming! See my stats for this video   Embed Video:   Apply for an Internship Leverage Start-ups - Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can't afford to pay people :-) Use the "Godfather Approach" - Make the company an offer they can't refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,) Dive Right In Build Test Sites - After reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms. Offer to Help Charities - Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering. Create a New Niche Leverage What You Already Know - Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche. Educate Others For Free - Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn. Join the Community Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences - Get your name out and build your network by participating online. Take Advantage of Osmosis - Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place. Follow me on Twitter, Fool! or Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt) If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by richardbaxterseoBuilding a solid foundation in your site architecture using search engine friendly navigation is a founding principle in good search engine optimization, but what does that actually mean, and what recommendations can you make to enhance your clients (or your own) SEO?   In this article, we’ll look at a few examples of well coded, search friendly navigation and look at ways to enhance your site architecture for SEO.   Technically speaking   What makes for a spider friendly navigation? In today’s out of the box CMS world, most navigation is already pretty SEO friendly, but just every now and again you come across a real car crash of a navigation that needs rebuilding from scratch.   If you’re reviewing a website with a suspect navigation (or "dodgy", as my friends in the US love to hear me say), you’ll probably see some of the following signs:   -          No drop downs work with JavaScript disabled -          Global / header links are image based rather than text -          A heap of internal links disappear when you’re browsing the site with JavaScript and CSS disabled -          The SEOmoz toolbar reports a lower than expected number of internal, followed links -          The Google cached, text only version of your page is missing those precious internal links too    Search engine friendly navigation requires only properly structured HTML combined with  CSS for all the fancy bits. Technically speaking, if you’re specifying a new navigation for your website, you should be asking for a "cross-browser drop-down cascading validating menu". Can you say that 5 times in a row?   The HTML is fiendishly simple, and you should be looking out for something like this unordered list of links in the cached (text only) or CSS / JavaScript disabled view of your web page: Home About History Team Offices Services Web Design Internet Marketing Contact Us United Kingdom France USA Australia If you want to see a great list of examples you’d be well advised to bookmark CSSplay.co.uk’s CSS menus page and, while I was researching this post, this CSS styled paginated navigation caught my eye, via this post. If you want to see a live example, take a look at this site with JavaScript and CSS disabled in Web Developer Toolbar:         There are so many other examples out there; I think I spent more time clicking around the interwebs than I did putting this post together! If you have some good examples of amazing, search engine friendly navigation be sure to add them in the comments.   Using CSS navigational elements for SEO   Drop down menus needn’t always be “drop down”, as such. Think about it – have you ever had a problem where design wise, it was too difficult to increase the number of internal links you have in a navigational section on your website? Next time you’re in that situation, think about how you might use this approach to increase the number of links on your pages.   Interested in testing this for yourself? Take a look at these navigational ideas:   -          View all hotels in Prague -          See events within 500m of this location -          See more case studies on CRM -          See all flights to Turkey-          Other users also bought / most popular products in this category-          List the top 6 countries by continent (see example below) Breadcrumb navigation that expands with a CSS drop down:A simple example expanding a list of options for a user searching for flights:Improving your navigation can have a positive impact on your site architecture. By making sure these fundamentals are covered, you can build your marketing efforts on a solid foundation knowing your website is crawlable and super-friendly to search engines. What are your favorite examples of great navigation?Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishAnother great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled "Startup Competitive Advantages that Work." It's definitely worth a read, even if you're not at a startup. As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn't help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we're in - domination of the organic search results - can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it. The core of Jason's post is below: The first step is admitting you have a problem. Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven't already. To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don't have an "edge" just because you're passionate, hard-working, or "lean." The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought. Like what? And he's got a number of terrific answers, but SEO, and more broadly, phenomenal organic web marketing, isn't among them. Before I tackle why I think it belongs there, let me explain the difference between "good" SEO and defensible, "competitive advantage" style SEO. "Good" SEO means You have a solid quantity of unique, quality content that users and customers will find useful. Your pages and links are crawlable, indexable and generally search friendly. You've done your homework with keyword research and update it regularly (monthly - quarterly) as new terms/phrases rise/fall in demand. You've engaged in some decent link acquisition campaigns, garnering links from a few authorities in your industry, some blogs, maybe a few article sites, press releases, link exchanges and the like to the point where you have similar metrics to your competition. You've engaged in social media and have profiles on the major sites, have a few tweets every week that point to your site and a few hundred fans on Facebook. In other words, you've followed best practices, done the "right" things and while an SEO audit might reveal some missed opportunities and an error here or there, you'd generally come away with an "A" on your SEO report card. "Competitive Advantage" SEO means Your site produces content people love to visit and love to share in a scalable, hard-to-replicate way Your on-site SEO is "best of breed." Note: This isn't much different than good SEO - on-page/on-site optimization is unlikely to ever be a competitive advantage. Your keyword research is baked into the content generation process. The material your site produces fulfills keyword demand just as, or even before it exists by tapping into the subconscious of the web and the culture of ideas/questions in your industry/niche. Website owners and content creators have a powerful psychological incentive to link to your work frequently, just as those who participate/contribute to the social web are incented to share via their network of choice. Some Examples of "Competitive Advantage" SEO Sites: StackOverflow Yelp Wikipedia LinkedIn Mashable Last.fm NY Magazine Amazon Cheezburger Network Wordpress AllRecipes SmashingMagazine All of these have content pouring out of them, generated rapidly, scalable, and in time with query demand. They have broad networks of patrons and participants that incent the spreading and sharing of their content through links and social networks. They employ content+SEO+sharing in a high-return equation that's nearly impossible for competitors to match. I'll illustrate: That's not to say they can't be beaten, but runner B (a new competitor) is going to have to go dramatically faster than runner A (the market leader) if they want to catch up before runner A sees them coming and turns up the jets. SEO Can Be a Competitive Advantage This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages. It's massively hard to duplicate It's prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines) It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so) It's certainly not the only option, but it can have a dramatic impact. If you're starting a company, starting an SEO campaign or just want to renew your vision for how your site will go from ranking for a few keywords to becoming a dominant market player, it's, at the least, a strategy worthy of consideration. p.s. If you're interested in some more practical SEO advice this morning, my slide deck from the Blueglass LA conference - Strategic SEO Link Analysis - may be able to scratch that itch.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishIt's that wonderful time of the month again! Linkscape, SEOmoz's web index powering our mozbar, API, Open Site Explorer, the classic Linkscape tool and many features in Labs and elsewhere pushed out new data (over the weekend) from a web crawl that ended earlier this month. There's lots of fresh info to explore on your sites, including new links and metrics, but I wanted to show off some spiffy new features, too.First up, by popular request, we've got a calendar of Linkscape updates available on the API Wiki:This should be updated regularly with ETAs for new Linkscape updates and as promised, we're sticking to our schedule of new data every 4 weeks.Next is a picture of how the web looked in our latest crawl. For those of you who, like me, geek out on data about the web, this stuff is pretty cool:_I also grabbed some information about the use of internal vs. external links and usage of nofollows & rel=canonical tags:Percent of Pages with Rel=Canonical: 4.63%Percent of Links that are External vs. Internal: 15.2% External vs. 84.8% InternalPercent of Links that use Rel=Nofollow: 2.08%Percent of Internal Links w/ Rel=Nofollow: 1.44%Percent of External Links w/ Rel=Nofollow: 5.67%Last, but certainly not least, we've got some great new calls in the API to request data. You can see a visualization of just a few of these below:In speaking to lots of users of our Linkscape data, I hear the following requests, all of which are on our roadmap:Historical data - show the links I've gained/lost since the last indexHistorical data - show my link counts and metrics from the last 6-12 months of index updates (this is challenging, as what we crawl changes month to month, but we believe we've got a workable solution coming by Q4)IP Address / Origin Country - show the country and IP address of the link sourceFresher & Faster Updates - this should be arriving by Q3 of this year, as we move to a more recursive model with fresh data updating possibly as quickly as every 1-2 weeks, while the larger, less-change prone portion of the index updates only 1X per month or twoDeeper Crawls on Large Domains - also on its way for Q3Text Surrounding the Anchor - another project in the works; we're first testing to see if it has correlation/impact on rankings (this should be exciting research)If you have a feature or request that's not listed, please let us know! We want to make sure you're getting all the link information you need with the highest possible freshness and quality.A big thanks to Kate, Ben, Chas & Phil from SEOmoz's engineering team, who put effort into this month's update.Do you like this post? Yes No

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Taking the time to identify your market and focusing on how to build relationships with those relevant sites will put you above SEOs who are still focusing on outdated tactics. ...

For your foreign language sites to be effective, they absolutely have to be localized for individual countries. Here's why. ...

Search reputation management isn't easy work. Here's how B2B brands and organizations can protect their first impressions in the SERPs. ...

If you've spent time analyzing search results for a variety of queries, you've likely seen results you can't easily explain. Here's why this happens. ...

Creating your own social media dashboard gives you the ability to show the impact of your social media efforts, and it will put you in great position to bide time until a truly robust social media measurement tool is available. ...

Four areas where our industry is straying from the basic fundamentals of good search marketing, and how to correct the course. ...

Get ready people. Real-time bidding works a great deal better than old school display. ...

A quick guide on how advertisers can leverage Google's Product Extension feature within AdWords and display product images and details in line with your PPC ads. ...

How to best use real-time search, social networks, and question-and-answer sites to improve the product purchase process. ...

Understanding user behavior, and having the most granular data available, can give you the advantage and help drive business in PPC and beyond. ...

Latest update and tips on the upcoming merger, plus what it means for your adCenter and Yahoo PPC accounts. ...

Why Japan is the most difficult country to provide both natural search engine optimization and paid search marketing service for. Part one of two. ...

Sorry to break everyone's Utopian social media bubble, but measuring ROI for social media efforts isn't terribly difficult. And despite what anyone says, it's all about the money. ...

This six-step process for building a keyword list will help you craft effective ad groups and landing pages for PPC success. ...

If you haven't seen him yet, check out the YouTube video of Isaiah Mustafa asking ladies, "Should your man smell like an Old Spice man?" As of today, the video has 11,740,466 views -- making it the most viewed video on YouTube during the past month.Click to read the rest of this post...

According to comScore, social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8 percent of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7 percent of men. This is just one of the highlights of a global report released today by comScore on women's online usage entitled, Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.Click to read the rest of this post...

According to new research from Econsultancy, companies worldwide are increasing their investment in site search because they want to improve the experience for website users and increase site usage and sales. Click to read the rest of this post...

An overview of some of today's ad/tech news. Click to read the rest of this post...

Yahoo Japan -- an independent entity from Yahoo -- has decided to forgo the Bing transition and will be using Google search results, Reuters announced today.Click to read the rest of this post...

Most reporters are focused on the United States Copyright Office declaration that it is it legal to unlock or 'jailbreak' a mobile device from the manufacturer and network provider from which it was purchased from, which permits users to install unapproved software under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) fair use provisions. The request was made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) particularly as it applies to AT&T and Apple's iPhone Software License agreement.Click to read the rest of this post...

The rumor is growing fast. Now the New York Post has it that Google could launch its search-related music store as early as this holiday season, i.e. November-December.Click to read the rest of this post...

The advertising industry is launching its own PR campaign by way of setting up an Institute for Advertising Ethics. The sector has always had a negative image and the likes of the "Mad Men" series are certainly surfing that tide to... sell. With the market staging a robust recovery the industry is planning ahead and wants to tweak its reputation. Here's how. Click to read the rest of this post...

NBC Universal (NBCU), the media and entertainment company, has launched its own advertising platform UAP to serve its own network of owned and operated sites, Mediaweek reported, quoting company executives. Click to read the rest of this post...

When AOL is in the news, it means business... CEO Tim Armstrong said advertising would be AOL's primary source of revenues in his turnaround plan for the company. As such, AOL already demonstrated its willingness to leave non-viable operations behind by selling its failing and ailing social site Bebo for a reported $10 million. Now it's building a new future, starting with the launch of an innovative political ads platforms and at the same time looking for its future head of music operations. Click to read the rest of this post...

AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search as its $700 million-a-year deal with Google is set to expire in December. Whether it renews its agreement with Google or switches to another search company, AOL is likely to sign in its partner for the few years to come by September, according to various reports. Click to read the rest of this post...

Microsoft's Greg Nelson and Yahoo's Mark Morrissey recently gave interviews to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. Nelson and Morrissey are in charge of a two-year effort to coordinate the massive search and online advertising partnership that their companies struck last year. According to Swisher, their job "essentially is the search equivalent of herding cats."Click to read the rest of this post...

This past week, Matt Bailey, the president and founder of SiteLogic, Cindy Krum, the Chief Executive Officer of Rank-Mobile, and I taught half a dozen of the modules in the Rutgers Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing certificate program. Rutgers incorporated "cutting-edge digital technology" into our teaching approach for this program - supplying all participants with their own free Apple iPad tablet, containing the pre-loaded program materials.Click to read the rest of this post...

According to Glenn Blain of The New York Daily News, Governor David Paterson of New York has signed into law a measure giving New York City greater power to crack down on so-called "illegal hotels." However, Dennis Schaal of Tnooz reports that Paterson issued a statement saying that he, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the bill's sponsor support an amendment to the bill which would mean the law would not go into effect until May 1, 2011, giving property owners time to adjust to its provisions.Click to read the rest of this post...

If you scour the rates and registration details for SES San Francisco, you'll find something that I haven't seen before. There's group pricing for 4-6 passes, 7-9 passes, 10-19 passes, 20-29 passes, and 30+ passes.Click to read the rest of this post...

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

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

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

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

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

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)Today, we're announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.Some background for those of you who don't build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here's a good explanation of how it all works.) So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish. To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we've built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you. With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published. Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles. We've built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it's a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.Posted by Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllToday we’re releasing a feature to help you discover if your site serves undesirable "soft” or “crypto” 404s. A "soft 404" occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn't exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. Soft 404s can limit a site's crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content. The web is infinite, but the time search engines spend crawling your site is limited. Properly reporting non-existent pages with a 404 or 410 response code can improve the crawl coverage of your site’s best content. Additionally, soft 404s can potentially be confusing for your site's visitors as described in our past blog post, Farewell to Soft 404s.    You can find the new soft 404s reporting feature under the Crawl errors section in Webmaster Tools.Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users:Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster ToolsFor the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URLDoesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 responseConfirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster ToolsIf you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.We hope that you’re now better enabled to find and correct soft 404s on your site. If you have feedback or questions about the new "soft 404s" reporting feature or any other Webmaster Tools feature, please share your thoughts with us in the Webmaster Help Forum.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

We’re kicking off June with the start of a new round of webmaster Q&A on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel. You submitted and voted on questions for Matt Cutts to answer, and Matt sat in the studio for a full day sharing advice for webmasters.For those of you who watch each video (and who doesn’t?), we’ve worked hard to keep things interesting. Not only did Matt wear different colored shirts, we changed the backgrounds as well! Just don’t submit any screen grabs to We Have Lasers, okay?To get you started, here’s the first video, which addresses a question about geographic targeting in Webmaster Tools:We’ll be posting links to new videos as they’re posted on our Twitter account, so follow us there or subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified of new answers.Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Webmaster Level: All The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.Written by Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team

Webmaster Level: AllSince we released the latest version of Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools we've gotten a bunch of feedback, most of which was overwhelmingly positive. Today, we're happy to bring even more improvements to Top Search Queries that we've implemented as a direct result of your feedback. First of all we've shortened "Top Search Queries" to be just "Search Queries" to better reflect all of the data provided by this feature. In addition to the name change you'll notice that Search Queries has several new updates. As requested by many of you, we're now showing an "Average position" column right on the main Search Queries page. This provides a quick at-a-glance way to see where your site is showing in the search results for specific queries. The other change you'll notice is that we're showing a "Displaying" number for Impressions and Clicks. This number represents a total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table. The number in bold appearing just above it is a total count of all queries including the "long tail" of queries which are not displayed in the Search Queries table. When the "Displaying" number is not visible, such as when you select a specific country from the "All countries" drop-down menu, then the bold number is the total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table.We've also added an Average position column to the Search Queries download.The other addition we've made to Search Queries is a "Starred" tab. Next to each Query on the Search Queries page there is now a clickable star icon. You can click the star icon for all of the queries that are of most interest to you. All of the queries that you "star" will be consolidated under the Starred tab providing a super easy way to view just the queries you care about.We hope that this update makes Search Queries even more useful. If you've got feedback or suggestions for Search Queries please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: AllUpdate on May 19, 2010: We have several translated versions of this post! If you're more comfortable reading Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, or Farsi, the links above will take you to your preferred version. Thanks again for your help.We pay attention to dozens of different languages in our spam fighting, but sometimes we really want to drill down and concentrate on a small number of languages. We’d like to ask for your help to identify webspam in Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech and Farsi. If you know of sites that violate our webmaster guidelines in these languages, please send us a spam report. We use this information not only to look at the sites listed in reports, but also to improve our effectiveness in the rest of your language on the web.Thanks in advance for any data you send our way about spam in these languages. Of course, you’re always welcome to submit spam reports in other languages too!Written by Viktor Nebehaj and Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

(Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog)UPDATE July 13: We have changed the name of the codelab application to Gruyere. The codelab is now located at http://google-gruyere.appspot.com.We want Googlers to have a firm understanding of the threats our services face, as well as how to help protect against those threats. We work toward these goals in a variety of ways, including security training for new engineers, technical presentations about security, and other types of documentation. We also use codelabs — interactive programming tutorials that walk participants through specific programming tasks. One codelab in particular teaches developers about common types of web application vulnerabilities. In the spirit of the thinking that "it takes a hacker to catch a hacker," the codelab also demonstrates how an attacker could exploit such vulnerabilities.We're releasing this codelab, entitled "Web Application Exploits and Defenses," today in coordination with Google Code University and Google Labs to help software developers better recognize, fix, and avoid similar flaws in their own applications. The codelab is built around Gruyere, a small yet full-featured microblogging application designed to contain lots of security bugs. The vulnerabilities covered by the lab include cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (XSRF) and cross-site script inclusion (XSSI), as well as client-state manipulation, path traversal and AJAX and configuration vulnerabilities. It also shows how simple bugs can lead to information disclosure, denial-of-service and remote code execution.The maxim, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is only true if the eyeballs know what to look for. To that end, the security bugs in Gruyere are real bugs — just like those in many other applications. The Gruyere source code is published under a Creative Commons license and is available for use in whitebox hacking exercises or in computer science classes covering security, software engineering or general software development.To get started, visit http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/. An instructor's guide for using the codelab is now available on Google Code University. Posted by Bruce Leban, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllIn this final installation in our URL removal series, let's talk about following up on your removal requests, as well as when not to use Google's URL removal tool. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the previous posts in this series:Part I: Removing URLs & directoriesPart II: Removing & updating cached contentPart III: Removing content you don't ownCompanion post: Managing what information is available about you onlineUnderstanding the status of your requestsOnce you've submitted a removal request, it will appear in your list of requests. You can check the status of your requests at any time to see whether the content has been removed, or whether the request is still or pending or was denied.If a request was denied, you should see a "Learn more" link next to it explaining why that particular request was denied. Since different types of removals have different requirements, the reason why a particular request was denied can vary. The "Learn more" link should help you figure out what you need to change in order to make your request successful. For example, you may need to change the URL in question so that it meets the requirements for the type of removal you requested; or, if you can't do that, you may need to request a different type of removal (one whose requirements your URL currently meets).If a request has been marked "Removed" but you still see that content in search results, check the following:Is the URL that's appearing in search results the exact same URL that you submitted for removal? It's fairly common for the same, or similar, content to appear on multiple URLs on a site. You may have successfully removed one URL, but still see others containing that same content.   Solution: Request removal of the other URL(s) in question. See this article for help.Keep in mind that URLs are case sensitive, so requesting removal of http://www.example.com/embarrassingstuff.html is not the same as requesting removal of http://www.example.com/EmbarrassingStuff.html   Solution: Request removal of the exact URL(s) that appear in search results, including the same capitalization. See this article for help.When a request is marked "Removed," that can mean different things depending on what type of request you submitted. If you requested removal of an entire URL, then "Removed" should mean that that entire URL no longer appears in our search results. If you requested removal of the cached copy of a URL, "Removed" means that the cached copy has been removed and will no longer appear in search results; but the URL itself may still appear.   Solution: Double-check what type of removal you requested by looking at the "Removal Type" column. If you requested a cache removal but you want the entire URL gone, make sure the URL meets the requirements for complete removal and then file a new request for complete removal of the URL.When not to use the URL removal toolTo clean up cruft, like old pages that 404.The tool is intended for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as confidential data that was accidentally exposed. If you recently made changes to your site and just have some outdated URLs in the index, Google's crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time. There's no need to request an urgent removal through this tool.To remove crawl errors from your Webmaster Tools account.The removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. There's currently no way for you to manually remove URLs from this report; they will drop out naturally over time as we stop crawling URLs that repeatedly 404.To "start from scratch" with your site.If you're worried that your site may have a penalty, or you want to "start from scratch" after purchasing a domain from someone else, we don't recommend trying to use the URL removal tool to remove your entire site and then "start over." Search engines gather a lot of information from other sites (such as who links to you, or what words they use to describe your site) and use this to help understand your site. Even if we could remove everything we currently know about your site, a lot of it would come back exactly the same once we'd recrawled all the other sites that help us understand your site and put it in context. If you're worried that your domain has some bad history, we recommend filing a reconsideration request letting us know what you're worried about and what has changed (such as that you've acquired the domain from someone else, or that you've changed certain aspects of your site).To take your site "offline" after hacking.If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, you can use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created, e.g., http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed; instead, simply clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site so that we can reindex the new, cleaned-up content as soon as possible. This article contains more details on how to deal with hacking.To get the right "version" of your site indexed.When a request to remove https://www.example.com/tattoo.html is accepted, http://www.example.com/tattoo.html is also removed. The same is true of the www and non-www versions of your URL or site. This is because the same content is often available at each of these URLs and we realize that most webmasters and searchers don't want these duplicates appearing in search results. In short, the URL removal tool should not be used as a canonicalization tool. It won't keep your favorite version, it'll remove all versions (http/https and www/non-www) of a URL.We hope this series has answered your questions about removing content from Google's search results, and helped you troubleshoot any issues that may arise. Join us in our Help Forum if you still have questions.Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate...k, i, s, s, i, n, g! Perhaps you heard our announcement that speed is a signal in rankings, but didn’t know where to start. We’d like to help foster a lasting relationship between you and a responsive experience for your users. Last week I filmed my updated presentation from "The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters" which includes three first steps to understanding site performance. So grab headphones and some popcorn, then verify ownership of your website and download a plugin, and we’ll all be comfy with site performance in no time.Just curious about the Q&A? No problem! Here you go:Is it possible to check my server response time from different areas around the world?Yes. WebPagetest.org can test performance from the United States (both East and West Coast—go West Coast! :), United Kingdom, China, and New Zealand.What's a good response time to aim for?First, if your competition is fast, they may provide a better user experience than your site for your same audience. In that case, you may want to make your site better, stronger, faster...Otherwise, studies by Akamai claim 2 seconds as the threshold for ecommerce site "acceptability." Just as an FYI, at Google we aim for under a half-second.Does progressive rendering help users?Definitely! Progressive rendering is when a browser can display content as it’s available incrementally rather than waiting for all the content to display at once. This provides users faster visual feedback and helps them feel more in control. Bing experimented with progressive rendering by sending users their visual header (like the logo and searchbox) quickly, then the results/ads once they were available. Bing found a 0.7% increase in satisfaction with progressive rendering. They commented that this improvement compared with full feature rollout.How can you implement progressive rendering techniques on your site? Put stylesheets at the top of the page. This allows a browser to start displaying content ASAP.Page speed plugin, videos, articles, and help forum are all found at code.google.com/speed/.Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Level: AllAs part of our efforts to make search results more useful to our users around the world, we’re announcing the international availability of rich snippets. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you already know that rich snippets let users see additional facts and data from your site in search results.For example, we recently launched rich snippets for recipes which, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet and makes it easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for:We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets - and we know that many of you have already started marking up your content - so today’s announcement is very exciting for us.In addition to adding support for rich snippets in any language, we have published documentation on how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in the following languages: simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. (You can change the Help language by scrolling to the bottom of the help page and selecting the language you want from the drop-down menu.)We encourage you to read the documentation to take advantage of the different types of rich snippets currently supported: people profiles, reviews, videos, events and recipes. You can also use our testing tool (in English only, but useful to test markup in any language) and start validating your markup to make sure results show as you would expect.Finally and as you’ve probably heard by now (several times), we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show rich snippets for your pages. We’re doing this to ensure a good experience for our users; but rest assured we’re working hard to expand coverage and include more web pages. Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Yu Watanabe

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

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

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

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

A couple weeks or so ago, we did an SEO site review session at Google I/O 2010. The video from that session is now live: The video is about an hour long, but I hope it’s a pretty good use of your time if you’re interested in search engine optimization. Enjoy!

If your company has a bunch of store locations, please don’t hide that information behind a search form or a POST. If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web [...]

Okay, I’ve finished roughly a year of 30 day challenges, and now I’d like your help picking new ideas. So far, I’ve done: - 30 days with no TV (May) - 30 days of 10,000 steps each day (June) - 30 days biking into work (July) - reading 15 books in 30 days (I only made it to 12) [...]

I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down [...]

Okay, today I’m going to try something different again. I’m going to try live-buzzing the keynote of Day 2 of Google I/O. You can follow the live-buzz right here. I’m going to update the buzz as news comes out; if you’re following on the web instead of on Buzz, you might need to hit reload to [...]

Okay, I’m going to try live-blogging the keynote of Google I/O, but I’m doing it with a twist. I’m going to try live-blogging in Google Wave with some other folks. Watch the live-stream video at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDevelopers by the way. Lots of folks will be live-blogging or waving. Here is a different live wave with Gina Trapani, [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Krista Moller, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Lindsay Benson, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Amie Hutton, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Jennifer Cooper, Client Services Manager, iProspect

By Matias Wigozki, Client Services Manager, iProspect

By Natasha Yemelyanova, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

By Diana Gordon, Marketing Strategist, iProspect

We’ve started testing organic (also referred to as algorithmic) and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S.  The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft. However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used [...]

Coming off the heels of the largest-ever Q&A with David Beckham on Yahoo!, Yahoo! Answers has even more exciting news. This week, the Yahoo! Answers team made a slew of improvements that streamline search to find the information you want on the world’s most popular question-and-answer site. First up, we have three new sorting options near [...]

Soccer lovers followed coverage of the 2010 World Cup with Yahoo! Search tools and shortcuts, and today we bring you some of the tournament’s top search trends on Yahoo!. Throughout the first week of play, U.S. fans were eager to know more about the World Cup opening ceremonies, the World Cup schedule and World Cup brackets. [...]

We’ve recently enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist to provide near real-time suggestions as you type your query. You probably already use Yahoo! Search Assist to conduct your searches quickly, but now you can get even fresher suggestions, which will be especially useful when there are recent top news or events related to your search topic. [...]

We’re introducing the Yahoo! Search Widget for the Android smart phones today, making it much easier to access web search on the Android phone home screen. The UI is simple and compact to fit the size of your phone screen. Under the covers, we’ve packed in some cool features. You can type the query using the touch [...]

Soccer fans around the world will be waving their flags today as the World Cup opens in South Africa — and American enthusiasm for the world’s most popular sport is reaching new heights.  Since the beginning of the month, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in searches for terms like World Cup, FIFA World Cup teams [...]

We at Yahoo! love the search box. In fact, you can find a handy search box at the top of every Yahoo! page – be it Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports or omg! – as well as in our handy Yahoo! Toolbar. But nowadays, Search has evolved to mean so much more than one or two [...]

As we promised last month, we are launching Shortcuts that give you upcoming schedules for a specific team, group or match. Try searching for “worldcup schedule”, “Slovenia vs US schedule”, “brazil soccer” and “group B schedule” and get the schedule you’re looking for right on the Yahoo! Search results page. You can easily access scores, photo [...]

Back in April, we introduced a new look for Yahoo! News Search in the U.S. market, featuring news source refiners, time refiners, and rich results to help you find what you’re looking for quickly and seamlessly. We’ve just launched the new Yahoo! News Search page for French, Spanish, German, and Indonesian language users in 11 international [...]

Wondering what kinds of pictures and videos people are checking out right now? We’ve redesigned the Yahoo! Image and Video search home pages for a visual snapshot of the most popular trending topics that people are looking for in Yahoo! Search. With both video and image search, we are featuring up to five pages of topics [...]