Elsewhere, another plug mates and a significantly more complicated process forces a beam of electrons onto a plate of glass covered with a chemical that glows when energized, resulting in the mass production of bright electric dots that illuminate the otherwise invisible mind of the computer.”

Meet John Maeda. Maeda is a digital artist who creates elaborate and beautiful pieces, or what he calls “eye meat” (as opposed to eye candy), via computer programming. Maeda’s visuals tell stories like how much money is spent on the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology vs. Cleanup of radioactive waste + the cost to maintain US nuclear warheads.  His art sell products like Absolut, Shiseido, Reebok, Sony and magazines. And more often than not, his stuff  just looks really cool.

The quote leading in this post is from his ©2000 book of digital collections called Maeda @ Maeda. The fact that this book is now 13 years old is completely irrelevant – the inspiration for those of us who appreciate beautiful creations stemming from data and algorthims is not at all lost, even in an age when “digital art” of the 1990′s could easily be laughable work today. And the stories he tells throughout the book are as weird and fascinating as the quote above, from page 1 to 480. Watch all 11 minutes of this TED talk on designing for simplicity to get a sense of the complexity of the constant shifting and mixing of left brain and right brain in the stories he tells back-to-back without taking a breath.

For those of us crawling out of geekdom and into content marketing, for those of us who want to create the next great visual piece for our clients, for those of us who aspire to tear down the walls between SEO and traditional marketing and storytelling, John Maeda should be one of the bright stars of hope. His work is an inspiration for what can be done when algorithms and art come together. Get that book, browse the random pieces he creates, and get inspired.

The post John Maeda and his Electric Dots appeared first on SEOgadget.

If these are challenges you face on a regular basis, then we have some good news! We’re happy to announce that the next SEOgadget webinar ‘Content Strategy beyond Top 10s’ has been scheduled for Tuesday 21^st May at 4:30pm UK time. This time myself and Dan will be taking a look at how we approach content strategy; from identifying audience groups and their needs through to content production and our process leading up to release. Our aim is to give you an honest view on what we’ve found works and perhaps more importantly, what we’ve found doesn’t work.

During the webinar we’ll show off a bunch of tools and examples to cover the following points:

• Audience profiling
• Defining goals
• Creating effective briefs
• Release / launch process
• Measuring success

Sign up for SEOgadget Webinar Updates:

We’d really like this webinar to answer as many of your questions as possible, so if you’ve got any questions or things you’d like us to cover – drop us a line in the comments and we’ll do our best to include them. To sign up for a place, simply follow the GotoWebinar link below and be signed in and available at 4.30pm on the 21^st May. If you can’t make it then fear not – we’ll be uploading the webinar to the blog for everyone to see.

The Details:

When: Tuesday 21^st May

4.30pm UK (BST)

11.30am (EDT)

8.30am (PDT)

Still not sure, check out this awesome tool!

Where: GotoWebinar

Register here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2136695590143055616

Webinar ID: 111-116-475

Q&A Hashtag: #SEOgadget

Instructions:

It’s easy! Simply follow the link and register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2136695590143055616

The post Content Strategy beyond Top 10s – SEOgadget Webinar appeared first on SEOgadget.

Case in Point: Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches

Today, let’s take a look at the Real Beauty Sketches campaign that just launched from Dove on April 14^th, 2013.  This campaign featured a criminal sketch artist who drew two sketches of the same woman.  In the first sketch, the woman described herself.  In the second sketch, a stranger described the woman. The campaign sought to show women that they are more beautiful than they think.

When I first started to look at this campaign, I was not 100% sure what to type into the search bar.  I started with the search “real beauty” since I knew it was a part of the Real Beauty campaign.

From here I could see that the mentions for what I wanted to find all encompassed the words “real beauty sketches”. So that was my next search query .

(Please note: if you are doing these searches along with me you will see different results due to personalization and the QDF algorithum update)

It was here that I noticed the URL of the campaign for the first time.  As you can see, it is a paid ad and the URL is no where to be found in organic search.  I searched the first four pages of the search results to see where the organic listing was, but was unable to find a listing.  (This was on Friday April 19^th which is the 5^th day of the campaign.)

What is going wrong here?  There are clearly online mentions, but the site is not ranking.  After spending some time looking at the campaign, I found three fixable problems that would better allow this content piece to be leveraged for search.

Problem #1

As you saw in the paid ad, the URL for the campaign is realbeautysketches.dove.us.  I plugged that URL into the Open Site Explorer tool from SEOmoz to look at the links coming to the page.

I tabbed over to the “Just Discovered” tab and was able to see that the site did have 139 links coming from external domains.

After looking over the developing backlink profile, I went back to the “real beauty sketches” search query because the page was not generating the types of links that the content should have been getting.

(Please note: this was taken on April 25^th, a few days after the original screen grab)

The reason why there are so few “Just Discovered” links is because there are very few webmasters who are putting a direct link to the original source.  All of the listings on the first page either embed the YouTube video or mention the campaign in text only.

This got me thinking, “How many websites have actually picked up this piece of content?” I did a specialized search starting April 14^th (the day the campaign launched) to April 25^th (the day I grabbed this image).

There are at least 512 search results about this campaign spread out on the internet but very few direct links to the site.

Which begs the question: who is getting the online credit for this campaign?

The short answer: YouTube.

Yes, if you scroll up you will see various news sources also getting SERP real estate over the original source; however, you will also see that YouTube is the first organic listing.

This makes sense since almost all of the websites on the first page have embedded that YouTube video.

Let us now take a look at Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches YouTube page.

It is wildly successful with over twenty eight million views and over eight thousand comments.  But there is a huge problem with this page and it is underlined in red.

Problem #2

The URL in the description is dove.com/realbeautysketches; however, it resolves to realbeautysketches.dove.us.  Though this is not where the content is located when you go to the site, if it is correctly implemented through 301 redirects this would not have any SEO issues.

To verify the 301 implementation, I turned to my coworker and this is what we found:

Basically, dove.com/realbeautysketches gets 301 redirected to www.dove.com/realbeautysketches which gets 301 redirected to realbeautysketches.dove.com which then gets 302 redirected to where the campaign actually lives. Here is another visual to better see what happens when you go to dove.com/realbeautysketches.

When you use a 302 redirect it passes none of the link value goes to the site you are redirecting.

Though YouTube links are nofollowed, users can still see the URL and potential link to it without ever knowing that it resolves to realbeautysketches.dove.us.

Problem #3

Also, the 302ed page is also being indexed in search as seen below.

The URL that is linked in the YouTube page is also being indexed:

This raised some questions for me as I was writing this (feel free to leave your thoughts on these in the comment section).

1. Should Dove had placed the video on their site?
2. Would that have crashed their site?
3. Does putting the video on YouTube because it will rank offer more value than putting it on their site and getting links?
4. Why market Dove.com if it 301s to Dove.us?

What to do to fix these three problems

Problem #1: Lots of mentions, but few links

Solution #1: Ask for a link

It’s a pretty simple solution that tends to get left behind by a lot of content marketers.  In many cases, we work hard to get the desired placement for our content but drop the ball when it comes to checking up on it weeks later.

A best practice is to build into every content marketing project set times that you will go back and see if there were any organic pick-ups.  If webmasters use your content but don’t link to you, then send them a quick email.

A best practice is to add the page you found the content on and the URL of the link you want the webmaster to use.  Making it as easy as possible for the webmaster will help your chances of getting them to add the link.  Also, you will find that some webmasters will email you back telling you they have done it.  Send a thank you back so that if you ever want placement on their site again, they will remember you.

In Dove’s case, since there are a lot of mentions and not a lot of links, I would prioritize the list based on:

1. Site Authority
2. Social Signals (are people going to that site and sharing on their social networks)
3. Comments (are people talking on this page)

Then put that into a spread sheet and start finding a way to contact the webmaster or author of the post.

Problem #2: Link Value stops at realbeautysketches.dove.com

Solution #2: Implement 301 redirect to realbeautysketches.dove.com so that it passes link value to realbeautysketches.dove.us

Problem #3: Multiple URLs ranking for the same content

Solution #3: Put a noindex meta tag on dove.com/realbeautysketches and realbeautysketches.dove.com.

There are things that both sides of the marketing spectrum do well.  Traditional marketers can create these amazing campaigns that go viral on the internet and SEOs can leverage their technical knowledge and make sure their work is getting the credit.  Imagine what would happen if you married these two sides of marketing together towards one brand.

The post Great Marketing Often Misses the Mark on SEO appeared first on SEOgadget.

There are many things in life that can help creativity emerge or drive your creativity forward. I believe that stress and fear is one factor in life that can block the creative mind but with a positive and open mind ideas will start to flow beautifully. It really all comes down to managing your emotions and fears in the right way, and from there it will help you open up the path to super creativity.

How many times have you played it safe? Worried and hesitating about stepping outside the idea box in case you fail, this is fear talking to you; it is telling you that you are a failure before you have even tried to step outside the box. When you change your mind set to become a confident person and challenge that fear watch out all the creativity goodness will come bursting out of you.

Have No Fear and Build Your Creativity

So, how do you become this confident person with no fear? You simply challenge yourself each day to change the way you do things and take a different action with risks. Too much activity and no rest will cause stress, stress then causes a blocked mind and a unhealthy person so firstly try incorporating relaxation sessions into your daily activity to produce a better and more healthier you.

Here at SEOgadget, I have developed the “Gadgeteers Learning Pod”, the pod allows workers to go into the pod and relax away from their daily work routine for an uninterrupted 20 minutes a day, allowing them to sit down away from their computer screens and either read or learn a new skill, which in turn will open up their path to creativity.

image source

Exciting Changes Make For Creativity

Last week was week one of a new change at SEOgadget, where the learning pod was activated. It saw me creatively thinking about different ways to tackle SEO problems through the inspiration of the book by Danny Dover called “Search Engine Optimization Secrets”. Mason and Tom were involved in learning new skills through Codeacademy, Sophie was reading up on PHP, Liam was reading Ian Lurie’s book “Conversion Marketing, An Internet Marketing Strategy That Works” and Lorna was creatively thinking up project ideas through reading up on trending industry news and catching up with The Economist news.  Next to the learning pod, Pete was teaching a beginners lesson in coding and if you have not caught up to date with this you can catch his training on our SEOgadet YouTube page. This is just the beginning of the learning pod developing and more exciting things are to come, but as you can see through changing the way you do things on a daily basis you can open up a new creative path or skill.

If however you do not want to sit down and learn then get up and be active, but pace yourself! If you are a fitness guru like me then try using your passion for working out as a way of opening up your creativity path. Many times I have been on the stepper at the gym and to be honest I used it just to tone my gluteal muscles, but when I attended the last ever Link Love conference in London it was Wil Reynolds that inspired me to change the way I used this. Wil Reynolds spoke about the nudge at different levels in link building, now I see each step on the gym stepper as a nudge and not just towards link building but I think about how on each step I can creatively push myself to the next goal to create awesome work for my clients. This way of opening up creative thinking is much more fun for me and stimulates my mind and body at the same time. You will find my fitness motivation on Twitter, just hash tag seofitness and you will see how determined I am to keep opening up my creative mind (#seofitness).

image source

How to Produce Better Content

Now, I bet as soon as I mentioned change some of you already tensed up, change this action immediately. So when I say change you say “hell yeah”, wait for it…CHANGE, I hope there was a lot of “hell yeah” being shouted just then! With your hell yeah I can do this attitude, you are now confident in the mind to go produce some creativity and here’s how:

1-      Take a risk and question your own idea

2-      Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself and run with new ideas

3-      Be bold and take action

4-      Study videos and analyse what made it creative and bullet point the areas that were great or needed improvement

I have a great example of number 4 on the list above but it needed no improvement as it was perfect. Yesterday, I watched a short animated video by Disney, and as many of you know I do love Disney but this video was all about the classic creativity that can live in every project or piece of work you do for a client. Take a look at this video called “Paperman” by Disney and think about creativity, what leaps out to you?

Paperman – Full Animated (Short Film) [VO|HD] by addictomovie

In my opinion, this video is an example of an animated perfection. It delivers a message through creative content, no voice is needed to speak the content and no text is needed to read the content, expression, sound and visual design is everything. In this video you not only capture the message that is being sent across but you are visually seeing how attention to detail is important. The male character creates a plane so precise to try and get his message to the female character, and although the plane keeps failing to get to where it needs to be he still keeps trying. Creative ideas do not just stop; they are built upon until the message can be delivered to the reader or viewer. And, look at the design in this animated video, simple and effective, it is actually amazing that you do not need bursts of colour to capture the attention as long as it designed in the right way and the flow blends in well with the story it will become a creative masterpiece and this is where Disney gets it right. The video threw me back to the classic Disney days and I really enjoyed it but this time I learnt creatively from what and how they produced it.

I hope you enjoyed my take on creativity, and if you want to join in with my physical and mental fitness come join me on Twitter, where I will be hash tagging the following that help my creativity flow:

#seofitness

#seohealthfood

#seohealthdrink

#seopool

#nandosseo (a SEOgadget #seotreat for us)

Happy creative hash tagging!

The post Creativity Is The Real King appeared first on SEOgadget.

So, as part of your clean-up operation you’re faced with some wretched old forum within whose monstrous spammy bowels lie a few hundred links to your domain. I won’t ask how they got there. What matters is that sooner or later Google is likely to spot them, and so you’d like to get rid of them post-haste. Ignore the problem, and you risk getting slapped with a penalty.

The method that I’m going to share today has dramatically increased the response rate to my forum link removal requests. In short, it is a nifty way of distilling a long and messy list of spam into a succinct, coherent, and actionable request.

Getting Started

I’m going to assume you have both a contact at the forum, someone to whom you can send a list of the spam you want removed (if you don’t, check out our Contact API, and for stubborn cases this splendid guide by Mr Mason), and a long list of linking URLs on the offending domain (from a backlink analysis, perhaps using the tools of the gadgetplex).

If you’ve culled the data from a variety of sources (Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, Google Webmaster Tools), your list probably looks a little like this:

Basically, a mess. Most of these forums don’t have anything that even resembles a coherent permalink structure, and so we’re often left with a mixture of search results links, profile links, post links and thread links, usually with a jumble of extra parameters on the end. Sending the list in its current state to your forum contact is not going to get you anywhere, because it’s simply not actionable. Our job today is to make the webmaster’s life as easy as possible. That means making sense of this raw data.

We can use the spammer’s methodology to our advantage. In my experience, the spammer usually places the offending link in the signatures of their users, so as to ensure it appears in every post they make. Often they will have half a dozen or so accounts, but will make upwards of thirty posts with each account. The best solution therefore is to get a list of the offending accounts and use them as our hit list. Deleting five users and their associated posts is a lot less daunting to our webmaster than making sense of several hundred garbled URLs. So, how do we go about this?

Quick Wins

Always check for an easy way out. Sort your list of linking URLs alphabetically, and search for a pattern. If, in among all the posts and threads, you see a few resembling http://badforum.com/profile/spammer123/, you’re in luck. Pay these profiles a visit, and you’ll probably find that the profile page contains the user’s signature (and the bad link). Grab the URLs of these user profiles, and you’ve got your hit list right there.

Often though, you won’t be so lucky. On some forums, user profile pages don’t include signatures and therefore aren’t picked up on our initial crawl (as they don’t feature the link). Upon running into this stumbling block, you might resign yourself to sifting through the mess by hand, trying to collect the names of all the spamming users. This is time-consuming, prone to errors, and boring, which is why I came up with the following alternative process.

Distill & Refine

First we need to get this list as short as possible. Get rid of all the obvious duplicates by removing all the prefixes; do a Find and Replace on variations of ‘http://www’, ‘http://’, ‘https://’, etc, substituting them with nothing. Then use Remove Duplicates (under the Data tab) to shorten the list. Do a quick check for unnecessary parameters at the end, such as ‘&ncf98dfj292m’, remove them and use Remove Duplicates again.

Ideally at this stage you’ll be able to spot the post permalinks, at which point you can delete all the thread links, page links, search results links, etc. This will leave us with a list of the offending posts (which can still easily reach into the hundreds). If however the forum doesn’t have post permalinks, then you’ll want to work by thread; this means deleting all parameters other than the page number, ‘&page=3′ for instance, to ensure you get the correct page of the thread. Using a combination of LEFT, RIGHT, LEN and SEARCH, Excel pro’s should be able to trim unnecessary parameters automatically.

Crawl Time

Once you’ve run a final dedupe, your list is probably as short as it’s going to get. That means… oh yes. You know what time it is. It’s time to fire up the frog.

Copy the first URL from your list and paste it into your web browser. Locate the offending post and note down the user’s name. Then copy and paste your list of URLs (ensuring to include ‘http://’ before each, use CONCATENATE if you removed it) into a notepad file and save it as a txt. We want to use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to do a custom scan of the pages’ source code. For help with this process, check out this great guide by Stephanie of Distilled. For the experienced froggers among you, stick it into list mode, feed it your txt file, set your custom filter to scan for the exact username that you just noted down, and hit Start.

Essentially, we’re scanning to see which of the posts (or threads) contain the spammer’s username. If Matt Cutts smiles upon you, your Frog will chew through your list and return a nice sizable chunk of it, meaning our lazy spammer used the same account many times. If it returns just one URL (namely the one you initially picked), you’re going to have a bad day. We’ll assume that hasn’t happened.

Cross-Reference

Hit Export and save the results of your Screaming Frog crawl as a CSV. Then copy the list back into Excel, into a separate table. We want to remove anything from our main list that we’ve linked to our first offender. To do this, add a second column to your main list, and do a VLOOKUP referencing your new table. Anything that doesn’t return an N/A error – that is, anything Screaming Frog has told us contains our first offender’s username – can be deleted, as we have established the user responsible.

Hopefully your list is now quite a bit shorter. Keeping a note of your first offender to one side, pick one of the remaining URLs in your main list and identify the user responsible. Repeat the Screaming Frog crawl, this time searching for the second offender’s username. Remove anything your frog finds from the main list. And so on.

With any luck, by the time you’ve scanned for your fourth or fifth user, your list will be more or less empty. In my experience, only the most determined of spammers will bother creating more than seven or eight. You should be able to get a pretty good idea of how many users you’re dealing with after doing your first crawl, as the automated nature of the spam means that each user will generally have roughly the same number of posts. So keep at it, and once your list is empty, you’re done!

“Great Success!”

And voila! What seemed just half an hour ago to be an insurmountable challenge, a great festering heap of rancid URLs pointing at some dark and disgusting corner of the interwebs is now a short, coherent, (and actionable!) hit-list of bad users. Fire this off to your webmaster and, if you’re lucky, he or she will delete the users and all of their posts. At any rate, you will have a far higher response rate with this method than you would by sending the webmaster hundreds of URLs from your initial crawls.

This is by no means a watertight solution, and naturally it has its shortcomings. But I’ve found that in certain specific cases of forum spam – generally, the ones that make you sigh and brace for disavowal – this method can score big wins, hence why I’m sharing.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading, and that you’ve found my quick guide useful. I’d love to hear your thoughts so please do share them, either in the comments or via @TomBennet88 on Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Image Credit: Varial Freefly

The post Forum Spam – A Practical Guide appeared first on SEOgadget.

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from the American show The Office) talks in her book “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me and Other Concerns” about how she imagined getting award show gift bags with vacations to wildlife reserves and $500 jars of miracle face creams made from human placentas. But since she’s not an A-List actor so in reality she would get stuff like protein bars and socks, and sometimes wouldn’t even be allowed into events.

It’s not that Mindy isn’t a fantastic person – she is. But she’s simply not as popular as the Meryl Streeps and Angelina Jolies of the world. The awards show gift bag preppers and door bouncers have a standard for who they let in and what they give them, based on how popular they are right now and among others at the event.

Google works the same way. When there are hundreds, thousands, or even millions of potential pages that could be in those first ten search results, Google has to make a decision about who is the most relevant and who is most popular among their peers right now. If that’s your page, well then welcome to the Oscars, and please enjoy your placenta cream.

The popularity factor in ranking

Knowing that links can and do affect rankings, our industry has blossomed around buying, selling, injecting, manipulating and basically selling our first born to get every link possible. It’s time-consuming, it’s not fun, and it certainly doesn’t make Google happy, since it clouds their vision of who is really popular. And it’s not news that Google has been working on fixing that.

So if you’re thinking ahead – thinking about what tactics you’re going to be able to implement as Google continues to crack down on SEO manipulation over the next year, 5 years, 10 years, then you should be thinking about more than just links. You should be thinking about what is going to make your audience naturally love and share and engage with your stuff online. I call this the popularity factor.

Popularity factor #1: Sharing is caring

In December 2010 Danny Sullivan asked Google and Bing if and how they consider Facebook and Twitter in their algorithms, and because Danny is magic, they answered him. Although some of the answers were a bit nebulous, we got a sense for how the search engines are thinking about what social signals might be important.

Before this there was some disbelief that a link from Twitter or Facebook (if it’s crawlable) could potentially contribute to a page’s rankings because of nofollows on the links. With thousands of PhDs working at Google I’m quite certain that the fact that a share, something people are excited about enough to tell others (not unlike a link), wouldn’t be beyond their grasp. It makes complete sense. Whether the link is nofollowed or not, it’s a sign that someone likes this piece of content. Just like a typical link, it’s a vote. And with the exception of social sharing spam, there’s no reason to ignore this increasingly popular type of signal.

Even in 2010 Google and Bing shared that the authority of a social share and the quantity of shares were factors considered in their algorithms and/or search result displays. Deducing the nebulous answers we can see that they were considering these factors (in web search and/or social search results, which have changed since then):

1. Authority: Importance or authority level of the person sharing the URL.
2. Quantity: How many times the URL has been shared.

And I’d also bet that by now they are also considering and possibly using these factors:

1. Expertise: Whether the sharer is an expert in the topic. A recent Microsoft & Carnegie Mellon study defined browsing “experts” as people who had been to a site x times. In social metrics, authority (how many followers/friends/etc you have) + topics (what you talk about most, what’s retweeted most, etc) could easily equal experts.
2. Type of query: It makes perfect sense that social signals might affect some kinds of queries more than others. For example, social signals probably come into play a lot more for news-related queries like a celebrity death, than static queries like refrigerator parts.

It’s all about Google+, right?

A few studies have attempted to look at the effects of social sharing on rankings (examples: 1, 2). Though, in my opinion the studies should be taken with a very large grain of salt, the interesting commonality seems to be that Google+ has more of an influence on the rankings in these tests than Twitter or Facebook shares.

Many people take the conspiracy theory route and blindly claim that Google favors pages that have verified Google authorship (in my experience it’s typically because they heard someone else say it). Google has also said that Google authorship doesn’t affect rankings, although it could in the future.

My thought on this is that there may be a high congruence between Google authorshipped pages and rankings, but if there is I’d believe that it’s currently more likely due to an indirect effect. Google has written about the tests they’ve done on the clickthrough rate of G+ results in September 2011, and increased the image sizes after the tests, presumably so that the CTR would be higher. We assume that organic search results that get clicks can perform better overall than SERPS that are ignored. Therefore, just like other video and image rich snippets in SERPS, it would make sense that people would tend to click on the results with the G+ author photo, especially if it’s someone they know.

All in all, Google’s Matt Cutts recently mentioned social likely becoming an even stronger factor in the future and is crucial currently for personalized search.

Popularity factor #2: Engagement

It’s still pretty tough to say exactly what the search engines might be able to see and/or take into consideration around what happens once a searcher enters a site. Google has said, in an older version of their policy page I saved called Ad Planner data methodology – Ad Planner Help, that they dip into a wealth of places to gather data for AdPlanner including Google Analytics and the toolbar and Google Analytics. Why wouldn’t the Search folks be doing the same? It’s entirely possible.

Several Google and Microsoft research papers and patents have mentioned a variety of ways they are thinking about engagement, including scrolling on a page, printing or downloading something from the page, bookmarking it, how long it is in focus, and more.

For example, here is an excerpt from a Google patent titled “Systems and methods for demoting personalized search results based on personal information”

Other characteristics of user behavior that can be used for user profiling include one or more of the following: the length of time that a user interacts with the website, the proportion of the website viewed by the user, actions (in addition to clicks) taken by a user while visiting the website (e.g., printing, bookmarking, cutting and pasting, annotating), and a user’s activity subsequent to the interaction with the website.

We would be pulling the wool over our own eyes to think that engagement in some way, shape or form, even if it’s simply bounces back to SERPS, time on page/site and/or pages per visitor, is not considered as a factor when weighing the popularity of your page versus the millions of others on the same topic.

Popularity factor #3: Links

This one needs no explanation. Links are still, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, a ranking factor, and of course an indication of popularity. Of course the level of link manipulation that SEOs can get away with is changing, there’s no doubt good links can still work wonders for a page and the site it’s on.

But I sell toilets: Woe is me

Around 2006 I wrote a blog post on toilets. It was on a Yahoo 360 blog (a product that no longer exists) and I wasn’t popular enough for anyone to scrape anything I said, so it is unfortunately long gone, but here’s the point: I was excited about a toilet. Excited enough to not only link to a few toilets, but actually write about them too. It’s not that I’m a plumbing aficionado by any means, but who wouldn’t get excited about a toilet that has a seat warmer and plays music while you do your duty? Or an innovation being considered where your “deposit” is analyzed to give you, and potentially your health care provider, an analysis?

The point is, I’ve heard the complaint over and over again that it’s impossible to generate links and shares naturally for something boring like refrigerator parts and cranes and toilets. I respectfully disagree for two reasons:

1. It’s all relative: Your popularity in search results is relative to other search results. Your toilet page is competing with other toilet pages, so be the best toilet page you can be and don’t worry about how many links travel articles and celebrity news sites get. You’re likely not being compared to them.
2. If these guys can do it, you can too:
   1. Social media savvy vacuum ‘tweets what it eats’
   2. The 15 Manliest Toilets
   3. 12 Cool and Unusual Refrigerators
   4. Mobile Crane Accidents

So what can the Mindy Kalings of the internet world do to generate more popularity? Figure out what you’re good at and do that better than everyone else. Write a book, become a thought leader, hone your craft, get creative, prove yourself, know what gets your audiences excited and go out there and do it. Spend less time building links to try to make it look like your popular in the directories and blogspots of the internet and instead spend that time doing something remarkable. It’s the way SEO is going. And just like SEO has always been – you’re better off paving the way than being late to the game.

Agree? Disagree? Know of other factors you’d consider popularity factors? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or via @lauralippay on Twitter!

The post The Popularity Factor in Today’s SEO appeared first on SEOgadget.

We had our first SEO Pub Trivia Night held at Raven Bar in San Francisco.  The night was a success with great contestants, food and tons of drink tokens.  There were four teams that battled through the three rounds: SEO, Social and a very tricky Visual round.

We were able to give away some great prizes from our sponsors: SEOMoz and PixelSilk.  But the fun doesn’t stop there!

We decided to do a mini version of some of the industry questions we asked that night and will be providing fun SEOgadget luggage tags to the top scorers!  In order to get the prize tweet out your score with the #thensome hashtag.

See if your knowledge is up to the level of the contestants.  The winners got roughly 80% of the questions correct.

The top 5 scorers throughout the month of April who tweet their score with the #ThenSome hashtag will receive the prize! Stay tuned for more fun industry events!

The post #Thensome Quiz Some! appeared first on SEOgadget.

I’ve put the slides from the session at the bottom of this post; but ended up writing a full summary of the presentation in-between J Feel free to skip to the slides at the end of take a read through the post for a more in-depth run through.

Ghosts of Link Building Past

It’s no news to anyone that the past 12 months has seen a lot of E-commerce sites lose traffic in the aftermath of the penguin update. Being able to analyse your backlink profile and gain an understanding of how safe (or otherwise!) your link profile might be is now just as important as understanding what keywords you need to target. It’s a big part of SEO, and a crucial step that site owners need to make. As some easy first steps, I ran through a few techniques such as mapping out the quality of linking domains, distribution of linking C-blocks and quick checks on anchor text; all aimed at identifying red flags and areas to investigate further.

I believe the route your link analysis takes should be determined by the data you find. First look for patterns, footprints and more importantly, the balance between various factors. You can then extend out from there diving into the areas that matter the most to your particular link profile.  Of course, cleaning up a nasty profile is a lot of hard work and requires a solid amount of commitment from all involved.

Diversifying Traffic

It sounds so simple, but so many sites ignore this important step. If your business relies heavily on organic search traffic then you’re opening yourself up to an unnecessary amount of risk. Every site will at some stage experience fluctuations in rankings, but how much this impacts your bottom line will largely depend on how much traffic you have coming from other sources. This risk increases even more and can start to look quite scary if the majority of your organic traffic is coming from just a small selection of big keywords.

If you drop 2 or three spots across the board, but only 50% of your converting traffic comes via organic; it will probably hurt a bit but not nearly as much as it would if organic search makes up 90% of your converting traffic. My suggestion is that any ecommerce site with a heavy reliance on organic traffic should start to explore other channels.

The example I used in my presentation was Net-A-Porter’s use of social media and in particular their extremely successful Facebook page; taking a look at a tool called BirdSongTT to dig into what content is working particularly well for them. I really like the way this tool breaks down content types to see what generates the most interaction. Clearly imagery is working great for Net-A-Porter. Also, I’d suggest its well worth looking at the video section of their site (note the interviews with fashion bloggers!) –pure genius in my opinion J

Ignoring Customers at Your Peril

We’ve all seen examples of sites where dissatisfied customers have left a trail of angry reviews, seemingly with the sole aim of stopping as many people as possible from making the same mistake as they did. Sure, there’s always going to be a small selection of people you can’t please but when you see search results littered with negative reviews, you do have to question how much that business really cares about their customers. Not only is this clearly bad for business, I think they’re missing a trick.

Using vivobarefoot.com as an example; I believe great ecommerce sites know how to make the most of their customer relationships – not only for repeat business but also as a weapons grade marketing asset. VivoBareFoot’s community section is a fantastic place to look should you want some inspiration on how you could put some ideas into action for your site.

Not Making Use of Data

As SEO’s we’ve got so much useful data at our finger tips. So much so, it’s always surprising to me how little of it gets used in the wider context of an ecommerce business. As an example, a great piece of keyword research should also be a source of useful information for the buying team. Want to know what products are hot and may require additional stock soon? Internal search is the perfect place to find out!

Another example I put into the deck was making use of Custom variables or event tracking to help monitor out of stock items. Using this method to dynamically add event tracking / custom variables for any of stock products, you can start to gather information on which products have lost demand and which ones should be prioritised in terms of buying in new stock.

Letting Opportunities Pass You By

Not understanding seasonality, missing out on in demand categories, or using internal language instead of appealing to the masses can all cost you dear when it comes to attracting as much traffic as possible. If you’re doing things properly, you’ll understand how people search for your products. One example I used here was search terms surrounding motorcycle helmets. As you’ll see, a lot of the search traffic reflects people looking for brands. If you’re selling motorcycle helmets and don’t have brand pages to capture this traffic then you’re missing a big trick.

On a similar note, the natural step following keyword research is to identify what relevant content your site is missing. To do this on scale is actually quite straight forward; the premise being matching your keyword research data with onsite crawl data in order to find broad matches of keywords that aren’t currently being catered for. It’s probably a full on blog post to explain this properly, but by using some wildcards and COUNTIF functionality you end up with a list of relevant terms (sub-categories etc) not yet featured on your site. Awesome!

Losing Out to Technical Nightmares

Of course, in many cases it can be a lot easier to talk about technical issues that it is to get them fixed – especially if SEO is being implemented as an afterthought rather than an integral part of the build process. However, there are usually a very common set of issues that seem to crop up time and time again. One of the first things we’ll look at when conducting a site audit is identifying how efficiently crawl budget is being spent. A good place to start is the ‘Index status’ report in Webmaster Tools. The shot below is for an ecommerce website with around 2,000 products. However, webmaster tools is reporting nearly 200,000 discovered URLs. So there’s clearly a problem.

The best way by far to dive into this and find out what’s going on is a good look at some log-file data. The issue with most off the shelf SEO tools (most of which are fantastic!) is that they might tell you a problem exists, but they won’t truly explain the root cause. Looking at a sample of GoogleBot requests from your log-files should back up your findings from other tools and should give you a much better insight into how GoogleBot is crawling your site.

Content = Your Character

Time after time, we’ll see an ecommerce site where they’ve stuck a chunk of ‘SEO Copy’ right at the bottom of each page in an attempt to rank without disrupting the user journey or flow of the site. As with some of the above, this might not be harming your site but you’re certainly missing out on an opportunity. In my opinion, content should be used to form and shape the character of a business. Unlike a physical location, one of the problems with doing business online is that you have very little time, and few tools with which you can reflect your personality. Surely every chance to do this should be grabbed by the horns?

In my opinion, if your content is good enough then put it in a place where people can read it. If it’s not, then rewrite it and then put it somewhere people can read it! If you want to know what good looks like, then I’d highly recommend checking out Wish.co.uk.

Weapons of Choice

Some of the tools used throughout this presentation:

Screaming Frog

SEO Tools for Excel

Majestic SEO

Open Site Explorer

Birdsong

If you’re interested in other presentations from SMX Sydney and would like to check out what the other speakers presented on; our good friend Jason Mun was pumping out an impressive amount of live blogging throughout the conference. Check out all his SMX Sydney posts here.

Slides:

The post SMX Sydney – Ecommerce SEO; Avoiding Common Pitfalls appeared first on SEOgadget.

Discovering Base Keywords

First off, you are going to need some base keywords to start with. Think about the main things your business has to offer.

• What would be one sentence you could use to introduce someone to your business?
• What would be the main products or services you would tell them about?

Within those answers should be some base keywords to start with that describe your business. SEOgadget, for example, could start with these.

SEO agency
marketing agency
content marketing
conversion rate optimization
social media strategy
search engine optimization

If your business is locally based, then you might want to take your base keywords and add cities / regions to them as well.

Best Tools for Keyword Research

The following are some of the best tools for competitor keyword research and generating more keyword ideas.

Suggested Search

Just about every search engine has instant suggested search results. These prompts are designed to help people find specific keyword phrases to search for. Most notably, there is Google.

Bing…

Blekko…

And pretty much every other major search engine. As you can see, you can get different results from one to the next.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Google AdWords Keyword Tool is the probably the most popular free keyword tool. You can get up to 100 keyword ideas back (depending on your keyword) or up to 800 keyword ideas back if you sign in with your AdWords account.

Just pop in your base keyword ideas or even the best ones from suggested searches to come up with a world of new ideas. Each will be listed with the estimated global monthly searches, local monthly searches, and, if you’re logged in to AdWords, the average CPC value.

SEO Site Tools

Your competitors can be your best source of keyword ideas. You can start with SEO Site Tools, an extension for Chrome, to see what keywords your competitors target by looking at their main title and meta description tags.

SEMrush

SEMrush can help you go even more in-depth with your competitor keyword research, showing you the organic and paid keywords a business is ranking for and targeting. It will also help you uncover additional competitors.

You can also see the pages on the website that rank for specific organic keywords and target landing pages for ad campaigns. This can help you determine if you should optimize your product pages or your content with specific keywords and phrases.

Amazon

Not the usual suspect when it comes to keyword research, but when you think about it, it should be.

First off, you can use the Kindle Store search to get instant suggested search ideas.

If you’re looking for keywords for content, you can then find out what people are using in their Kindle book titles AND how many people are actually interested in more in-depth information about those topics based on the number of reviews.

The same thing goes if you sell products. Don’t just find out what people search for – find out what products people are actually buying.

LongTail Keyword Pro

If you are doing niche keyword research, LongTail Pro is a good solution. It allows you to get up to 800 keyword ideas (based on AdWords login), search for multiple keyword ideas at once, sort by difficulty rating and monthly searches, then number of pages on Google that use each keyword idea in the title, and even see available domains that match each keyword phrase.

You can also use it to research the top 10 competitors for a particular keyword idea or phrase. You’ll see each competitor’s page authority, links, domain authority, mozRank, PageRank, and site age.

Separating Commercial and Content Keywords

Once you have a decent sized list of keyword ideas and phrases for your business, you will need to sort out which ones have commercial intent and which ones do not. Commercial intent simply means that people searching for those keywords are likely looking to buy.

If you are unsure of whether a keyword is being used for commercial or content and you have a membership to SEOmoz, then use their Keyword Difficulty Tool. It will give you a comprehensive view of the keyword you want to target, from the level of competitiveness to the top sites that are ranking for them.

Using this tool, you’ll be able to quickly see which keywords should be used for content and which should be used for your products / services based on whether the majority of pages ranking for it on the first page are businesses or blog posts.

As you go through your list of keywords in a spreadsheet, add a column to note which keywords will be used for your homepage, products, and services. For the rest, determine what content titles can be derived from the keyword phrase and how those pieces of content can lead your audience from devouring your content to conversions.

Once you finish this exercise, you should have more than enough keywords to use to optimize your internal business pages. You will also have a great list of content topics to publish as blog posts, videos, infographics, and eBooks.

How do you do topical keyword research and what are your favorite tools? Please share in the comments!

The post How to Perform Topical Keyword Research appeared first on SEOgadget.

Demonstrate Your Knowledge

The best way for your business to become recognized as a thought leader in your industry is by creating amazing content. These are the two most important areas to start with when building your credibility in the industry.

Blog

If you want to create a hub of authority on your own website, then your blog is the place. Instead of just having one person blog or just having a blog created from the company’s point of view with no author mentioned, try to get everyone on your staff involved. Let author’s claim each post as their own with an author bio, and make sure each author bio includes the position that author holds in the company. This way, readers of your blog will see how knowledgeable your staff is and be more confident in working with your business. Plus, when author’s have their name and face on a blog post, they are likely to invest more time on it to make sure it is high quality vs. a nameless, faceless article.

Guest Blog

You can’t expect to build authority on your blog alone. Guest blogging is another way to demonstrate your expertise across the web. You will want to research the blogs whose audiences include potential clients, make sure they accept guest posts, and start submitting high quality content. If you don’t have time to spread yourself all over the web, don’t worry – just pick blogs that have a strong audience and become a regular contributor to them. The more often you submit a post, the more their audience will recognize you and will want to learn more about your business.

Speaking

Once you have developed a strong base of content and gained recognition in industry-related publications throughout the web, you will want to start pitching presentation ideas towards conferences in your industry. Conferences tend to choose speakers based on the topic idea, the speaker’s knowledge of the topic (which can be proven with content), and the speaker’s popularity. The latter is especially true for conferences who have a voting system to allow attendees to vet the topics they want to hear about.

Be Everywhere

Next on the list of authority building is making sure people see you in the right channels. Don’t just settle for your main company Twitter profile, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Company Page, or Google+ Page. Expand your reach beyond that with employees and colleagues who are social and willing to spread the word about your business.

Add Your Business’s Twitter Handle to Personal Twitter Profiles

If your employees and colleagues are on Twitter and they use their profiles professionally, encourage them to add the company Twitter to their bio. They can do this by simply adding their job title and your company’s @username.

HubSpot, for example, has 276K followers. Ten of their employees that have @HubSpot in their Twitter bio have a total of over 485K followers. You can see how the company’s reach is twice as large or more if you counted all of the employees who have @HubSpot in their bio. It’s important because as someone searches for an inbound marketer on Twitter, they will see lots of profiles coming up what all list their association with HubSpot. This will make the searcher more likely to visit HubSpot’s profile and website for more information.

Add Your Business’s Facebook Page to Personal Profiles

Graph Search is going to change the way people search for users on Facebook, making it more likely that people at your company will end up in search results. Encourage employees and colleagues who have a professional presence on Facebook to add the company page to their profiles by updating their Work & Education section.

Make sure everyone hovers over the company name on their profile to see if the page’s information pops up. If it doesn’t, make sure you like the page and then select it from the dropdown when adding your employer to your profile. This way, the same thing happens. If someone searches for people with a particular skill set, they will hopefully see lots of results with your company name in them.

Add Your Business’s LinkedIn Company Page to Professional Profiles

LinkedIn is just another social network working on improved search functionality, and an important one if your business is B2B. If your business has a company page on LinkedIn (which it should), then make sure your employees and colleagues are linked to it when they list their current employment.

Not only that, but make sure that they have listed your business as their most recent employer, and preferably include it in their headline as well. This will ensure that the business name comes up in all areas around LinkedIn, including search results.

Add Workplace and Contribution Link to Google+ Profiles

Last, but not least, make sure employees and colleagues have links to your business on their Google+ profile. For those that contribute on the blog, make sure they have followed the steps for Google+ Authorship so content from the blog is claimed in search.

This can increase the click throughs on your posts as well as the recognition of authors on your business blog.

Help Others

A great way to be everywhere and demonstrate your business’s knowledge in your industry is by helping others. There are prime areas throughout the web where you can offer your assistance to potential customers.

Participate in Groups and Communities

Most of the major social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ have groups and communities that everyone can participate in, usually based around a specific topic. Find the groups and communities where your potential customer base are likely to hang out and start participating. Many even allow you to share your latest blog posts with members – just check the group rules or community guidelines to find out.

Your participation within the group, along with participation from your employees and colleagues, will boost your business’s exposure on these social networks. Not only that, but as an added bonus, the blog posts you share will gain additional traffic. Sharing with groups can increase the visibility of your content from just your following to hundreds, if not thousands of other members.

Participate in Q&A Networks

Q&A networks allow you the perfect platform to help people in your industry who have questions oriented around the products and services you have to offer. Quora is one of the most professional networks that covers everything from A to Z. Have employees and colleagues create a profile on Quora that includes their job title and company name. Then have them take some time daily to answer questions.

If a potential customer has asked a question and several member of your team come along to provide great answers, or if a potential customer is browsing through answers several questions and sees your business name come up over and over, it will show just how knowledgeable and supportive your business is.

What strategies have you used to become an authority within your business’s industry? Please share in the comments!

The post How to Build Authority Within Your Industry appeared first on SEOgadget.