Cape Fear Media Solutions

4th Annual Jell-O Snarf Crowns New Champion [Video]

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:36:25 +0000

Today was the 4th annual SEO.com Jell-O Snarfing contest Last years champion, Greg Bay, ,decided to go on vacation rather than stay and defend the title he has held for the last 2 years. (Shame on him) But this year was a very exciting event, as well as disgusting. While some came to compete, others had no idea what they were getting themselves in to. “I embarrass myself every year” says Ash Buckles, president of SEO.com. He continues to say “But I still talk trash to throw off the noobs” Boyd Norwood, director of SEO says… “I was the only male in my heat, and the girls slayed me!” This year the winners were: 1st Place: Ryan Hanvey 2nd Place: Daniel Woodall 3rd Place: John Rodriguez Enjoy the video recap of the 2012 SEO.com Jell-O Snarf… the contestants are already planning on strategy for next year! RELATED POSTS: First Annual SEO.com Jell-O Snarf SEO Webinar Week Sneak Peek Jell-O champion claims victory again Gary Vaynerchuk (Spoof) Promoting SEO.com’s $60,000 Giveaway This Week in “Commonly Asked Search Marketing Questions”

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4th Annual Jell-O Snarf Crowns New Champion [Video]

With Today’s IPO, Will May 18, 2012 Now Be Known As Facebook Day?

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:38:08 +0000

Facebook… love the social network or hate it, finally went public today. Many investors are running wild to get their hands on some of the newly minted shares of the social media behemoth. Shares were set to open up at $38 a share, and according to CNN , the stock started trading at $42.05 when the stock began trading at 11:30ET. Shares are expected to jump much higher in the early going. Some of the news I have heard today say that buying Facebook is a suckers bet. Big corporations and the rich get access to the stock first at the lower dollar amount, and turn around and sell it back to “the people” at an inflated price. I am sure there is a lot of that going on, but over all I think this is great for Facebook, Zuckerberg, and all the Facebook employees that will become millionaires today. In fact, I stand up and applaud… (and secretly wish I would have thought of it!… oops, guess that is not a secret now.) The future of Facebook as a public company is what intriges me. Some people compare Facebook to Apple, but Apple has a definite product they are selling, not to mention a rabid fan base. What is it Facebook sells to consumers? Sure they have the game network, as well as the paid advertising platform… but at the end of the day, what will make this company worth the expected $104 billion dollars to you and me? And how does the love hate relationship users of the platform have, in regards to privacy, come into play? I’d say the closest comparison to Facebook in the stock market world would be Google. Google makes most of their money from advertising… but they have jumped into consumer products with the Android platform etc. Will Facebook eventually come up with a product or service that people will want to actually buy? Or will Facebook even need to? Time will tell I suppose. According to CBS news , today Facebook will be the 23rd largest company in the U.S. (as measured by stock market value) putting Facebook ahead of shopping giant Amazon.com. However, Facebook ranks 909th in terms of annual sales globally. Pretty interesting don’t you think? So, for better or worse, today may very well be known as Facebook Day. What are your thoughts… will you be buying shares of Facebook? Do you think the need to pander to investors will help, or hurt the social giant? Let’s keep the conversation going below in the comments! Until next time… Doc RELATED POSTS: 8 Step Guide to Using Facebook to Generate Links & Business The Facebook God is Coming to Utah Zuckerberg, conservative senator: an unlikely duo Facebook Challenge – Part 1 Senator says Zuckerberg ‘No. 1 attraction in the whole high tech world’

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With Today’s IPO, Will May 18, 2012 Now Be Known As Facebook Day?

Online Marketing News: Facebook IPO: Worth $140 Billion, Google Penguin & Panda Party Crash, G+ Ghost Town

admin — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:00:32 +0000

Top 250 Internet Retailers Social networking for retailers makes sense right? Make your brand visible where your consumers are spending the most time. This infographic from Campalyst shares information on one of the things that helps makes retailers successful online, a social presence. Key findings include: Number of followers by social platform How success on social networks is distributed The most followed industries on specific social channels Featured Team Member Story Mike Yanke – Who Will Win the War of the Sidebars? While Google made headlines this week with the launch of its Knowledge Graph (ie a new sidebar element designed provide facts the search giant has amassed on people, places and things), emerging force Bing made its own announcement last week with a platform relaunch, complete with a social sidebar. So what sidebar format will most engage users – a vast collection of knowledge on people, places or things you may never see – or a vast collection of facts on people, places and things you may see every day? Check out Search Engine Land for more on both Bing’s social sidebar and Google’s Knowledge Graph . This Week in Online Marketing News Facebook IPO Could Place Its Value at $140 Billion The social network priced its shares at $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion. The average first-day “pop” for a technology company is 32 percent; if Facebook follows that trend, it’ll be worth $137 billion by day’s end. Via Bloomberg . Who Invited Penguin & Panda to the Party? Google’s new penguin update has many organizations confused, frustrated, and angry. It seems that many sites have seen a sudden drop in traffic, and are blaming “Penguin” and “Panda” for the decline. This article covers the importance of knowing which update affected your traffic as well as tips for gaining some of your traffic back. Via Yoast . 57% of Facebook users Never Click Ads Facebook’s public offering has generated a lot of buzz and anticipation. However, the ineffectiveness of advertising and user distrust due to policy changes may stunt aggressive growth goals. Curious to know other results of this poll run by CNBC? Via MSNBC . Is Google+ Becoming a Ghost Town? This week Fast Company received exclusive insights into Google+. If it’s true that Google+ is the company’s “social spine” then they are in need of some serious adjustments. The picture painted by the data shows very weak user engagement, waning interest and minimal social activity. Via Fast Company . 9 Ways to Be An Expert, Without the Attitude There is a fine line between providing valuable information, and the stigma that comes with being thought of as an expert. This article provides 9 helpful tips that you can share valuable information in an influential way without being perceived as a jerk. Via Brass Tack Thinking . 17 Steps to Becoming a Content Curator Many people curate content without even thinking about what they are doing. Re-sharing an article from a friend or colleague, or collecting and sharing a series of blog posts on a particular topic. There are some very simple rules that you can follow to properly curate and share the information you find online. This guide from Econsultancy covers the basics to set you up for success. Via Econsultancy . TopRank Team News Kodi Osmond – Yahoo Debuts Big Data App Called “Genome” at Internet Week Genome, over-simplified, refers to the biological information needed to build a living thing. If one thinks of data as capturing the behavior of a living thing, then data must be a “living thing”, too. Perhaps this was the logic used when Yahoo named its big data software, scheduled to release in July. Read more of Yahoo’s press release and what EVP of Americas Rich Riley had to say at Venture Beat . Shawna Kenyon – What People really Want vs. What They Share on Social Media Social media monitoring company NetBase published a year’s worth of its own data and compared it against a Harris poll to determine the gaps between what people say in social media updates compared to what they actually want. They found that in general people are ‘emotional sharers’ but in actuality tend to be quite logical when asked a direct question. This article poses an interesting comparison between men and woman within a number of categories. Via Mashable . Roxanne Hagberg – Google Search Just 1,000 Times Smarter (We all know that Google’s Knowledge Graph is big news this week. Our team found this change to be very important for our readers so we have included another review from Mashable) Google taps into a variety of knowledge databases to roll out “Knowledge Graph”, the next generation of search. Knowledge Graph allows users to quickly narrow their search to find the most relevant results. Via Mashable . Brian Larson – Saving Time in Google Analytics I remember the first time I really, really dug into a Google Analytics (GA) profile. I logged into GA at noon and the next time I looked up it was time to go home. There’s no doubt that there’s a tremendous amount of valuable information in GA. There’s also no doubt that it can be easy to lose time data mining in this tool. Search Engine Watch’s Eric Stiu shares ‘7 Time Saving Google Analytics Custom Reports’. Via Search Engine Watch . Time to Weigh In: Wow, this was a big week in SEO and social news. Google “Penguin” as well as their new “Knowledge Graph” are on the minds of many organizations. Has your company seen any significant decreases in traffic since this release? Do you believe that Google+ is a truly effective mechanism for engaging customers and clients socially? What updates would you recommend Google+ make to increase usability and engagement? Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog , 2012. | Online Marketing News: Facebook IPO: Worth $140 Billion, Google Penguin & Panda Party Crash, G+ Ghost Town | http://www.toprankblog.com

Ways to Win Customers and Influence Rankings – Whiteboard Friday

Wes King — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:54:00 +0000

Posted by randfish Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don’t forget to leave your own advice in the comments below. Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy! Video Transcription Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, “Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?” We’ve done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who’ve had success in-house, who’ve had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz’s membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I’d start with a few of those. So number one, if you’re just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you’re very early stage. Even if you’re saying, “You’re my first professional customer,” that’s fine, that’s okay. But have a few things that you’ve done in the past to show off your work. So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you’ve helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you’ve helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you’ve helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend’s got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she’s going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You’re going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that’s going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there’s a personal blog, either one that you’re running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great. Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, “Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it’s ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff.” Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant. Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, “Hey, I don’t want you discussing my particular project. I’d prefer you didn’t share and disclose which types of things you’ve worked on for me or what you’ve done.” That’s okay, and that’s another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, “Hey, here’s a few clients we’ve worked with” or “I can’t tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I’ll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we’ve worked on, and those include some of these other ones.” A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here’s Adorable Adoptions. It’s an animal shelter. It’s not actually an animal shelter. It’s an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things. The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it’s somebody’s personal project, something they’re putting on Kickstarter, or something that they’re launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you’ve seen that they’re launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don’t have a lot of venture backing and they’re kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. “Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I’ve done some things. I’m trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network.” They’re going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don’t have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those. But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there’s just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you’re committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, “Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you’ll recommend me in the future. I’d love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get.” Fantastic, but you’ve made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don’t, you can get into a messy territory. Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you’re an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don’t love to go networking, that’s okay. That’s fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you’re in and whatever geographic region you’re in. By being on top of what’s happening in the field, you can say, “Hey, I noticed that you said you’re looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I’d be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it.” Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn’t need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you’ve connected in the future will say, “Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her.” Great way to get business. Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it’s critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career. I’ll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I’m going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He’s the only person I see in my stream who’s really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He’s made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he’s showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that’s connected to Google+, there’s AJ, the stuff that he’s Plus 1′d and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he’s done a great job of this. There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who’s getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you’re going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known. Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you’re most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I’ve talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, “Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in.” So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn’t. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you’re not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It’s actually a great idea when you’re desperate to be able to say to someone, “Hey, I’m sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You’re not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you’ll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit.” That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, “Yeah, let’s start some client work. Well, I can’t pay you that much, and besides I know you’re desperate for business. So I’m going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you’re going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I’m unpleasant to work with.” This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing. Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I’ve got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, “Man, that guy’s pretty cool. I’d really like to know him. You know what? I’ve got a van. I’m going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I’ll reach out over Twitter or maybe I’ll reach out over email.” Fantastic, right? You have a friend who’s out of work. I know you’re struggling as well, right? You’re trying to find clients. You obviously don’t have a position for them, but it doesn’t matter. As you’re looking across clients, you’re meeting with someone, maybe they don’t take you up on it and you say, “Hey, I know that we didn’t end up being your SEO agency. I didn’t end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who’s really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I’d love to make the introduction.” Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There’s a new local news site out there. There’s a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you’ve done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future. All right everyone, I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Ways to Win Customers and Influence Rankings – Whiteboard Friday

All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:20:45 +0000

Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston – Flickr [Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.] One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize . We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience. We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline. Consider the customer experience. They weave between traditional broadcast and print media into online seamlessly. For example, someone could ride their local train or subway, see ads, surf the Internet on their mobile phone, read a magazine (on their tablet or not), or a host of other activities. You get the point. Customer media use supersedes tactical practices. That’s true for both B2B and B2C, though as Lee points out in his book, these sales cycles are very different. Multichannel marketing applies to traditional print, broadcast, mail and PR approaches, too. They should all be optimized for search, too, with messaging and keywords that will invoke familiarity with stakeholders regardless of which media form they are seen. Think about it. Customers search when they are looking to find something. If you optimize online ads , content, social and SEO so that search indexes your company’s name first, then you absolutely need your print ads, direct mail, press documents, white papers and broadcast ads to use the same keywords. A customer may not even realize it, but they are mentally associating these words — message components — with your brand. When they search, they will use the keywords, and your optimized content will naturally come up in the top results. More importantly, it will already be familiar to your customer. Take it a step further and add your creative, ads and content to the web site in a the modern press room. Transcribe the broadcast media so the keywords are searchable. Make them shareable. and start real discussions on them. Even ask for feedback on the ads. All of your traditional content can be repurposed, optimized and indexed for social and search. That’s why all marketing disciplines should be integrated and operate together as a collective whole. Marketing in the Round discusses selecting traditional tactics and newer disciplines like social, online and mobile. It’s about how to weave them together to achieve the common objective. Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate. Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ?rm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog , 2012. | All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich | http://www.toprankblog.com

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All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich

In-depth Guide To Content Creation [With Infographic]

Wes King — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:07:18 +0000

Posted by Designbysoap Ltd This post was originally in YouMoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an on-site SEO consultant, a link-building specialist or an all-round ‘internet marketer’, content creation should be particularly high on your list of priorities. We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘content is king’ for years now, but given Google’s recent de-indexation of low-quality blog networks, the Panda updates and the new algorithm burning across the horizon, it seems it’s never been more true than in 2012. It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult. So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content? To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns. Click for a full size version if you’d like to print it. Research Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it. Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages. Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites). To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal; Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research. This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer – suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage. Ideas Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information. The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry? Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc). An excellent example is SEOmoz’s own Google Algorithm Change History ; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they’ve provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change). Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes: Infographic section via PlayVille You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event – a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn’t necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic. Infographic section via Autoblog Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in. Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion. If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production. Placement Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed. Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage. It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers. Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else. When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces. Creation So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content. Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics. Infographics Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience. Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you. Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic — there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!): Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog Infographic section via Volvo Infographic section via HotelshopUK Infographic section via Geekosystem When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’. Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished. My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it). Blog Posts It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can. Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading). Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts. Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org . Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing. You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this , tell them how to do it. Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal. Publish So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails. I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content. Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved . Promote It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage. It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can. You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post , this list of infographic distribution sites , this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites . You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people. So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below. Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd. Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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In-depth Guide To Content Creation [With Infographic]

9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:08:19 +0000

Posted by Dr. Pete I spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way ( please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions… 1. Dogma Will Get You Killed You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up. It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options. 2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO . People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed. 3. A Link, by Any Other Name… …might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in Q&A is Rand’s 2010 post “ All Links are Not Created Equal ”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on. Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk. 4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly. At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.” 5. On-page Is Getting Messier I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated. 6. Check Your Headers Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook. 7. Use Basic Tools Well There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer ) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog , but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall. 8. Learn When to Be Patient Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information). 9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)… DO THE FUCKING WORK. The most frequent excuse I hear in Q&A is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you. Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions

Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:50:59 +0000

At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients . In late 2011 Vocus welcomed Jason Jue as Chief Marketing Officer. As Vocus & PRWeb’s Account Manager at TopRank, I was keenly interested in getting to know Jason better and learning his plans for the future – and what better way than through an interview for all readers of Online Marketing Blog to see? In this interview Jason talks about the undeniable convergence of PR and marketing, what social media metric is most undervalued by many PR and marketing professionals, where marketers should invest for 2013 and his vision for Vocus. Tell us a little bit about your background and w hat excites you most about joining Vocus? Prior to Vocus, I was Vice President of Marketing at Rackspace and had several executive positions at Dell in the US and Asia, marketing to businesses. Vocus offers cloud marketing and PR software to businesses in every market sector and size that want to reach and influence buyers. I’m excited about sharing with businesses how easily our products work wonders for our current customers. Some of the leading marketing consultants such as Sirius Decisions and MarketingSherpa use our products to maximize their online publicity. For some people, Vocus is synonymous with Public Relations software. Can you speak to how and when Vocus first expanded to offering marketing solutions? We have always believed PR to be a core part of “promoting a product or service” or marketing. Many customers who buy our PR software have a marketing title, and we’ve recently seen faster growth in this group. These customers use our social media and PRWeb news release features of our PR software. For them, we created a cloud marketing suite which integrates search, publicity, and social media marketing. Our cloud marketing suite was the most successful product launch in Vocus history, and will be even better when it includes email later this year. Do you see PR and marketing professionals as two separate audiences? Or are they converging disciplines? In marketing teams that have PR and marketing professionals, we continue to see them as two audiences with different product needs, although their roles are converging, especially around social media. PR professionals are using social media for brand positioning. Marketing professionals use social media for lead gen. Meanwhile, for the millions of businesses who have few, if any marketers at all, the marketing functions blend together. Use your crystal ball and give us a glimpse into the future. How will the Vocus offering change over the next 2 years? Where do you see the most opportunity for growth? The future of marketing is simple and powerful integrated campaigns. Every marketing team realizes that when working together on unified and integrated campaigns, lead generation and brand perception results are much better than working alone. I know that sounds like a pipe dream as marketing complexity has increased to address the everywhere all the time customer. Today’s customers are constantly switching back and forth from website, news, social, search, email, and mobile. To add confusion, each specialty has their marketing tools resulting in silos and disjointed communication. In the near future, marketers will be able to buy cloud marketing software to easily manage integrated campaigns. It will incorporate the trendy with the tried-and-true tactics of marketing The essential elements will work together for better results in lead generation and brand perception. And, it will recommend how and when to engage with prospects and customers. Seem unbelievable? I think it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t already happened. In the past 15 years, every corporate function, from marketing to sales to HR, has seen a proliferation of technology tools. Marketing is the only function without a major product suite. IBM is doing it for large enterprise marketing. We are integrating all the important marketing tools into a cloud marketing suite so every business, large and small, can easily achieve big results . Staying on social for a moment, what is one social metric that you think may be most overlooked by PR and marketing professionals alike? On the flip side, any stat that you view as overvalued? The most important social media metric is how many people actively recommend your product or service. I think the most overvalued metrics are fans, followers, and likes. As 2012 is well underway, what is one investment you think marketers must make in order to succeed the rest of the year and into 2013? (i.e. invest in mobile marketing) Focus on marketing fundamentals that will dramatically accelerate growth. Who is your target customer? What product or service should you develop for them? How should you promote to them? Why should they buy from you? Then, find the best product for you that simplifies all the marketing tactics and trends. This product will then let you focus on the marketing fundamentals. Thanks, Jason! Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog , 2012. | Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue

17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid

Wes King — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:02:50 +0000

Posted by Carson Ward If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it’s that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam. It’s become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the “danger zone” in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus. I was only partially correct, as the majority of cases appear to be devalued links rather than penalties. Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they’re doing doesn’t look like a type of link spam. Google’s response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone. 1. Cleansing Domains While not technically a form of link building, 301 “cleansing” domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers just cut the trouble redirected domains loose like anchors, and float on into the night with whatever treasure they’ve gathered. When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight. Link building through redirects should be easy to catch, as new links to a domain that is currently redirecting is hardly natural behavior. To anyone watching, it’s like shooting up a flare that says, “I’m probably manipulating links.” The fact that search engines aren’t watching closely right now is no guarantee of future success, so I’d avoid this and similar behavior if future success is a goal. 2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs I’ve already covered the potential risks of blog networks in depth here . Google hates blog networks - fake blogs that members pay or contribute content to in order to get links back to their or their clients’ sites. Guest blogging and other forms of contributing content to legitimate sites is a much whiter tactic, but consider that a strategy that relies heavily on low-quality guest blogging looks a lot like blog network spam. With blog networks, each blog has content with a constant ratio of words to links. It posts externally to a random sites multiple times, and with a lot of “inorganic” anchor text for commercially valuable terms. Almost all backlinks to blog networks are also spam. I cringe when I see low-quality blogs with questionable backlinks accepting guest blog posts that meet rigid word length and external link guidelines. Quality blogs tend not to care if the post is 400-500 words with two links in the bio, and quality writers tend not to ruin the post with excessive linking. Most of us see guest blogging as a white-hat tactic, but a backlink profile filled with low-quality guest posts looks remarkably similar to the profile of a site using automated blog networks. I’d obviously steer clear of blog networks, but I’d be just as wary of low-quality inorganic guest blogs that look unnatural. Guest blog on sites with high quality standards and legitimate backlink profiles of their own. 3. Article Marketing Spam Article link addiction is still a real thing for new SEOs. You get one or two links with anchor text of your choice, and your rankings rise. You’re not on the first page, but you do it again and get closer. The articles are easy and cheap, and they take no creativity or mental effort. You realize that you’re reaching diminishing returns on the articles, but your solution isn’t to stop – you just need to do more articles . Before you know it, you’re searching for lists of the top article sites that give followed links and looking for automated solutions to build low-quality links to your low-quality links. Most articles are made for the sole purpose of getting a link, and essentially all followed links are self-generated rather than endorsements. Google has accordingly made article links count for very little, and has hammered article sites for their low-quality content. Maybe you’re wondering how to get a piece of that awesome trend, but hopefully you’ll join me in accepting that article directories aren’t coming back. Because they can theoretically be legitimate, article links are generally devalued rather than penalized. As with all link spam, your risk of receiving more harsh punishment rises proportionate to the percentage of similar links in your profile. 4. Single-Post Blogs Ironically named “Web 2.0 Blogs” by some spam peddlers, these two-page blogs on Tumblr and WordPress sub-domains never see the light of day. After setting up the free content hub with an article or two, the site is then “infused” with link juice, generally from social bookmarking links (discussed below). Despite their prevalence, these sites don’t do much for rankings. Links with no weight come in, and links with no impact go out. They persist because with a decent free template, clients can be shown a link on a page that doesn’t look bad. Google doesn’t need to do much to weed these out, because they’re already doing nothing. 5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links Site-wide footer links used to be all the rage. Google crippled their link-juice-passing power because most footer links pointing to external sites are either Google Bombs or paid links. Where else would you put a site-wide link that you don’t want your users to click? To my point of avoiding the appearance of spam, Penguin slammed a number of sites with a high proportion of site-wide (footer) links that many would not have considered manipulative. Almost every free WordPress theme that I’ve seen links back to the creator’s page with choice anchor text, and now a lot of WordPress themes are desperately pushing updates to alter or remove the link. Penguin didn’t care if you got crazy with a plugin link, designed a web site, or hacked a template; the over-use of anchor text hit everyone. This goes to show that widespread industry practices aren’t inherently safe. 6. Paid Links in Content There will never be a foolproof way to detect every paid link. That said it’s easier than you think to leave a footprint when you do it in bulk. You have to trust your sellers not to make it obvious, and the other buyers to keep unwanted attention off their own sites. If one buyer that you have no relationship to buys links recklessly, the scrutiny can trickle down through the sites they’re buying from and eventually back to you. If you do buy links, knowing what you’re doing isn’t enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links. 7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc. Speaking of footprints, I believe it’s possible to build a machine learning model to start with a profile of known links violating guidelines, which you can acquire from paid link sites and link wheel middlemen with nothing more than an email address. You can then assess a probability of a site being linked to in that manner, corroborating potential buyers and sellers with a link graph of similar profiles. I have no idea what kind of computing/programming power this would take, but the footprint is anomalous enough that it should be possible. Exchanging links through link schemes requires a lot more faith in a bunch of strangers than I can muster. In a link wheel, you’re only as strong and subtle as your “weakest links.” My opinion is that if you’re smart enough to avoid getting caught, you’re probably smart enough to build or write something awesome that will have superior results and lower risk than link wheels. 8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication High-quality syndication and wire services possess a few unattractive attributes for spammers: there are editorial guidelines, costs, and even fact checking. Low-quality syndication services will send almost anything through to any site that will take it. You’ll end up with a bunch of links, but not many that get indexed, and even fewer that get counted. My experience has been that press releases have rapidly diminishing returns on syndication only, and the only way to see ROI is to generate actual, real coverage. I still see link-packed press releases all over the web that don’t have a chance of getting coverage – really, your site redesign is not news-worthy. I’m not sure whether to attribute this to bad PR, bad SEO, or both. 9. Linkbait and Switch In this context, we’re talking about creating a real piece of linkbait for credible links, and later replacing the content with something more financially beneficial. Tricking people into linking to content is clearly not something Google would be ok with. I don’t see linkbait and switch done very often, but I die a little every time I see it. If you’re able to create and spread viral content, there’s no need to risk upsetting link partners and search engines. Instead, make the best of it with smart links on the viral URL, repeat success, and become a known source for great content. 10. Directories Directories have been discussed to death. The summary is that Google wants to devalue links from directories with no true standards. Here’s a Matt Cutts video and blog post on the topic. Directory links often suffer from a high out/in linking ratio, but those worth getting are those that are actually used for local businesses (think Yelp) and any trafficked industry directories. Would I pay money for a listing here? Are the majority of current listings quality sites? Do listings link with the business or site name? If the answer to any of these questions is no, don’t bother with a link. This immediately excludes all but a handful of RSS or blog feed directories, which are mostly used to report higher quantities of links. When I was trained as an SEO, I was taught that directories would never hurt, but they might help a tiny bit, so I should go get thousands of them in the cheapest way possible. Recent experience has taught us that poor directory links can be a liability. Even as I was in the process of writing this post, it appears that Google began deindexing low-quality directories . The effect seems small so far – perhaps testifying to their minimal impact on improving rankings in the first place – but we’ll have to wait and see. 11. Link Farms and Networks I honestly can’t speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action. “I’m telling you right now, the engines are very very smart about this kind of thing, and they’ve seen link farming over and over and over again in every different permutation. Granted, you might find the one permutation – the one system – that works for you today, but guess what? It’s not going to work tomorrow; it’s not going to work in the long run.” – Rand in 2009 My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I’d love to hear your thoughts. 12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites Links from the majority of social bookmarking sites carry no value. Pointing a dozen of them at a page might not even be enough to get the page crawled. Any quality links that go in have their equity immediately torn a million different directions if links are followed. The prevalence of spam-filled and abandoned social bookmarking sites tells me that site builders seriously over-estimated how much we would care about other people’s bookmarks. Sites focusing on user-generated links and content have their own ways of handling trash. Active sites with good spam control and user involvement will filter spam on their own while placing the best content prominently. If you’d like to test this, just submit a commercial link to any front-page sub-Reddit and time how long it takes to get the link banned. Social sites with low spam control stop getting visitors and incoming links while being overrun by low quality external links. Just ask Digg. 13. Forum Spam Forum spam may never die, though it is already dead. About a year ago, we faced a question about a forum signature link that was in literally thousands of posts on a popular online forum. When we removed the signature links, the change was similar to effect of most forum links: zero. It doesn’t even matter if you nofollow all links. Much like social sites, forums that can’t manage the spam quickly turn into a cesspool of garbled phrases and anchor text links. Bing’s webmaster forums are a depressing example. 14. Unintended Followed Link Spam From time to time you’ll hear of a new way someone found to get a link on an authoritative site. Examples I have seen include links in bios, “workout journals” that the site let users keep, wish lists, and uploaded files. Sometimes these exploits (for lack of a better term) go viral, and everyone can’t wait to fill out their bio on a DA 90+ site. In rare instances, this kind of link spam works – until the hole is plugged. I can’t help but shake my head when I see someone talking about how you can upload a random file or fill out a bio somewhere. This isn’t the sort of thing to base your SEO strategy around. It’s not long-term, and it’s not high-impact. 15. Profile Spam While similar to unintended followed links on authority domains, profile spam deserves its own discussion due to their abundance. It would be difficult for Google to take any harsh action on profiles, as there is a legitimate reason for reserving massive numbers of profiles to prevent squatters and imitators from using a brand name. What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn’t match your site or brand name. “The name’s Insurance. Car Insurance” When profile links are followed and indexed, Google usually interprets the page as a user page and values it accordingly. Obviously Google’s system for devaluing profile links is not perfect right now. I know it’s sometimes satisfying just to get an easy link somewhere, but profile link spam is a great example of running without moving. 16. Comment Spam If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments. I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything. I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn’t. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this: Let’s pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you? Maybe I’m missing something here, because I can’t imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let’s just hope you didn’t build anchor text into those comments. 17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical Buying domains for their link juice is an old classic, but I don’t think I have anything to add beyond what Danny Sullivan wrote on the matter. I’m also a fan of Rand’s suggestion to buy blogs and run them rather than pulling out the fangs and sucking every ounce of life out of a once-thriving blog. Domain buying still works disgustingly well in the (rare) cases where done correctly. I would imagine that dozens of redirected domains will eventually bring some unwelcome traffic to your site directly from Mountain View, but fighting spam has historically been much easier in my imagination than in reality. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble. Spam Links: Not Worth It I have very deliberately written about what spam links “look like.” If you do believe that black hat SEO is wrong, immoral, or in any way unsavory that’s fine – just make sure your white hat links don’t look like black hat links. If you think that white hat SEOs are sheep, or pawns of Google, the same still applies: your links shouldn’t look manipulative. I’m advising against the tactics above because the potential benefits don’t outweigh the risks. If your questionable link building does fall apart and your links are devalued, there’s a significant cost of time wasted building links that don’t count. There’s also the opportunity cost – what could you have been doing instead? Finally, clearing up a manual penalty can take insane amounts of effort and remove Google’s revenue stream in the meantime. Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid

5 Content Marketing Strategy Fundamentals

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:09:55 +0000

Every SEO campaign can be broken down into 5 fundamentals , then segmented into off-site (link building) and on-site (content) approaches to identify and understand the application. This webinar recap and slide deck (at the bottom of this post) is a top level guide to assist you with setting the correct content marketing strategy today. 1. Have a Plan A good content strategy will consist of a plan rooted in specific value-based principles. These values are those that make a website good, worth visiting, long lasting etc. The way I came to determine just what these values should be is by drawing some parallels beween human success and marketing success gleaned from the well-known self improvement book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . In the beginning of this book Stephen Covey outlines that all success literature over the last 2 centuries can be broken into two approaches to achieving success. One of these approaches should be considered primary, and the other secondary. Character Ethic : This is the primary way to achieve success. It would be an approach based on principle based solutions. Covey calls this the “inside-out approach.” Meaning that if you focus on the key characters that make up who you actually are—such as honesty, integrity, creativity etc.—and as you work to improve yourself success will naturally follow. Personality Ethic : This is the secondary approach. Often you could define these as quick fixes, superficial or even instant gratification. These are the appearance driven tactics you find in self-help books that only focus on the surface of who you really are. They can gain you short term success, but often wean off and deter your overall success in the long run. While approaches to gaining success under the personality ethic are valid, they really only have long term value when they are utilized by a person who has mastered his character and established a personality rooted in strong value-based principles. The Marketing Parallel So it is with a website. No matter how many links you build (personality ethic), and how flashy your website looks—it’s long term success (traffic, leads, sales etc.) and sustainability of that success can only be secured if you first focus on the character of your website. What this means is if you focus on your websites internal content strategy (character ethic) by applying the below value based principles to establish a well thought out strategy the longevity of your website will be secured. Here is a quick mind map of what typically should branch off of these values and develop into your content marketing strategy: And if you were to sequence these in order of priority I would lay them out as follows: In the end, links are only as valuable as the website you pass them to. To put it in other words, no one cares if the directions you got to a party were great if the party isn’t any good. As you focus on these core principles that make up a quality content marketing strategy I suggest approaching the plan with 3 specifics: Measurable Goals Target Audience Target Keywords As you approach these 3 things look at how they apply to the characteristics that make up an ideal content strategy by asking questions like: What KPI’s indicate good usability ? How will I know the right people are finding my content? Does our branding speak to our audience? What is the user’s end goal? What phrases is our demographic most likely to search? ( findable ) Does my use of keywords on the page make sense? ( valuable ) 2. Put People First As you cater a content strategy to your specific audience or customer you will achieve higher success in content marketing. People enjoy making a connection. Understand the type of people your website is most directed toward and put these people first by ensuring you build a website with content that is: Easy: There is no doubt that people like easy. Which means as soon as the user opens a browser they are looking for a simple process. Building content that is optimized will ensure people can easily find your website Creating a logical navigation with clear taxonomy means people will easily be able to locate what they are looking for Integrating the right social network sharing capabilities in the right places makes sharing you website with others easy Entertaining: People love to be entertained. From the wording in your copy to the design to specific media used on the page each part of content is an opportunity to entertain your visitor in one way or another. As you plan your content, look to marry your brand with some form of entertainment that speaks to the targeted audience. And no matter the audience that entertainment will be most delivered best through a combination of: Remarkable graphics Spectacular videos Engaging content Educational: Just as much as we all love to have entertainment handed to us, we are drawn to learn more. The informational form of content is often one of the greatest for SEO purposes as well. Look at the questions your industry is currently asking and seek a unique way to deliver the right answers to the web. 3. Nitty Gritty SEO Once your content is quality in terms of design and user experience then look to basic SEO implementations to ensure the nitty gritty is in order: Titles: Page titles are placed within the area of the source code and should: Be between 65-70 characters typically Contain branding somewhere in the title Use 1-2 keyword phrases that are most relevant to the page (don’t overdo this) Read naturally (not spammy) Inform the searcher what they will find as they click through Here are various acceptable formats to approach your page titles: Branding : Page Title With Keyword Here Keyword Here In Title With Branding Included In Middle Page Title & Keyword Inclusion Here | Branding Headings: Your page headings are given more prominence and importance that paragraph content by search engines. This means that the keywords and phrases used within headings are considered indicators as to the pages relevance. In approaching the use of your page headings you should: Not sacrifice true headings for keywords Use the most important/relevant key phrases naturally in the most prominent heading (the ) Use supportive or variant phrases in subheadings ( through ) Not overuse headings on the page in an attempt to optimize for keywords Content Placement: Body content (or words) should be integrated into nearly every area of your website. Search engines view this as quality, and users benefit from it. Words on a page are not placed their solely for search engine optimization purposes . If they are, you have got it all wrong. The content you use should: Explain each page Direct the visitor Be placed both above and below the fold Be part of the design, not separate from it Keyword Use: Keyword Placement Using keywords and variants of those keywords within the content is an integral part of making your website findable. Do not concern yourself with using the phrases a certain amount of times. In fact, using keywords correctly on a page will often happen naturally and without intention. In approaching your content creating for a web page it is best to write the content first to be readable, purposeful and succinct. After this is done, review the content to determine if the correct key terms have been used. If they have not revise as needed. Images: One of the most under utilized areas of a website for optimization are images and graphics. In the placing of your images there are two opportunities for optimization for a topic: Alternate Text File Name Navigation: To correctly optimize a website navigation it is important that know what keywords you are targeting for each individual page. Typically this is referred to as establishing keyword mapped URLs. To ensure you navigation is best optimized it must be: Crawlable to search engines Contain a logical taxonomy 4. Stay Active Beautifully designed static pages will become stagnant if you don’t have active content regularly supporting your websites relevance to major search terms and pushing visitors to landing pages. A major factor enabling web properties to gain increasingly more search engine real estate is active content production. The idea is that you need to keep your website up-to-date and interesting both for people and for search engines by: Creating discussions about industry news Updating audience with business news Niche guides Case studies Instructional blog posts Videos Infographics Above all else, the best way to ensure you content is active is to have a schedule laid out and broken down to the week or days if needed. Often this is referred to as an editorial calendar. Itemizing the content piece’s you plan to publish will help you look at everything with a bird’s eye, ruling out overuse of a specific topic or type of media. A well planned out content calendar successfully integrates with other marketing initiatives as well. For most internal blogs I find laying out a 12 month editorial calendar is best. 5. Don’t Overdo It Over optimization is an increasingly detrimental issue in search marketing. It is very common for professionals to latch on to one specific strategy or become accustomed to a few singular approaches that, if done over a long period, can in turn deter the websites performance. While over-optimization has always been an issue, with the latest algorithm updates from Google , this has been publicly announced as a target. Stay Away From Over-Optimization There are many forms in which over optimization can creep into your websites SEO campaign , but looking specifically at your content on-site there 3 items to watch out for: No content above the fold Overuse of exact match anchor text internal links Overuse of keywords within page titles Your Content Strategy Checklist And if all else fails, here is a quick checklist of major items every great content strategy consists of: What is your thought on this content strategy? Anything you would like to add? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below. You can also view the recording of my webinar on this subject by clicking here Implement These 10 SEO Tips, You Must Part 1 | SEO.com Webinar View more PowerPoints from SEO.com RELATED POSTS: The 3 Key Elements Of A Successful SEO Campaign Link Building: Two Categories, One Goal Explode Your Keyword List Right – Part 3 Explode Your Keyword List Right – Part 2 Explode Your Keyword List Right – Part 4