lundi 28 février 2011

Outreach for Linkbuilding - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom Critchlow, and I'm here in Seattle helping out with some SEOmoz SEO bits and pieces. I'm sharing Whiteboard Friday because Rand is out of town.

Today I'm going to be talking about outreach for link building. There's a lot of talk online about how to get links, creating great content for links, but a lot of focus goes on creating the content rather than actually doing the outreach for the content. So, I thought I'd do a video on how you can actually get links from your content.

There's an assumption here that you've already created some great content and that that content is targeted to a particular niche. Obviously, great content works much, much better when it's targeted to a particular community that they can be passionate about, they can comment on, and so on. The really broad content doesn't typically do so well.

So, let's assume that you've created some great content, whatever it might be, whether an infographic or a competition or a video, etc. Then there are a few tips that we've used in doing outreach that I just want to share here.

The first thing that I've noticed when doing outreach is that you want to have efficient contact gathering. There are lots of ways of getting bloggers in a particular niche or getting Twitterers in a particular niche, but the more that you can make that process quick, scalable, and efficient, the better the whole process is going to be.

There is the usual stuff that you can do. You can run some Google searches for things like top ten blogs about your niche. So, let's say it is photography. You can run, "top ten photography blogs." Run a search like that and you're going to end up with lots of blog posts and articles talking about what the top blogs are in that niche. You can go through and you can find those. That is obviously a great source. One thing that I really love to do is go find these top blogs that get talked about individually and then go through their blogs rolls. A lot of blogs will have a little blog roll or recommended blogs or friends section. Those kind of talk about all the people that they read, that they subscribe to. In fact, Rand wrote a post about all the blogs that he subscribed to at one point. That might be a list that you might find if you were searching for SEO blogs or recommended SEO reading, etc. Go find the influencers, find who the influencers link to and who they recommend.

You also want to find Twitter followers or rather influential Twitter accounts. And Follower Wonk, which I have written out here, FollowerWonk.com is a fantastic tool that will do this. They've indexed a whole bunch of Twitter accounts, and you can search through all of the bio text. So you can search for Twitter accounts that have a particular follower count and are interested in a particular niche. So, let's say it's photography, you can go through and you can find a whole bunch of people that are interested in photography. You can also search by location on Follower Wonk. This is a great way of finding niche accounts in a particular area that you can then go out and you can contact.

One of the key points here that I love to do is actually categorize these people as I am finding these contacts and finding these blogs. Go through and categorize them depending on what kind of outreach you're going to do to them. Some people you might find and you might think, well, they've got a pretty mediocre blog. It's all right. They have semi-interesting content. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time personalizing my response to them or sending a really detailed email. I'm just going to send them something pretty standard. Some people you might find, however, might be journalists or they might have a really popular blog or it might be somebody that you found Twitter that doesn't have a blog but they maybe own a forum or an email newsletter, something like that.

So categorize these people into broad buckets. The buckets I like to have are your standard contacts, your extraordinarily contacts, and kind of left field. That kind of separation means that you can quickly and efficiently send your mass email to all the standard contacts. The extraordinarily contacts you can go through and you can say, "These people I'm going to really craft an email to. I am going to send something specific and personalized and fun and creative to these people." The left field contacts are those that you might not want to send an email to. Maybe they're left field because they live near you. Maybe they have an email newsletter and you want to subscribe and send them an email dedicated to that. So, something maybe a little bit different. With that categorization, I find really useful when I am going through my contacts so that I can save time later.

That is the first thing. The second thing, being enthusiastic I find is more important than being unique. So when you're doing outreach, everyone will tell you to find something personalized to that person that you're speaking to and put it in the email. Say, "Hey, I read this blog post you recently read and it's really awesome." That will somehow make the outreach more effective. In my experience, I find that being enthusiastic trumps that every time. Even if you don't put much in the email that shows that you've read their site or that you've really tried to engage with them, rather just write an email that's awesome. Right? Take a leaf out of the SEOmoz newsletters that go out and so on. Put some personalization in there. Put some fun in there. Talk about maybe you're a really small company, maybe you're a startup, maybe you've got some exciting tools or content. Whatever it might be, tell people about that. Come across as genuine.

The trick here is that people control links. Websites don't link to people, people do. You want to reach out to people and make them like you. You really want to get on their good side. In my opinion, always write an enthusiastic email over a unique email. And what's your USP? Maybe you're more fun than people. Maybe you're more creative than another company. Many you're smaller. Maybe you have content that is more interesting. Whatever it might be, leverage those things when you are crafting the contact.

I'm going to switch over here, now, to the purple section. The other thing here is that when you are doing outreach, not everyone is going to respond to you. In fact, anyone who has actually tried outreach will know that not that many people respond to you, which is kind of unfortunate, but you want to make sure that anyone who does respond to you, even if they come back and say, "Ah, I'm not interested right now. You're content was okay, but it doesn't really fit with my audience." Really make sure that you follow up with those people. In the same way that you would have a sales channel and a sales funnel, make sure that you really cultivate these people. Go back to them and say, "Hey, why didn't you like it?" Or, "What can we do better next time?" Or, "Maybe next time we're doing this, we'll include you in the content that we're writing." So, really, anyone that responds to you, you really want to cultivate a relationship there. At the end of the day, outreach is all about getting relationships with people whether they have a blog, a forum, or they're just an influential Twitter account. You really want to create a relationship, because those relationships are worth so much more than the individual outreach that you're doing. They can be useful for future pieces of content that you're releasing. You can get them involved in things like surveys that you do and things like that.

If they do come back and they're really positive, then you still want to cultivate that relationship. If somebody comes back and says, "Great. Sure. I put it on my blog," don't end there. Find out if where else they blog, for example, is a great one. A lot of people that blog online will have multiple blogs. I think I have about 17 last time I counted, not all of which are recently updated. Do they have any friends? Find out who else they know in the blogging space that might also want to post your content. Anyone that responds to you, really, really go after them really strongly.

Then the final thing is hustle, which is a really hard thing to define. When we've been doing outreach, the most effective thing that we've done is just think laterally. It's all very well building the contact list, sending email to all these people, but actually, at the end of the day, the thing that gets you the results is usually either a random contact or it's leveraging some kind of hot news. Something like that. It's really hard to come up with a process that will get you those things. In my experience, there are a few things that you can do to give you a greater chance at success.

The first thing is, make sure you follow all of the Twitter and RSS feeds in that niche. A lot of people will think, this is a niche I'm engaging in. I'm doing research. I'm trying to find good bloggers. But they don't actually bother living and breathing the niche. You have to go in. You've got to actually engage these people. Read their blog posts. See what gets them riled. See what gets them hot. Really engage with them. That's where you can really win above and beyond just doing the kind of outreach. If you actually understand what this community is about, you'll have a much better chance at success. So, go through and actually follow a lot of these people, and actually see what makes them tick.

Watch forums as well. I think forums are massively underrated when you're doing outreach because that's where a lot of the people that are really passionate about the niche hang out. You can actually capture them in their natural environment so to speak. When you go to forums, you can actually see, you know, what do they chat about that's not in their niche? People are in that niche just chatting. Just shooting the breeze, right. See what they're interested in. See what they're passionate about. You might spot opportunities there that you might otherwise miss.

I find Alltop is a great way of very, very quickly and easily finding a particular niche and then looking at all of the top news in that niche. So, you kind find out what's hot. Alltop has kind of categories all over the place so that it kind of aggregates Twitter users and blogs in a particular niche. You can very quickly see if there is breaking news or if there is a hot topic. Alltop will show that up quite nicely. That's a great way of kind of artificially getting yourself embedded in a particular niche. At the end of the day, don't forget that this is where a lot of the success comes from is that kind of extraordinarily luck basically. You stumble across somebody talking about something or you happen to be doing outreach at the same time as some hot news. You need to give yourself the best chance of success with that kind of activity. These are some good tips to get that.

Those are my main tips. There is one thing here, which I have kind of put in very light blue that you probably can't read up here, which is that you need to manage expectations. Whenever you're doing outreach, there is a tendency to think that every single time you do outreach for content, you're going to get amazing results. That is simply not true. What you can do with outreach is even the failed outreach, even the outreach that you've done that resulted in zero links, that will still build your relationships. When you're doing this whole process again, when we come back to efficient contact gathering, don't forget the people that you've reached out to previously. Don't forget the people that you reached out to that were semi- lukewarm leads last time, but this time maybe it is a different piece of content. Or maybe you took in to account some of their feedback. Make sure that when you're doing outreach, even if you are not getting links, you're building relationships.

That's a great way of kind of managing expectations. Whether it is your boss, maybe you're an agency and you've got a client, when you're positioning the outreach work you're doing, don't just report on the links, also build a rapport on the relationships you've built. They can be really, really useful. This particularly applies when you're doing the really high- level outreach to people like journalists and your high-level bloggers. You're not going to get in the first time most of the time with these. You want to build a relationship, get an email conversation going, and then you can get some really great content that they're going to link to.

I think those are my main top tips. I've probably said, as I just said right now, about a million times, and again, because I am kind of new at this. But that's fine. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to learn more about link building, we're running some conferences in London and New Orleans in March. There will be a link so you can find out more details. Sign up to that. I'll see you there. Thanks, guys.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/EH1CNvqMeHQ/outreach-for-linkbuilding-whiteboard-friday

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dimanche 27 février 2011

What It Takes To Be an Independent Search Marketer

Greener GrassIf you're a Search Marketer working at an agency, in-house or are out-of-work entirely, you've probably considered going independent at least once. A bad day at the office can inspire daydreams of earning more money and working from home in your pajamas. There are clear advantages to becoming your own boss but the grass isn't always greener, as they say.

Remember the 2010 SEO Industry Survey? More than 10,000 respondents participated and the result was some fascinating analysis by Will Critchlow and the Anatomy of a Search Marketer infographic was born. I was in love. As I began exploring the anatomy of an Independent Search Marketer the raw data from this earlier survey revealed yet another use.

I'll share a few new findings from the survey that I thought would be most interesting to those thinking of going solo. Also, as someone who's experienced in-house, agency, and now independent search marketing roles perhaps I can have a useful perspective. I'll try my hardest, anyway!

Lets check out the data first. After I shatter your dreams of making more money and attending every search marketing event once you go independent, we'll dive in to what the job of an Independent Search Marketer really looks like. If you are still interested, that is.

As with any survey, there are a number of caveats to take into consideration when looking at the data and conclusions. Take a read of those cautions as described when we first released the survey data over here. All of the data below looks only at US based respondents. There were 846 US Based Agency Search Marketers, 2217 US Based In-House Search Marketers, and and 1176 US Based Independent Consultants.

Interesting Find #1

On average, Independent Consultants earn about the same as Agency Search Marketers and In-House Search Marketers. The average yearly earnings for all three groups was within the $60-$75K range. As you can see in the graph below however, the distribution is very different. I'll let you interpret that bit as you will.

earnings comparison

If you're thinking of going independent for the financial advantage, rub the dollar signs from your eyes and think seriously about your business plan and revenue forecast. More money isn't a given, but is of course possible.

Interesting Find #2

Independent Consultants work with a smaller book of clients at one time than Agency Search Marketers.

how many clients do you work with at one time?

If you're looking for variety and to work with a larger number of clients at once, an Agency job might be your best bet. If you prefer to dive deep with a handful of clients, an Independent Consultant career path could be the way to go. Personally, I'd call this finding a big plus for the Independent Consultant side.

Interesting Find #3:

Independent Consultants are less likely to attend industry events and conferences than both Agency Search Marketers and In-House Search Marketers.

attended-event

Uh oh. Come on Independents! If I�were to guess, I'd say that Independent Consultants are less likely to attend industry events because the cost comes directly out of their own pockets. I'm interested in your thought on this, too.

What does it take to become an Independent Search Marketer?

Still thinking of taking the leap from employed to self-employed? Lets explore how your duties as an In-House or Agency Search Marketer might change in your new role as Entrepreneur and Lone Ranger.

Expert Skills

Regardless of what search segment you choose to focus on, as an Independent Consultant your clients will expect you to be an expert. They'll be hiring you to make solid recommendations usually beyond the skill set that they have in-house. It is okay to ask for help from your peers (read your consultant/client NDA first!) and seek the opinions of others, but YOU need to make the call on the final recommendation based on your experience, expertise, and the information at hand.

Stay S-M-R-T Skills

In The Simpsons' "Homer Goes to College" episode, Homer gleefully sets his high school diploma aflame, while singing, "I am so smart, I am so smart, S-M-R-T, I mean S-M-A-R-T!" Behind him his living room is going up in flames (quote). Just because you've made it into the realm of independent consulting doesn't mean you can stop going to conferences (see Interesting Find #3). Keep engaging, keep reading, and keep learning if you wish to continue growing your career.

Self-Promotion Skills

Don't like to toot your own horn? That'll cost ya. You need to be able to speak intelligently and convincingly about your subject matter. You need to speak confidently about your experience and skills without taking it too far.

Nun-chuck Skills

nun-chuck skillsJust kidding. You don't need nun-chuck skills to be an Independent Consultant, unless your also trying to get girls. Right Napoleon?

Closing-the-Deal Skills

Do you have a hard time asking for things? Once you've covered the Expert and Self-Promotion pieces, you might find yourself in a position to sell something. So, what do you do?

As an in-house or agency consultant, you likely haven't had to sell your services... for money. Sure, you sell ideas, projects, and the like. You may even be great at asking for a raise or negotiating for more holiday time. What it comes down to is this. Are you willing to look a prospect in the eye (or at least speak over the phone) and sell a project along with the price tag?

General Business Skills

You might be an SEO prodigy, but that doesn't mean you are a business person. It is possible that the most brilliant SEO on the planet would be most successful and earn the most money if he is allowed to focus on his core strength. Running an independent SEO consulting business requires a lot of tasks that will take you away from the thing you love. Here is a quick list of the non-SEO stuff you?ll need to be prepared to tackle.

  • Marketing ? I know, you can show up in the SERPs for the terms you are targeting but SEO isn?t the only marketing channel at your disposal to drum up clients. What else do you have in your tool belt? Email, graphic design, advertising, social media, affiliate...? Take stock and make sure you have enough tricks bill collectingup your sleeve.
  • Basic Accounting ? Even if you hire an outside accountant to handle your taxes, you?re going to have to keep records and have a clue about balancing a budget, filling out a W-9, invoicing, accounts payable, etc.
  • Bill Collecting - If a client doesn't pay, it is on you to follow-up and make it happen. Outsourcing this function can be pretty expensive, so be prepared to do it yourself at least in the beginning.
  • Strategic Planning ? Sorry, this one sounds borrowed from a business 101 text book. The content there wasn't all drivel! Strategic planning is important because you need to be able to plan and think about your business as well as do the work.
  • Old-Fashioned Paper Pushing ? You?ll need to register your business and keep it registered, notice and do something about legal matters as they arise, open your mail, deal with banks, order business cards, etc. This is my least favorite part about being independent. Each of these items can seem like a small task, but add them up and you can lose a lot of valuable billable time.

People Skills

You may know your search marketing inside and out. You may have a solution identified to triple a web property's search traffic. Unfortunately none of that will matter if you can't communicate and influence your prospects and clients. Some people are excellent at this from birth. Others have to work at it.

  • Save money first ( You're so smart!)
  • Move back in with Mom. Food, shelter, bedtime stories, what more do you need? (Think I'm kidding? See: Census Bureau data, Slide 18)��
  • Take a loan. This seems like a bad idea, but your finances are your own business. :)
  • Lean on your partner. Are you currently living large with two household incomes? I bet you could manage on one for a little while.
  • Get your boss to hire you. Some of my best independent consulting clients today are my employers of yesterday. Why not continue to work a bit for your current boss, as an outside consultant? It could make the transition smoother and help everybody meet their goals.

What is the fun in that?

Certainly there are a lot of heavy things to think about before making a go of it on your own. Lets round this post out with the top 5 reasons that being an Independent Consultant is awesome.

  1. You can choose your own clients. Not into paper products? Don't pitch the project!
  2. You don't have to get dressed in the morning. You should. The point is you don't have to.
  3. You'll have a nice short commute from your bedroom to your office.
  4. If you have a young family, you can oversee your children's care with in-home childcare.
  5. If you do your best work at midnight, have at it. Aside from client calls and general daytime availability you can usually set your own hours.

That does it for tonight. Happy Daydreaming!

P.S. Congratulations Watson! "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." - Ken Jennings

Images from Shutterstock

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/F6XSxYtcvlc/independent-search-marketer

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samedi 26 février 2011

The London Underground ? a Blow for Mobile SEO?

February 22nd, 2011 by John

The London Underground is enormous. And, what?s more, it?s going to get pretty cramped by the time the Olympic Games roll around in 2012. A Chinese telecoms firm called Huawei has planned ahead, and has offered to provide a network across the Underground so commuters can enjoy some more mobile time when they travel.

Except that that?s not what Britons want, according to a poll conducted by the folks over at GoodMobilePhones.co.uk. Their research shows that a staggering three quarters of the British public are opposed to the Tube becoming mobile-friendly, citing annoyance more than anything! Due to the cramped nature of the Underground, those questioned said they don?t want to hear ringtones or people?s conversations, and were worried about the safety implications of having their mobile phone on show in such a public area.

Will the London Underground get a mobile network fro 2012?

Which must be something of a kick in the teeth to mobile operators, who would love nothing more than to have customers sit on the Underground and use up more of their minutes! The amount of people who pass through the Underground on a daily basis, and the volume of those people who have access to a mobile phone could make this an incredibly lucrative area.

Mobile browsing is a medium that?s on the verge of explosion, and many companies are optimising their web presence to include sites and applications so as mobile searchers can access their business on the go. Again ? especially for those businesses in the London area ? wouldn?t it be fantastic if people could take a seat on the Tube and browse their website?

Opinion?s divided though, and we?re still waiting for an official stance on what the mobile plan will be during 2012. For those who have spent a lot of time on a search engine optimisation campaign around London, and have invested a lot of time and money into mobile SEO, they?ll be waiting with bated breath?

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Source: http://www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk/seo-blog/mobile-seo/the-london-underground-a-blow-for-mobile-seo.html

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How to Set Up an RSS Feed

In your travels across the World Wide Web, you have likely encountered this symbol:

What does it mean? What is its purpose? Should you use it? Should you be afraid?

This icon denotes an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a way for websites to publish and circulate frequently updated content. By subscribing to a site?s RSS feed, such as a blog or news site, you?ll have access to an actual feed of content from said website that?s updated as the website updates their content, preventing you from having to head back to a website every other minute to check for new content.

RSS feeds function through software called an ?RSS reader.? Popular RSS readers include Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Bloglines and FeedDemon, although there are many out there. When you click on a website?s RSS icon, you can often link directly to your reader for quick and easy RSS subscription:

It?s important to note that you will have to create an account with a reader client if you don?t have one already. Some readers are part of larger overhead services, such as the Google Reader; ergo, if you already have a Gmail account then you?ve already got access to your own Google Reader.

I know what you?re thinking: ?Do I really need up-to-the-minute updates on a site?s content?? That all depends on what the content is. Maybe you?re following the New York Time?s feed for developments in Egyptian Revolution. I find that I use the RSS feature to stay up on various news sources and relevant tech and education blogs; the feed provides a quick way to sift through a massive amount of timely content.

RSS feeds are good for much more than the news though. You can use RSS feeds to stay up on classified listings sites, like Craigslist, so you know when products, jobs, real estate listings and much more become available. So, for example, if I wanted a pair of tickets to the upcoming, sold out Beach House shows this week in New York City, I?d head to Craigslist.org, click on the ?tickets? category and type in Beach House in the search window. Let?s say I can?t find the tickets at the price I want. Look to the lower right hand corner of this search page, and click the orange RSS icon. You?ll be taken to a page with RSS code; all you need to do here is copy the URL in the address bar up top and then paste that code into your reader:

Now all you have to do is check your reader and as soon as those tickets, or whatever listing you searched for, becomes available, you?ll be the first to know.

Source: http://blog.grovo.com/2011/02/how-to-set-up-an-rss-feed/

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Digital Shopper Marketing ? Shoppers Take a Nonlinear Path to Purchase

According to eMarketer; Shoppers Take a Nonlinear Path to Purchase


Journey is complex and multidirectional

The study, conducted in March 2010, examined how the recession has changed shoppers? purchasing habits and how different media touchpoints affect consumer shopping behavior, including the way people learn about, research and discuss their purchase decisions. This shift has altered the traditional purchase funnel whereby marketers move consumers from awareness to sales to include digital media. For example, consumers may first learn about a product based on a tweet from a friend or a post on a social network, then go online via computer or smartphone to research the product, search for the product and consult product reviews. Beyond that, offline word-of-mouth and media remain influencers, making for a complex multimedia experience along the path to purchase.

Using mobile devices in-store to help make a final decision on an item is a newer and notable influence along the purchase path: The study found 38% of US shoppers said they used their mobile devices to help make a final decision to make a store purchase. And 31% of those polled purchased a new item after using their phone in-store. This finding signifies the rise of yet another media channel in the convoluted path to purchase.

Influence of Online and Mobile Channels on Most Recent Grocery or Personal Care Purchase According to US Internet Users, March 2010 (% of respondents)

Further demonstrating the need for brands and retailers to evaluate the impact of digital touchpoints, the study found that post-shop, 11% of those blogged about the purchase experience, posted a comment about the purchase on a social networking site and 11% posted a review online, respectively.

In addition, the research found that in the low-involvement grocery segment, 39% of those surveyed engaged in social network conversation about potential purchases but 47% of grocery reconnaissance occurred on the phone with friends and family. It is worth noting that not all social networking is digital.

Types of Conversations that Influence Purchases According to US Internet Users, by Shopping Category, March 2010 (% of respondents)

Another study, ?Engaging Consumers: The New Normal,? conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, iModerate Research Technologies and SageBerry Consulting, underscores the findings. That report found that since consumers have reduced spending, the shopping process becomes all the more important. The bottom line: Entirely new shopping, research and media consumption habits are emerging?and retailers and brands need to figure out how to address them.

?We found that the way people shop has changed and that during the period where people are making and refining lists, owned media from retailers is a top source of information,? said Beth Uyenco Shatto, global research director with Microsoft?s ads unit.

By ?owned? Shatto means media that originates from retailers online, in-store and elsewhere. Owned media created by marketers that appears on the retailer?s site (e.g., banners, video and microsites), along with in-store media, are also influential.

As consumer purchasing habits change, so must retailer and marketer communications. They need to collaborate to engage consumers on every channel that has the capacity to influence purchase and result in post-purchase satisfaction.

Square One a Dallas Digital Agency are experts in Shopper Marketing and Digital Shopper Marketing

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Source: http://www.sq1agency.com/blog/?p=2284

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AOL Convinced That Content is the Future

February 8th, 2011 by John

There?s an old adage in the search marketing industry that says ?Content is King?. A bit cliche maybe, but it?s a phrase that runs true for people who adopt search engine optimisation tactics when looking to market their website online.

And though the phrase is trotted out at every given opportunity, it still rings true. AOL, though, are taking the phrase literally, and investing heavily to produce more quality content to attract visitors to their services. AOL want to be seen as making visible changes to their structure ? the company has recently acquired GoViral for $96.7 million, and have recently bought American news website The Huffington Post under a $315 million acquisition agreement.

Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong discuss the buyout on PBS News Hour

?It?s amazing to see the work, for example, that we can now do on the local space, the global space, around engagement, the women?s space, and with original reporting. These were our highest priorities for 2011, now we can work on all of them all at once,? says Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington.

Tim Armstrong, AOL CEO, sums it up in one sentence: ?The next phase of the internet is about content.? Well, as far as we?re concerned the internet has always been about quality content, but we see where Tim?s coming from. The investment isn?t just in The Huffington Post. It?s in Arianna?s ability to create more content, and create a Huffington ?media brand? that can grow and grow.

Content, in this case, is news. Content, in GoViral?s case, is video-based. AOL looks to be splashing the cash and invest in creative businesses that can grow, and have the potential to produce original web-based copy and videos for years to come. When it comes to SEO, original content is crucial when expanding your web presence. We can?t help wondering what AOL will invest in next?

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Source: http://www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk/seo-blog/seo-content/aol-convinced-that-content-is-the-future.html

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Director of Bing Discusses Holistic Search and Clickstream Data - Whiteboard Friday

Rand:�� �Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we have a very special guest with us, Stefan Weitz, director of Bing.

Stefan:�� �How are you doing?

Rand:�� �Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.

Stefan:�� �Sure.

Rand:�� �Really appreciate it.

Stefan:�� �It's on the way home. It's actually better for me this way.

Rand:�� �So, Stefan has two great distinctions. Number one, you were recently honored best hair at Bing. Is that right?

Stefan:�� �That was actually true and it was by mistake. One day I woke up and I had long hair and then I was afraid of getting scissors near my head and so I won't cut it now.

Rand:�� �That's phenomenal. And second, you are tasked with dealing with messy cleanup from incorrect PR that happens on the Internet and in major media sources.

Stefan:�� �Sometimes PR that I actually create. It's like job security over and over again.

Rand:�� �That's great. Well, let's see if we can't create some job security for you here today on Whiteboard Friday.

Stefan:�� �I'm sure we can.

Rand:�� �So we are going to get into some of the clickstream topics, but the first thing I actually wanted to chat about is something that you and I were talking about before this session. I think it will be of big interest to a lot of webmasters. So Bing obviously is gaining some nice market share, having a significant impact. Clearly Google is thinking you guys are more and more of a threat, which has got to feel a little flattering. It's got to be a nice feeling.

Stefan:�� �Well, I mean certainly it's good to know that. I mean, no one's really gained share against Google since Google launched. And look, they do a phenomenal job and they have for years and they've served us well for over a decade. So, yeah, it's nice to see us actually, between us and our Yahoo-powered search or the search that we power for Yahoo as well, I mean, you're talking between 26 and 30 percent of queries are now served by a Bing engine, which is great. The engineers love to see their work being used. There's nothing worse as engineers, as we all know, than writing something that never gets used.

Rand:�� �Oh boy. I can tell you some frustrations we've had on that front. Now, in terms of Bing and Google, one of the things that is really interesting is this New York Times story that came out this past weekend around JCPenney. So a search consultant was using Open Site Explorer, digging through the backlinks . . .

Stefan:�� �Nice plug.

Rand:�� �Yeah, it was a nice plug. Oh yeah, I have to plug SEOmoz on Whiteboard Friday. That's very important.

Stefan:�� �Okay. Make sure we're clear on that.

Rand:�� �So they're digging through these backlinks and they're finding a lot of what look like manipulative and paid links that apparently an agency that JCPenney had hired to do some search marketing work for them had purchased to help inflate their ranks. And for a year plus, or nine months plus, they'd been ranking number one, number two, number three at Google and fairly well, reasonably well on Bing, for most of this time for a lot of big searches. So one of the big ones we talked about was "dresses" and "bedding" and these kinds of generic terms. So the New York Times writes this article. That afternoon, Google sort of responds and says, "Hey, we're taking some punitive action against them." In the article they talked about this.

Stefan:�� �A penalty basically, yeah.

Rand:�� �Now, we did a search right before this Whiteboard started, and we searched for "JCPenney dresses."

Stefan:�� �That's right.

Rand:�� �And JCPenney is not in the top three results.

Stefan:�� �That's where it got weird for me, actually. I mean, look, I get . . . there are certainly, it's well within Google's rights to say, hey, we want to manually penalize a domain for any number of reasons. That happens. We generally don't like to use a lot of manual re-ranking. We like to try it algorithmically if we can because that just seems like it's actually a more scalable fashion. But you're right. What's happening here, I think, is they've kind of gone a little too far down the path of penalization. Because literally as we looked at, "JCPenney dresses," probably the best P1 result would be JCPenney's dress site, I would think. Right?

Rand:�� �Right.

Stefan:�� �And now it doesn't appear anywhere on that P1, page 1.

Rand:�� �And in fact, I think the fourth result is like their mobile page, which is sort of a weird result to have in the web search.

Stefan:�� �Yeah.

Rand:�� �And this is happening because of this penalization system. One of the things that is really curious, I think, for a lot of webmasters, how are Bing and Google ever going to beat this problem on a macro scale?

Stefan:�� �That's an excellent question. So, there's a couple ways. There is the kind of short-term thing we're looking at from the ranker itself. Like, are there particular classes of link farms that we know are of low quality? Can we kind of apply some kind of discount to links that are coming in from what appear to be low-quality link farms? There's stuff we can do there, which we'll do too. We'll all look at these methods to figure out . . .

Rand:�� �There's a lot of machine learning that goes into that process, to say like here's a big set of what we think are spam links.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �So as a webmaster, you better not look like spam, either the spam that exists today or the spam that's going to exist tomorrow because a classifier is going to catch that.

Stefan:�� �That's right. And this is a machine, right? And so you could get ostensibly swept up into one of these categories, right? We actually had someone mail us, a couple weeks ago, who had a site that actually looked like it may have been a spam site. It actually wasn't, but it had a lot of characteristics of what we consider them to be and so she was getting a penalty it looked like on her site. And so we said, "Okay, we can't tell you exactly what to fix, obviously, but here's some things you ought to look at." So there are some things that are happening there.

But, I think, if we go a little bit further, there are two things. We, Google, everyone, Yahoo, Bing, we all use human judges to kind of measure relevancy.

Rand:�� �Right. Google has this big worldwide distributed team of search quality raters, and you guys have a team as well.

Stefan:�� �Same thing. HRS, yeah, same thing, and so human raters actually look at this. The challenge we have, we were looking over the weekend, all the engineers, we were all in threads over the weekend looking at this problem and we said, gosh, you know the problem is for bedding, the JCPenney result wasn't bad to a human. Maybe it shouldn't have been P1, but P4? I don't know. Actually if you ask a human to say, "Is this a good result?" They go, "Yeah, it's actually pretty good."

Rand:�� �So this is why you're not going to get spam quality raters who are saying, oh, JCPenney ranks first for bedding, complain and spam report.

Stefan:�� �Exactly.

Rand:�� �No. JCPenney seems perfectly reasonable.

Stefan:�� �That's right. And so if we took it all the way out, we actually realize that you likely would decrease any CG or the kind of cumulative gain that we get as we measure relevance. So if you yank it out, you actually then, people go, "Wait, where did JCPenney go? They sell bedding." And so it's one of those weird things actually to try to correct for when you have a situation like this.

But in the longer term, this really points to the bigger challenge with search, which is stopping thinking of search as just a way to navigate the collection of links across the Web. Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and page rank and inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term.

Rand:�� �And you think that this model of anchor text, page rank, or in Bing's case static rank and diversity of incoming domains, that's going to fade out to something else? Or it's going to be bolstered by other things?

Stefan:�� �Yeah. I think that'll be around for a long time. So don't worry. You don't have to like go and sell off. Don't call up Rand and say, "I want out." That's all fine. I don't know. I always think of you as . . .

Rand:�� �That I sell links? Really?

Stefan:�� �No. You know orange is Bing's color. That's why I took the color.

But there are signals beyond this. That'll be for a long time. But what we're looking at, and the example I was using today with some engineers was, you do a query ? not to pimp Bing here ? but if you do a query for, say, shoes on Bing, we actually . . . the first answer now, we actually fire off what's called a visual search gallery, which basically is a way to navigate 3,000 pairs of shoes using a more familiar visual metaphor. So you can say, "Okay, I actually want high heels. I want patent leather. I want black."

It's kind of like applying metadata to your query, and it actually rejiggers the results in real time based on what it is you're trying to do. Because in many cases, people do come to engines and they put in one word, they put in two words, very ambiguous. "Shoes" is a horrible query, right? But we get a lot of that. So the question really is do we just take "shoes" and just try to throw back everything we can against that word, which of course is going to be fraught with problems.

Rand:�� �Right. Shoes.com. Online shoes. Shoe store.

Stefan:�� �Yeah, exactly. Is that the right thing? Really, is something that ambiguous actually calling out for a more reasonable approach where we say, "What do you mean?" Kind of like if you and I were talking and I would say, "Shoes." And you go, "What? What, like dress shoes? What are you asking? Do you want to buy shoes?" So we have conversations. And today, engines, they kind of fail. They're very autonomic. They're kind of an in and out type transaction. And we think, with things like Visual Search, we're able to actually start to say, "Okay, great. What do you really mean with that query," and try to pivot and help people refine.

Rand:�� �So Google's got kind of on the left side those related searches or search suggestions. You guys have search suggestions.

Stefan:�� �I think the left and the top. On the top. We actually do an answer bar at the top. Those are interesting ways of conversation modes, but we're even looking at ways to go a little further than that without getting into Clippy, which I love Clippy, but not everyone loves Clippy. So something like that without being annoying.

Rand:�� �I always worry that people are going to think Roger, our mozBot, is Clippy-like.

Stefan:�� �Oh, you know what? Can we borrow him for our . . .

Rand:�� �You totally can. We have a current asking price. I'll let you know after this Whiteboard Friday.

Stefan:�� �So there's that. Longer term, we're looking at how we think of the Web really as a representation of the physical world itself. So we understand that, the weird example I was giving you earlier, "Inception" is a movie. You and I understand that "Inception" is a movie. We understand "Inception" as a movie has a certain number of characteristics. Movies have reviews. They have show times. They have previews. They have trailers. They have pictures. They have conversations on Twitter.

Rand:�� �So are you saying, from a marketer's standpoint, let me imagine that this is the knowledge that I've got about "Inception." It's a movie. Do I then want to say, "Oh, I should make sure that a page about 'Inception' of mine has things like information about who is acting in it and maybe a video of the preview or the trailer and reviews and data like that and that it's in the movie realm rather than just being the page on the Internet with the most inbound links that say 'Inception.'"

Stefan:�� �Yeah, because honestly, what's going to happen is . . . we just did this, actually, with our last release. We have become much smarter about these objects on the Web. So we do actually know "Inception," and that's a weird example. Think of like, "Casablanca," which actually has multiple editions that have been re-released over the years and there are different release dates.

Rand:�� �And there's an actual city.

Stefan:�� �Exactly, right that too. But now we can begin to say, okay, this "Casablanca" on Netflix is the same "Casablanca" you can buy on Amazon or you can rent on iTunes. That's actually a lot harder than you think because the movie domain is not as clear.

Rand:�� �So this is like an entity association type of algorithm.

Stefan:�� �Yeah, exactly. And so that's what we're going to see more and more search heading towards, we believe, is that us understanding the Web again literally as a representation of the world and not just a bunch of links and pages and static text. That offers up an entirely new way to think about ranking.

Rand:�� �I guess that would be my last question on this before we move on to the clickstream stuff is, as a marketer, what should I be thinking about to be a step ahead as this is coming forward? It sounds like there's naturally going to be some brands who are doing these types of things already. I'm a small website. I'm starting out. I review movies. I want to make sure that Bing and Google know that my stuff is good. What should I be thinking about?

Stefan:�� �Today, all the classification is done in a very machine learned process. Ideally, there are defined microformats you have for a lot of these things. I can see a lot of that coming down the road. Even like Facebook's Open Graph system has a limited amount of RDF.

Rand:�� �Right. I can say, "This is me. Rel=me."

Stefan:�� �Or you can say something like, I forget the actual phrasing, but basically you can say, "This page is about a movie," for example. I would be watching very carefully what standards or even what proposed standards begin to evolve to help describe things that you're working on in a more concrete manner. So if you are selling, let's say your business is selling sheet music of 1930s swing songs, as an example. There will be a time in the not too distant future, in most people's opinion actually, not just mine anymore, where you're able to actually mark up this piece of sheet music that I'm selling. There will be kind of an ontology or some kind of taxonomy which lets the marketers say, this is from, I can't think of composers from the 30s, but some composer ? composer=foo, decade=foo, year=foo ? and actually begin to describe this thing, this object as an object and not as simply a web page, hoping that we crawl and parse it correctly. Because, frankly, crawling and parsing is a very messy, expensive, and inaccurate science.

That's the brave new world. But again, for now, just keep doing great SEO work, but don't buy links.

Rand:�� �Don't buy links. Let's move into another really interesting story around this clickstream stuff. So a couple weeks ago . . . no, I'm sorry. I guess it was about a month and a half ago. So Google built a little honeypot, right? Essentially they say, we think that . . . well, because Google and Bing are both using these signals of clickstream data, Google says we think we can engineer this clever system to catch Bing by using a nonsense word.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �And essentially what they caught you guys doing is not building a system that was robust enough to recognize, oh, when we have very few signals about some random nonsense word, maybe we should be tossing those out because otherwise we could be manipulated in a way that would make us look bad.

Stefan:�� �Right. Yeah, let's do it.

Rand:�� �So let's go with an analogy here. This is a terrible representation of the island of Manhattan, right?

Stefan:�� �Wow.

Rand:�� �So here's maybe here's Central Park. Does that sound . . .

Stefan:�� �That's better. Now I . . .

Rand:�� �Now you're there. Washington Heights right here.

Stefan:�� �My mom grew up in Harlem right over there.

Rand:�� �My sister lived right here for a while. This is kind of fun.

Stefan:�� �Yeah.

Rand:�� �So, navigating the island of Manhattan are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �Maybe even a million vehicles. I'm not exactly sure. There's like 11 million people in the city. So if I get a Bing navigation system, Bing is going to tell me based on traffic patterns and the weather and the time of day which way I should go in New York City. Hang with me, this analogy works.

Stefan:�� �It does work, I think.

Rand:�� �So Bing has this nice satellite that's orbiting up here.

Stefan:�� �This is hypothetical, by the way. There is no Bing satellite watching traffic.

Rand:�� �Right. This is a pure analogy.

Stefan:�� �Everyone is going to be freaking out.

Rand:�� �So there's a satellite that's sort of watching and saying, "Oh here, look at traffic patterns." And Google's got their nice satellite.

Stefan:�� �Yeah. They actually do have one though, watching everything you do.

Rand:�� �That's good to know.

Stefan:�� �I'm sorry. Was that out loud?

Rand:�� �Oh boy, you're going to get into big trouble.

Stefan:�� �There goes that sponsorship.

Rand:�� �So they're both watching all the traffic patterns and what they see is, oh, you know what? The best traffic pattern at 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday for a midsize car is to go down the West Side. The East Side is just a mess. Park Avenue, nobody wants to be there, but the West Side, that looks quite good. So they're directing cars this way.

Now, what Google did in this instance, taking this analogy to search is essentially say, "Oh, you know what? It's 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. There's virtually nobody on the road and we're actually going to grab . . . you know what? We're going to make this weird, new three-wheeled blue vehicle that no one has ever seen before and we're going to send them this weird circuitous route. In fact, they're going to have to cross over Central Park and around there." Oh my gosh, just to get down to Wall Street.

And so Bing is monitoring this and they see, all right, well there's one blue car traveling on Christmas Eve at 2:00 a.m. This is the route it takes. And then next Christmas Eve, when a blue car shows up, some Google engineer goes home and gets into his blue car and checks, "Oh look, that's the route that Bing is sending me. They must be . . ." What do they call it?

Stefan:�� �Copying.

Rand:�� �Right, cheating off my test.

Stefan:�� �Yes, copying, cheating.

Rand:�� �It doesn't seem like an entirely accurate analogy, but it's pretty good. Well, the cheating off the test results seems . . . it seems like the kind of way that things are going. So Google and Bing are both looking at where people are going on the Web, what they're clicking on, when they search for something, what do they get to next, what do they seem to be happy with, did they refine those search queries and do other types of searches, can we learn based on that behavior? Seems like a very smart way to go. And you saw, there was an ex-Google engineer who went on Quora and said, "Oh yeah, when I worked at Google, we did exactly the same thing."

Stefan:�� �Oh, yeah. That's kind of what I was so perplexed about is that it's not . . . (a) we've said we've been doing this for years. We've actually, since '07, been doing clickstream analysis. It's an opt-in thing. Again, it's anonymous. People opt-in to it.

Rand:�� �And the Google engineers who checked this, they went home and they installed Internet Explorer with the toolbar and opted in.

Stefan:�� �And opted in, correct.

Rand:�� �So that they would show you guys this data.

Stefan:�� �Exactly. And so what? We made no secret of this at all. This is actually, we think, a very valuable signal to have. Now, that being said, I can tell you, without getting into all the details, it's not a huge signal. It's one of thousands of signals we use to actually calculate PR.

Rand:�� �I bought thousands of Mechanical Turkers and had them all click your results for SEO, and I didn't move one position. So I'm really upset about that.

Stefan:�� �Aw, dammit.

Rand:�� �Because based on what I saw here I thought . . .

Stefan:�� �You thought you could nail them, right?

Rand:�� �I thought I could just get it.

Stefan:�� �So that's the first thing is that we, and Google even themselves uses this data. They are kind of going back and forth if they do or not. But look, we know for deep links, likely they use toolbar plus . . .

Rand:�� �Right, sure. Yeah. If I click that JCPenney search result, there's these other links that pop up there, and they're usually the same ones that people search for most often and click on most often.

Stefan:�� �Exactly.

Rand:�� �That's a good customer experience. You actually want to encourage that.

Stefan:�� �Oh, totally.

Rand:�� �They have, I think, they've got a site speed ranking factor as well. How fast is the site? And they'll show you that data in Webmaster Tools and that comes from the toolbar.

Stefan:�� �That's right.

Rand:�� �I think they say it comes from the toolbar inside Webmaster.

Stefan:�� �Oh, well, there you go. I'm not throwing mud at all. I think it's actually a very valuable thing. What was frustrating to me, I think, is just the fact that it was . . . they successfully proved something we've said we've done now for three years, which is great. They've given me a proof.

Rand:�� �Well, to be fair, you guys probably should have written something that said, hey, if someone builds a honeypot and uses these small signals . . . so they've got a little gotcha.

Stefan:�� �Absolutely.

Rand:�� �But I think maybe it was the press who blew it into a pretty big gotcha.

Stefan:�� �Yeah. At the end, it's really, you're right. And we actually were talking to Harry, who kind of runs all engineering for Bing and he's like, "If anything, they helped us kind of find a bug. Maybe we should be throwing out if we only have one signal." Because really, the reason that 7 of the 100 that actually tried the beta with . . . so we actually didn't fire. They gave 100 terms and 93 we didn't actually do anything.

Rand:�� �So they had 100 blue cars.

Stefan:�� �That's right.

Rand:�� �You only tracked a few of them.

Stefan:�� �We tracked all of them because they have clickstream, of course, but we just didn't use the clickstream in our ranker. I would have to look at the probe. Something triggered something somewhere and said, "Even though we have this signal from toolbar, something doesn't feel right. We're not going to fire anything at all." So seven of the hundred actually did, and that was, probably where we had . . . maybe the engineers got a little happy at home and they had a couple gin and tonics and started clicking like crazy on the link and that gave us more data than the other terms. Who knows. But the point is that we think it's a valuable thing to use. We think the behaviors of customers on the Web who have said they want to help improve the product through their usage, we think it's the customer's behavior that they're giving to us to use and refine.

Rand:�� �Well, this would be like in the SEOmoz web app, for example, us saying, "Oh, you know what? When people go from their on page to their ranking report, lots of people are doing that, let's put those tabs right next to each other."

Stefan:�� �Exactly.

Rand:�� �Let's do it. It seem pretty natural.

Stefan:�� �One of the arguments that I had heard from people on the Web was, "You just shouldn't be using it. It's just not your data." And I think that the Web was built on this notion of collective intelligence. And frankly, Google has a lot of search data. We know this, right? So to ignore it just because it comes from a competitor, it seems . . .

Rand:�� �Well, you're not just doing this on Google, right? You do it on Yahoo.

Stefan:�� �Oh, yeah. The clickstream, right.

Rand:�� �If somebody searches SEOmoz's website, you'll see that if I use Internet Explorer.

Stefan:�� �Yes.

Rand:�� �So it doesn't matter the specific source. Right?

Stefan:�� �That was the big brouhaha.

Rand:�� �So let me ask, from a marketer's perspective. I think a lot of people in search observed this behavior and then said to themselves, "Wait a minute. I can drive blue cars. Can I influence things through the clickstream?" Is that something where you've already seen an uptick in manipulation?

Stefan:�� �There have been attempts, I'm sure. But the reason this was so successful, if you call 7 out 100 successful, was because they were nonsense words, words that no one would ever use.

Rand:�� �Literally zero search volume ever.

Stefan:�� �Precisely. They were made up words. And then Google did a manual re-rank of those in their index. So when you searched for them on Google, this one site would pop up. It was a completely . . . and even that, even with that explicit signal, only 7 out of 100 actually worked. So I would tell you that it probably isn't a good use of your time to be doing a lot of clicking on clickstreams to try to rank higher.

Rand:�� �Gotcha. All right. Well, good to know. We'll try something else.

Stefan:�� �Exactly. But what it does say is that if you rank organically high generally . . . do what you generally do to rank high organically, because that is a factor. In other words, if you do rank at P2 on Google or P2 on Bing and people are clicking through, they search for SEOmoz and click on that link. It's just good practice.

Rand:�� �So you're saying one of the things that SEOs maybe need to be thinking a little bit more about is not just getting that position, but making sure that once you have that position, people want to click on it.

Stefan:�� �Are you maximizing? That's right. Your caption, your title, all this stuff.

Rand:�� �Right, that title and that meta description.

Stefan:�� �Exactly. Make sure . . . you want that click after they search for you if it is the right site for that particular term. So yeah, that was "Copygate" a couple weeks ago.

Rand:�� �Well, I'm glad we're done with that.

Stefan:�� �It was fun.

Rand:�� �Yeah, I'm sure you want to do that all the time.

Stefan:�� �One hair is grey now because of that.

Rand:�� �I have more than that. So, third question, and last question, but I think a lot of people are interested. What's some new stuff that's coming out at Bing? Either for searchers or for webmasters, because I know Webmaster Tools has sort of been in a little bit of a stagnant state for a little while.

Stefan:�� �It's catch-up, I'd say. We just actually brought in Duane Forrester who you guys might know out in the community.

Rand:�� �Yes, absolutely.

Stefan:�� �Duane now works on the Bing team, and he is in charge of a lot of stuff. He'll be out there in the forums with you guys a lot more and across the entire ecosystem for Bing. Duane will be our guy out there in the space. We updated the Webmaster Tools, I think it was a couple months ago now. It's all Silverlight-based. There's still some areas I know we need to catch up in.

Rand:�� �I won't give you too hard a time, but the Silverlight . . .

Stefan:�� �I know.

Rand:�� �When you install Silverlight functionality, there are a few things you lose that you have on the HTML side.

Stefan:�� �Yeah, that's frustrating. But the good news is that we've staffed a team of actually more than we had before. So those guys are cranking on the new functionalities. We know that we have to do a better job there. We know it. No one's hiding like, "No, we're hot. Let's just keep going." We think we do a good job. We can do a lot better.

And then as far as new stuff for consumers is concerned, I think one of the most interesting things that we'll have rolled out this week ? since this is Friday, I can talk about it now ? is this new thing called tiles. You'll see them on the page. Think of it now as really a user experience enhancement. In essence, what we found was that people are able, when they see basically a page, if you look at the page and you do a query for something like, I don't know, let's just do one. What's that new Natalie Portman film?

Rand:�� �Oh, that looks terrible. Not "Black Swan."

Stefan:�� �Not "Black Swan," the other one.

Rand:�� �Oh, with Ashton Kutcher.

Stefan:�� �So we'll let's call it "new Natalie Portman film." I don't what it's called, but whatever it's called.

Rand:�� �That's probably a good search. Since we can't remember, lots of people are querying that.

Stefan:�� �That's probably true. I can see the billboard in my head, but I can't . . .6

Rand:�� �I can see the preview. Clearly bad branding.

Stefan:�� �God, no kidding. What the hell? Anyway, so you do a search for this on Bing and you get all the results here, all of the organic results. And what you're seeing now with the introduction of tiles is a little visual indicator here on the side for a couple of these results that come from what we call authoritative sites. So you might have one from IMDB here, one from Rotten Tomatoes, one from, I don't know, Flixster, etc. We're actually going to be pulling in metadata from those sites. So you have the average 77% fresh rating here. Flixster might have their rating, IMDB can have their rating. But what we're doing now is we 're actually . . . because we know people actually are able to figure out the results they're looking for if you append some kind of visual cue onto the page. So by adding on these visual cues for these kind of authoritative sites or high-quality sites. . .

Rand:�� �Are they sending data specifically to you, or are you guys pulling that from their page without them even having to do anything?

Stefan:�� �No. In this case, there's been some agreement with these guys.

Rand:�� �So it's like when Google was testing some of their rich snippets, what they call recipes and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stefan:�� �So that I think . . . we'll see. It's just a test now, but we'll see how it works. Internal flighting have been pretty successful with it, and it really provides a way for people to actually find what they're looking for much faster, because you know the logo for IMDB, you know the logo for Flixster, maybe.

Rand:�� �And if I think I'm a trusted website, hopefully in a few months I'll be able to submit something to you, give you some data, and you could potentially give me this kind of result.

Stefan:�� �Yeah. Nothing to announce yet, but you're getting the idea. Exactly. This notion of how do you kind of ingest third party content more successfully and make it more discoverable to people. So that's kind of fun.

And then, of course, a lot of mobile stuff has come out in the past couple months. You'll see more of this going forward. But really focusing on the scenarios as you're on the go. You know, unfortunately, it's not out yet, so I can't talk about it. Just let me think for a second. It's so awesome. You're going to love it. Just wait.

Rand:�� �Is it on all Nokia devices now?

Stefan:�� �It should be. We'll do a follow up. Next time, I'll actually bring a machine and we can actually demo stuff.

Rand:�� �Oh, that sounds awesome. I love it. Well, Stefan, this has been phenomenal stuff. I think people really appreciate you and Duane particularly being out in the community talking to webmasters about this type of stuff. I hope you'll join us maybe in the comments if folks have a couple questions.

Stefan:�� �Absolutely. Just don't make fun of my hair. That's all I ask.

Rand:�� �It was windy outside before he got up here.

Stefan:�� �Sure.

Rand:�� �Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, everyone. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/AOByolLCm-I/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday

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vendredi 25 février 2011

How to get 33% more visitors for your website

"A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business. [...]

Attempts to game Google's ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That's why we cannot reveal the details of our solution [...] We will continue to work hard towards a better search."

Related: Alleged 'bully' online retailer arrested in New York, Do not try to trick Google. Use ethical search engine optimization methods.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/free-seo-news/cXWx/~3/6Gw49wtPIkE/newsletter450.htm

Sean (Diddy) Combs Serena Williams Shakira Shaquille Oneal

jeudi 24 février 2011

Great ways to get an interview in SEM, SEO and/or Analytics

Since I spend my days looking at resumes and cover letters (I had four open positions, but am finally starting to figure some of them out), I wanted to write what the job search looks like from the other side, especially when it comes to our field, Internet Marketing.

Now, some of you have it great. You?ve got amazing credentials and can write your own ticket.� But there is a big group of people who just want to get into the field.

IMO, the hardest part is getting to the interview. Once you are there, you have the opportunity to wow the company with how great you are. But until you get into the door, you are just another piece of paper. So here are some ideas:

Network. Not an exceptionally exciting or new idea, but it is surprising how well it works and how few people take advantage of it. The first person I ever hired at LunaMetrics came to me through an intermediary whom I trusted.� Note, I had already chosen (in my mind) the ?successful candidate? and I threw all that thinking out the door when my friend suggested this potential.� And how about going to all those Web Analytics Wednesdays, or attending local SEMPO events? In our fair city alone, there are three competitive SEO groups where you can network.

Research. If you are really interested in a job, go read that company?s website. Follow their employees on Twitter ? after all, you are an Internet person, right?. They would probably love to hear from you on their FB page.� Understand who they are before you approach them for a job, because otherwise, you are just another piece of paper.

Get experience. Yes I know, it is hard to get experience without experience. On the other hand, there are a lot of websites that need your tender loving care, go get experience with them. Look into summer internships.� What about accreditation ? the AdWords badge requires that you manage a certain amount of money over a certain amount of time, but anyone who has fifty bucks and can study can take the GAIQ test.� Without experience, your piece of paper is too easy to screen out.

Decide what you want to do.� I see so many resumes where people say, I am the webmaster and I do SEM and then SEO and GA and social media and and and. It is lovely to be flexible (and very necessary in a small company like ours), but when I am looking for an SEO expert, I probably don?t look to someone who does a little bit of everything. (Go ahead and disagree.)

Stop blathering about how great you are and start showing how great you are. I must get one resume every day that says, ?I am uniquely qualified for this job.?� I?d love to get a cover letter that says, ?I?m interested in your company and the job, I think I have the right experience and qualifications, but I do have a number of questions.?� After all, in this most interactive of all worlds, why should the job search be so one way?

Be creative. Although we don?t do graphic design, I did find this great graphic design resume in the Creative Commons part of Flickr, at the top of the page.� How cool is that?

Robbin

Related Posts

  1. My Interview with Eric Peterson
  2. Twenty five ways to increase your online conversion rate
  3. eMetrics Summit: Great Networking
  4. Conversion: Great Thank You pages, Part II
  5. The Great Anchor Text Debate

One Response to ?Great ways to get an interview in SEM, SEO and/or Analytics?

Great Article Robbin! I wanted to add one more idea. Volunteer. We had a guy come in to apply for a job earlier this week and he really stood out from the rest of the applicants, because he was already doing SEO for free for a church. There are many organizations out there that don?t have the money to do SEO or Analytics, but would appreciate someone who could volunteer to do it for them. This is a great way to get a good letter of recommendation as well.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lunametrics-blog/~3/oklrhQuHi68/

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Webmaster world forum wrongly mentioned Google PR update year yesterday

Webmaster World Forum Error

Webmaster World Forum Error

As We all know that 2011 Google PageRank Update happened on January 20, 2011 previous day. I saw a funny thing on webmaster world forum while confirming the real PR update yesterday (20 Jan 2011). The thing is that the forum thread title mentioned as ?PR Update 20 Jan 2010? instead of ?PR Update 20 Jan 2011?. But today they have changed as ?PR Update 20 Jan 2011 (down 1 for me)? which denotes their website dropped by 1.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4255684.htm

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 at 2:01 am and is filed under Google, Internet, Others. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://www.cogzidel.com/blog/2011/01/webmaster-world-forum-wrongly-mentioned-google-pr-update-year-yesterday/

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mercredi 23 février 2011

Easy link building techniques

Written on June 28, 2010 ? 12:01 am | by Shell Harris |

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easy-link-building
If you spend more than twenty minutes on any of the large webmaster forums, you are likely to find a lot of posts and threads related to link building since this is a great way to improve a site?s search engine placement. Of course, link building is only one part of a successful SEO strategy, but typically gaining a lot of quality backlinks doesn?t cost a penny and requires only time and perseverance.

How can you build backlinks and increase your website traffic for free?

Write an e-book: believe it or not, you don?t have to be a professional writer in order to write a quality e-book that other people would find informative and useful. Almost everyone is an expert in one field or another: find a topic that you know about and that you are passionate about, find what most people want to know about this topic, take the time to do some research, and finally put together an e-book. Make sure that you link to your main site or a few of its pages from within the text and as long as your e-book is of good value, you will soon discover other people linking to your site from their own blogs or forums. You may also submit your eBook to sites like clickbank. That way you do not only increase income potential, but the affiliates will also have to link to your site when they direct their traffic to your money page. This will, of course, strengthen your website in the search engines resulting in even more traffic and customers.

Write articles and submit them to the article directories: there must be thousands of article directories out there that will gladly publish your well-written articles. It is up to you to narrow down the list to a manageable size, then write articles, submit them, and use this as part of your link building and SEO long-term strategy. The top article directories also rank very well on the search engines and if one of your articles starts receiving good amount of search engine traffic, at least some of the people that read it are likely to visit your site as well. Most internet marketers know about do-follow article directories like ezinearticles, articlesbase and isnare which are among the best article sites out there, but too few publish their content on Buzzle. In my experience Buzzle and ezinearticles are the two strongest article directories in terms of ranking the best in Google.

Offer quality content on your own website: the majority of people are getting online when they need to search for information, for a product to buy, or to entertain themselves. No matter what your site is all about, quality content is likely to keep people coming back, but is also a great way of link building: if you have a computer-related blog, write detailed and up-to date article on anti-virus protection, include a few links to the best anti-virus protection software, and you are likely to get dozens if not hundreds of links from various computer forums, blogs, and websites. Search engines are becoming smarter and smarter and if you browse the net you will probably notice that sites with good quality content rank better in the SERPs. As an example there are thousands of article directories on the net, but those that rank the best, like Ezinearticles and Buzzle, are those with the highest quality criteria. Those sites will manually approve your content and proper English is a requirement.

Submit your website link to directories and social bookmarking sites: you might hear people saying that this is an outdated link building technique, but they are wrong. Of course, the search engines give less weight to such links compared to a few years ago, but this is still an easy way of getting quality links and getting direct traffic as well. Don?t get lured by the services that offer sending your link to thousands of directories for just a few dollars: out of these thousands of directories, only a few dozen are actually worth submitting to and you can easily create your own list. Here are a few quality social bookmarking sites I use: stumbleupon.com, digg.com, propeller.com, del.icio.us, reddit.com, folkd.com, diigo.com, mixx.com and newsvine.com.

RSS feed directories: Although utilized by many link builders, it is not commonly known that submitting your site to RSS feed directories is an actual link building technique. Submitting your site to those will indeed help your new post get noticed by the search engines, but many of them actually creates a valid back link too. Sites like feedage.com, rssmountain.com and feedagg.com are high page rank sites willing to link directly to your site.

Link building, however, is more than just knowing how and where to build links it is also important to actually do it the right way. Timing is the keyword. You need links from a variety of sites like directories, blogs, social bookmarking, article sites etc. otherwise big G will regard your efforts as manipulation of SERPs. What I usually do is to build links slow but steady starting with a few social bookmarkings, then a few link directories. Do never use any software to make your job an easier task. Google will know if you have been using software like Onlywire.com. You WILL need to write unique title and descriptions for all your social bookmarks and link directories. If you use blog commenting make sure that the blogs are relevant. The next step is to create blogs and publish articles together with press releases. This technique has the greatest effects if used long term. Do not suddenly stop creating blog / web 2.0 networks, it will seem suspicious in the eyes of Google. Instead slow down your activity for a while before quitting. Here are some do-follow web 2.0 sites I use with high page rank: WordPress.com, Weebly.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Blogger.com, Livejournal.com, Vox.com, Quizilla.com and Blinkweb.com. I have also found Yola.com sites to rank pretty well.

SEO strategies change constantly, but this shouldn?t discourage you from looking for new and better ways to build true backlinks to your site and it is almost certain that persistence and hard work will pay off sooner or later.

Guest post by Ronni Rebsdorf

Related posts:

  1. Link Building with Google Alerts and RSS Feeds
  2. Google Alerts for Link Building ? SEO Tip Week 39
  3. Top 5 Reasons to Comment on Blogs
  4. Search Engine & Directory Submissions ? SEO Tip Week 18
  5. Ten Great Link Building Idea Sites

Source: http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/easy-link-building-techniques/

Mariska Hargitay Meagan Fox Megan Megan Fox

How to Keep Your SEO Well Groomed

How Well Groomed Is Your Website?You may or may not have seen our recent post about the nose hair waxing event at SEO.com. Yes it is just as painful as it looks on the video. And yes that is my wife doing the torture. Which leads perfectly into our subject at hand: How well groomed is your website?

While ?man-scaping? may be a painful experience, ?seo-scaping? certainly is not.

Here are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind when trying to SEO-groom your site. Whether the site is in its infancy or well seasoned, the items we will cover here will remain applicable.

Website Technicality

Usability ? Your website?s purpose makes no difference if visitors cannot find it, view it correctly, or if the site takes any longer than a few seconds to load. Here are a few tips:

  • See what the search engines see. Use a text browser like�Lynx and examine your website. What you find will likely be similar to what the majority of search engine spiders do, too.
  • Utilize the robots.txt file on your server. This will communicate to crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. As long as this is current with your preferences, you will be in control with what will be crawled and indexed.
  • Test each Web page in the various Web browsers for both visibility and functionality.
  • Pay attention to your website performance and optimize load times. The goal of every search engine is not only relevancy, but also a great user experience.

Navigation and Content

Site Navigation ? While nearly every website will approach their navigation with slight differences, one thing should always remain: keep it simple and straight forward. Here are a few tips:

  • Link Structure ? Every top level page should have at least one link directing to it from each of your pages.
  • Site Map ? This is a great way to show the search engines the extent of your website and also help your users find what they are looking for when all else fails. A combination of both a plain html formatted map for users and an XML sitemap will do the trick. For a clear walk through on the standards for your XML sitemap visit the protocol.
  • Overall Linking ? A commonly held idea is to stay below 100 links per page. Anything more than this typically will not be crawled.

Content ? The content placed on the page will be a main driving factor in who arrives and how they will interact once landing there. The first question that should come to mind when creating content is ?does the page clearly communicate the subject and goal at hand?? This is often achieved by keeping your subject matter down to one topic per page. Here are a few tips:

  • Make sure the page is actually useful and provides quality information.
  • Check for broken links and correct the HTML.
  • As much as possible use text over images to display prominent content such as headings, addresses, names and links.
  • Brainstorm words people would commonly use when searching for your website, and make certain the website actually includes those words. (Go here for a more in depth walk through on choosing keywords wisely)
  • Keep your URL structure simple. Remember when using URLs that are dynamic (for instance if it has a ??? character in it), not all spiders crawl dynamic pages. It helps to keep the dynamic parameters to a minimum or to write them completely out where possible.�The following format is ideal for a URL:

Quality Assurance

With competition always on the increase, now is the time to show your true colors. And just this once, it does matter if you are black or white, otherwise you might experience what JCPenny did.�Keep your website on the search engine good graces with these tips:

  • Keep your links in the right neck of the woods: avoid links to Web spammers, which commonly have an adverse effect on the website.
  • The best page is a natural page. Search Engine Optimization does not have to be forced. Make sure your pages are created primarily for users, not for search engines. Refrain from ?cloaking,? or displaying content different to search engines than visitors.
  • Avoid tricks solely dedicated to manipulating search engines. A test is to ask is, ?Does this help my users?? SEO and website usability can play nicely together.

I feel confident in saying the best Search Engine Optimization is found in natural processes. Make sure the content you create is unique and worth sharing and then create lots of it. Do this and follow the above guidelines and you will end up with one handsome website.

A special thanks to my amazing wife, Tiana,?the SEO.com hair removal specialist and Doc for his amazing video production. The experience was an inspiration to us all.

Here?s the video:


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Source: http://www.seo.com/blog/on-page-optimization/groomed-website/

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