Content Makes Panda Happy

Panda is a hungry bear, ready to gobble up any sites with low quality content. It’s been over a year since Google released the Panda update into the wild, taking down sites with huge losses in keyword rankings. One well-known site to get hit with the update was EzineArticles – they lost a huge amount of their keyword rankings as shown in this graph by SEMrush.

What you may note is that EzineArticles has still not managed to recover their rankings. One site that has seemingly recovered is HubPages.

They did it by separating weak content from the main domain by establishing subdomains for HubPages writers and content.

The lesson you can take away from studying these two sites is that low quality content will make you target for future Panda updates. Panda updates didn’t stop with the one in February of 2011 – according to SEOmoz’s Algorithm Change timeline, Panda has evolved from 1.0 to 3.4, last updated in March of 2012. The only thing that will save your website is removing your low quality content and replacing it with higher quality content.

Content Makes Link Building Easier

As someone who has requested links for a variety of different websites in different industries, there was one thing that was a sight for sore eyes in any link building project – a website with great content. It was always a challenge to build links to the homepage of an unknown retailer or to a boring product or service page. It was rarely a challenge to build links to pages with interesting content.

When you have useful content and resources on your website, you are bound to find others who are willing to link to it. Some ideas for various industries include…

• Calculators – Getting an anchor text link to a boring home loan provider can be a challenge. Getting a link to a useful home loan calculator, on the other hand, is much simpler. It’s a tool that you can convince almost anyone to add to a home buyer’s resource page (unless they are a direct competitor).
• Infographics – Well-designed infographics are a gem for any industry and for link building. If you can find relevant blogs, they are usually happy to share your informative infographic with their niche audience. And, if nothing else, you can always submit them to infographics directories and blogs that have high domain authority and PageRank to boot! Plus there’s always the chance that someone at Mashable will take a liking to your infographic and start the viral sharing.
• Videos – There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of “As Seen on TV” products that you never have and never will hear of. But one product you may not have missed is the Slap Chop, a little food chopper. The website for it has about 20 links, 1,000 likes, and 190 tweets. The official video for it, on the other hand, has over 500 links, 44,000 likes, and 55,000 tweets. And that doesn’t include the parody or remix videos. This means a simple little product received a whole lot of online marketing thanks to an entertaining commercial that went viral.
• Lists – Love them or hate them, lists get the job done and attract lots of links. On one site that I contribute to regularly, the post that has the most links is The Entrepreneur’s Handbook: 101 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs.

Need more ideas? Try this inforgraphic from Copyblogger and the BlueGlass infographic team.

Content is More Likely to Be Shared

Besides just link attraction, great content is also likely to receive lots of shares on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. The latter is particularly important as Google+ results might show up in search results for people connected to the Google+ user who shares the link to the content. For example, can you imagine being on the first page of search results for a search on Yahoo? This Google+ post was, thanks to relevancy and timing, with a link to the post on Google+ and the actual blog post itself.

So be sure that you don’t just create content, but you encourage social sharing for that content by adding social share buttons. You can get the official ones from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ or use plugins like ShareThis or AddThis.

If you don’t believe that social sharing is important, consider this. One of the ways you build links is by making people aware that a piece of content exist. Encouraging the social sharing of content will make even more people aware of that content which will almost always lead to more links to that content.

Content Helps Brands Build Authority

Whenever you read a good book on a topic, you tend to believe that the person who wrote it is an expert or authority on that topic. Producing content online helps professionals and brands become publishers. It allows them to go beyond just another name in search results and become a leading authority in their industry. Some great ways to take advantage of content marketing as a way to establish authority includes the following.

• Publishing great content on your official blog.
• Offering great content to be published on other top blogs in your industry.
• Writing articles for major publications (newspapers, magazines, etc.) in your region or industry.
• Contributing to crowdsourced posts and books in your industry.

By creating content to be published on your website and beyond, you will demonstrate your expertise to your current audience and gain more exposure to bring in a new audience.

Content Can Help Your Customers

Do you find yourself (or your customer service department) answering the same questions over and over again? If so, you might want to consider publishing blog posts, reports, or even eBooks to cover those topics and offer them on your website for your customers. These could be product manuals, tutorials, or even a easily searchable FAQ database. Customers that like to be self-sufficient will greatly appreciate the ability to get the information without having to contact you by phone, and your customer service department will greatly appreciate having more time to deal with higher-level issues than being overwhelmed with the same simple questions.

Content Can Be Repackaged & Repurposed

Last, but not least, most content can be repackaged and repurposed to further increase its exposure. Some great ways to do this include the following.

• Take your blog post content, have someone read it, and turn the recording into a podcast.
• Take data from a well-researched post or case study and turn it into an infographic.
• Take sections of your infographic and turn it into a slideshow.
• Take your slideshow and convert it to video.
• Record webinars onto video, and transcribe what is said throughout the webinar to make it into a blog post.
• Take a collection of several blog posts that have a similar them, combine them, and turn them into a report or eBook that you can giveaway in exchange for mailing list subscribers.
• Take eBook content, divide it up into logical parts, and turn it into an autoresponder series such as “7 Days to ____” for mailing list subscribers.

There are many, many different ways to repackage your content and use it to gain more exposure and entice readers to become potential clients. The possibilities are endless and only require some time and editing!

What other reasons do you have for incorporating content marketing into your online marketing strategy?

Image credit: OpenSource.com

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Some wide spread search engine spam tactics have been motivated by the will to pass anchor text.

Lately, as expected by many in the SEO industry Google has been tweaking the algorithm to weed out possible anchor text spam tactics. We don’t know exactly how they did it but there are a several common sense ideas floating around that explain how faulty anchor texts might get targeted.

*

Anchor text is not just a simple signal from each and every link. Your whole backlink profile will get analysed to find out whether your anchor text distribution is natural or artificially inflated by over-zealous SEO practicioners. How can you influence your anchor text in a manner that still works in 2012?

Do we have to stop anchor text optimisation in 2012 altogether? Does Google discount optimised anchor text now? Well, most probably not. Anchor text is still a valuable way of improving both user experience and search engine positioning. Why?

Well, just consider the most popular old school type of anchor text: “click here”. It might sound good and even actionable but take a look at this list of links:

1. click here
2. click here
3. click here

Here it’s obvious that the anchor text is useless. So anchor texts can’t get ignored completely, neither by humans nor search engines.

How to manage anchor text when link building

There are three key ingredients you need to be able to garner natural looking links while actually building links hands on.

You need:

1. variation
2. branding
3. natural links

Variation

When you build links yourself as in contacting webmasters to link to you, submitting to directories or guest blogging you tend to use the same anchor texts over and over. You just copy and paste the biography or just slightly change the directory entry. Google may consider these repetitive links duplicates or in the worst “unnatural links”.

So you need to add variation. You can’t always rewrite or write everything anew, that would be a waste of time and energy. What you can do though is provide a bit of variation depending on the context and circumstances. Some examples of variation are listed below. Let’s assume that we optimise for the keyphrase [SEO agency]. The anchor text is in [brackets].

• Use synonyms – [SEO agency] may get replaced with SEO company] or [SEO firm].
• Use plural/singular forms – SEOgadget is one of the most advanced [SEO agencies]
• Use keyword modifiers – As above: [advanced SEO agency] or [London SEO agency] or [SEO agency UK]
• Switch keywords in keyphrases – Check out one of the main services of our [agency: SEO].
• Combine keywords – [SEO agency and Internet marketing company]
• Use natural language (e.g. stop words) – [We're an SEO agency]
• Don’t use site-wide links – Do not link with the same anchor text on dozens, hundreds or thousands of pages from one site.
• Link to one URL with different anchor texts – Make sure to add link other relevant keywords as well, for example [SEO services] in our case.

Branding

Branding has over the years become one of the most important ranking signals for Google to sort out the cesspool as Eric Schmidt put it as Google CEO. So over the years it become more an more important to act as a brand, be it name brand like Ford is one or create a personal brand like I did for myself as Tad Chef. The more people link to you as a brand the better it seems. At least as long you have some optimised anchor texts as well to rank for your keywords too. So it’s about finding the best middle ground. You need all of the links below:

• brand only – [SEOgadget]
• added brand – [SEO agency SEOgadget]
• misspelled brand [SEO Gedgat]
• personal brand – [Tad Chef]
• personal + name brand [Tad Chef of SEOgadget]

Natural links

Natural links are quite rare these days. Still many links you build can be natural to some extent. Natural means not optimised by you in this case. It’s easy to build natural links in that sense that you don’t have to give exact instructions on how your link has to look like to those who will put them on their sites. You just “forget” to send them the preferred anchor text and people will come up with creative ways to link to you. See some examples of typical natural links you want to have as well:

• “click here” – [click here] or [go] or [link] etc.
• URLs – [www.seogadget.co.uk]
• misspellings – [seoagency]
• whole sentences [This SEO agency is so cool I actually froze during the meeting!]
• nofollow links – In real life many link are “nofollow” that is not counting for Google. Google can see them though and they count for your link profile as a whole. In case you don’t have any at all you’re suspicious just the same as having too many of them.

How to influence anchor text while getting links

The best strategy of link building is to actually getting the links while passively sitting around. OK, it’s not that simple. You have to create the obligatory “great content” and make people link to you in the way you’d like to. How do you achieve this when unable to contact every person who links to you? Also often not people but aggregators link to you automatically. There are several on page elements that usually influence the outcome. people an bots tend to use a select few page elements for their anchor text.

• title tag – Include the anchor text in your title tag but try to sound self-explanatory and not entirely generic otherwise many people won’t use it. Especially keyword-stuffed title tags rarely get used in their entirety.
• URL path – Make sure to include the keyword in your URL path. seogadget.co.uk/blog/anchor-text-optimisation could be the solution for this post. Don’t make it too short or too long though. /anchor-text by itself may be a bit too broad while the whole post headline is too long for a clean URL. Many automated tools link to URLs but also some lazy people like myself.
• h1 tag – While some people take the title tag others prefer the first headline aka h1 or whatever tag you use for the most important headline on the page. So do not only focus on puns here. Include the keywords as well.
• brand – You see, SEOgadget already has the keyword SEO in the brand itself. This surely helps, especially in cases where the brand is SEO.com
• name – People link to people not websites. Some really do it literally. So they will link [Tad Chef] as the anchor text. That’s not bad as noted above thus provide a visible name as anonymous content without an author gets trusted less and thus also less linked out to.

Anchor text tools

Many SEO tools do offer some insights into anchor texts. On the other hand there aren’t many tools that exclusively focus on anchor text. Thus I’d like only to recommend a few tools here everybody can work with.

• Open Site Explorer – Open Site Explorer by our buddies from SEOmoz shows anchor texts along other link metrics. You can see the top 5 for the free edition or 10 if you’re logged in. For more you need a paid membership.
• SEOgadget Anchor Text Tool – Our own anchor text tools uses Open Site Explorer data but organises in a way that focuses on the anchor text distribution. It’s great to see why a particular page ranks for a keyword at a glance.
• Keyword Combinations tool – This is actually a simple tool intended for keyword research but you can also use it to inspire some variation of your anchor texts.

Anchor text resources

Anchor texts are in some sense the secret sauce of SEO. There are some myths surrounding them. These resources are a must read but make sure to do your own tests and not blindly believe what they say.

• All About Anchor Text – Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz
• 301 Redirects Can Pass Anchor Text | The Google Cache
• SEO 2.0 | Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
• Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text To Next Generation Link Signals – Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz
• 5 things that stop anchor text being passed

* Creative Common image by man’s pic.

Link Building: Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices in 2012 is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Why bother with site speed?

Because it costs money not to. A nicely summarised roundup by SmartInsights reported on research showing a dramatic decline in conversion as page load times increases to 4 seconds:

We already know there’s a strong business benefit to improving site speed, it’s possible to see figures as high as 1% conversion rate loss for every second in site speed squandered. I presented at a large retailer network company head office on Thursday, comparing the time to render taken by a search result page at Google, Amazon’s home page and their flagship retail site:

Assuming a directly proportional relationship between page load and conversion rate, the potential gain for this site is obvious.

How does a CDN work?

Put simply, a CDN caches all of the objects on your site (for instance; images, JS files and CSS files) and serves them from a location that is usually closer to the request location. This should mean that visitors see a faster page load. By hosting all of your static files on a CDN, it’s fair to assume there’ll be a perceived increase in page load, especially in locations far from your own hosting (assuming the CDN has good coverage there).

I wanted to learn about CDN implementation, so I opened an account with MaxCDN. SEOgadget’s static files are now being served from “cdn2.seogadget.co.uk”.

The end to end set-up process should have taken around 10 minutes. There was a little complication owing to SEOgadget being an SSL site, but I’m pleased to note that MAXcdn will work with your own SSL certificate, provided that you have a wildcard certification that will certify any subdomain (for example: *.seogadget.co.uk).

How to configure WordPress with a CDN

Firstly, open an account with your CDN provider of choice. In MAXcdn, create a new “pull zone”:

You can name the zone anything you like, in our case, “SEOg”. Set the “origin server URL” name to match your domain name and enter your intended custom CDN domain (the location from which your static files will be. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything with DNS just yet:

After you’ve created your new pull zone, you’ll see this message:

Take a note of the two domains, your custom domain (cdn.yourdomain.co.uk and the pull zone location generated by MAXcdn – seog.seogadget.netdna-cdn.com). Now head to your DNS control panel:

(This assumes you’re using CPanel to manage your domain a, cname and MX records via your web host. We use TSOhost’s nameservers and SEOgadget has been hosted with them for a long time. If you’re not using CPanel, you’ll have to follow slightly different steps to get to the DNS zone editor at your registrar - it’s very easy though, so don’t be put off if this is new):

Select “Advanced DNS Zone Editor” and the domain you’d like to edit, here:

Protip: Yoast uses more than one CDN address serving JS and CSS separately. This (I think) has the benefit of asynchronous downloading of those files.

Configure MAXcdn with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is our caching plugin of choice. It’s easy to use, fast and reliable. What’s most powerful about the plugin is compatibility with several well known CDN service providers. Here’s how to set it up with MAXcdn very quickly:

Firstly, select “NETDNA / MaxCDN”. Don’t enable just yet, just click “Save all settings”. Next, head to the CDN configuration from the options along the top of the settings page.

You’ll see a space for your CNAME, so complete that and fetch the API key from MaxCDN here:

As soon as you’re done, click “Save all settings” and select “Test NetDNA” to make sure all is well. The outcome should look like this:

This makes a great weekend project – give it a go!

I quite enjoyed getting SEOgadget set up with a proper CDN. The process is not without its pitfalls – especially if you happen to use SSL to serve your content. Still, with a little perserverence and background reading, it becomes relatively simple (and extremely interesting). The main limitation I faced were problems related to multiple subdomain names (cdn.*, cdn2.*, etc) because of the SSL certificate. We have a wildcard certificate that wasn’t validating easily in the MaxCDN interface. To save time and hassle I elected to creating a separate certificate which was fine for one subdomain but not for multiple addresses.

The performance panel provided is initially very interesting. We’re now serving the US far more locally, (so I might expect our latency to be vastly improved in the US) but, we’re serving the UK and all of Europe from Amsterdam. I suspect that overall performance won’t be improved much in the UK. My initial tests certainly make me feel the improvement locally is marginal, but still improved.

I used Pingdom tools to evaluate overall object loads and got some initially interesting results from New York, with one exception to the observation that we appear quite a lot quicker:

Initial data is almost irrelevant though, so I’ll be watching Google Analytics (site speed report, segmented by country) for a reduction in page loads from our main traffic generating sources over the next few weeks. I’m hoping for an improvement across the board, and certainly no increases in the UK:

I’ve set up a basic alert in Google Analytics to inform me when there’s a week on week decrease in page load – it’s not terribly granular, so we’ll see what happens:

A few useful sources

I’d like to recomend you take a look at these (extremely useful) blog posts:

http://rackerhacker.com/2010/02/13/wordpress-w3-total-cache-maxcdn/

http://devilsworkshop.org/maxcdn-setup-on-wordpress-using-w3-total-cache-plugin-wpmu-tutorial/

http://yoast.com/articles/cdn-wordpress-maxcdn/

http://support.netdna.com/knowledgebase/installing-custom-ssl/

Image credit: Yi Shiang

Setting Up a WordPress CDN (Content Delivery Networks) for Beginners is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

It’s actually very simple, but then again I guess the best things in life are. I hope it saves you time and if there’s a feature you find useful, drop a comment below.

Here’s the link: https://seogadget.co.uk/embed-code-generator/

Generate Infographic Embed Codes Quickly and Easily with this Tool is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

So just what is a “good link”? We know what we look for in a link for our clients but we wanted to survey as many members of the SEO community as we could to get a real idea of the kinds of methods and metrics that SEO professionals all over the globe are using to assess the quality of a link.

What do we look for in a (link) partner?

We analyse a prospective linking partner for our clients based on three different areas:

• The strength of a link – despite the shifts in link building practices, it is vital to assess a link from a strength point of view. This means utilising one or several or your preferred metrics, for us this is PageRank, mozRank and domain authority.
• The quality of a site – just what is a high-quality website? We assess a website based on the overall user experience and the apparent policies of the website being evaluated. This includes things like a suitable number of adverts relative to content, well-written and well-constructed pages, and ensuring the website doesn’t appear to be overtly flogging its sidebars or footers.
• The relevance of that website – some argue that the relevant link is a myth but we are still keen advocates of links making sense from a user’s perspective and that is the key to relevance. Obviously in some industries it is near on impossible to get links from directly relevant websites (unless you’re talking about the SEO community where knowledge, links and interactions flow freely between competing businesses!) because they are in the same industry and often are unwilling to link. This is why we look for natural crossovers between industries and topics to help extend the reach of our clients.

Show me the results

We opened the survey and saw just over 500 individuals complete it – thank you to everyone that took part and hopefully you’ll find this data interesting.

Link Evaluation Survey 2012 infographic By Orange Line SEO

If you like this Infographic, you can embed it on your own blog or website using the code below:

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It’s difficult to find a proper definition of what “over-optimisation” is, it sounds like an oxymoron, as usually you can’t over-optimise something. Optimisation is a synonym of improvement. Can you improve your website too much? No, it’s rather about a few common SEO tricks that have plagued the Web for years by now.

Luckily Matt Cutts already has given us a few hints what he has in mind and what the Google engineers are currently working on.

In this post I’d like to explain what Google most probably considers over-optimisation. In the second step I will attempt to suggest long term SEO strategies that will make you immune to this over-optimisation update and future updates of this sort.

Risky SEO tricks Cutts mentioned include:

Keyword stuffing

For years misguided webmasters and even some SEO experts have been using so called “keyword density” to measure site optimisation. According to the keyword density logic the more frequently a keyword is mentioned on a page, the better.

Keyword density is a remnant from the ancient past of SEO. It stems from a time before Google, when search engines used to judge website relevance mainly based on the actual number of keyword instances occurring on a page. When Google appeared on the Web, the game changed. From then on, links became the crucial factor. Still to this day, keywords do have to be mentioned on a page in order to make them relevant to the query but keyword density is a completely irrelevant metric.

Of course, you can’t not mention the actual thing you write about. Still, many people still assume that mentioning a term more often will improve their search engine rankings. Google has been been penalising overtly keyword-stuffed pages for years. Even last year’s Panda update targeted this SEO trick.

So how can Google step up their efforts here? It could be page titles for example. Many websites only feature keywords and keyphrases there to this day. In contrast natural language or whole sentences are used by journalists or average Joe webmasters who don’t overdo SEO.

Link exchanges

For years link exchange or simply swapping links has been one of the most popular link building tactics. I link to you so that you link to me. Of course this tactic went over the top and Google had to act. The search engine did repeatably discounted so called reciprocal links and automated link networks among others. People came up with so called three way link exchanges and similar techniques to overcome the penalties but reciprocal links haven’t been as popular since then.

Still link exchanges remained one of many standard link building techniques many people, especially average webmasters have used over the years. Some sites still rank with such links.

So what can Google do about it that hasn’t been done yet? Google can enhance its bias towards brand signals. Exchanged links are in many cases unnatural to use Google’s own term. Either they look unnatural by themselves as they use exact match anchor text, or the way they appear on the Web looks suspicious. When you add too many links in a short period of time it can seem unnatural as well.

Brands in contrast get links all the time, whenever someone refers to them and the people linking to them rarely use optimised anchor texts. Just think about it, when you write about Amazon, do you link the word Amazon or do you use “auction”, “auctions” or “auction deals” to link to it?

SEO issues Cutts probably has also in mind:

• anchor text
• unnatural link profiles

What is considered not over-optimised and thus runs no risk of a penalty? “Great content” on a “great site”. This is as superficial as it can get. Sadly Google still does not disclose their ranking factors unlike competitor Blekko,where you can look them up right below the search results. So we can only guess on what Google considers to be great content or a great site based on the past explanations given or SEO tests run.

What you can do in order to stay on top of the game despite recurring updates?

Think about people not search engines. Google is always trying to mimic searchers. So you should mimic search users as well not Google who is only mimicking them. Think about humans first and then consider the current ways in which search engines in general or Google in particular attempts to fulfill their wishes.

Over-optimisation always happens when you think about search spiders first and search engine users second or even forget the actual users.

Combine your SEO efforts with CRO (conversion optimisation) and user experience design. Make sure that the people who arrive at your site from search do find what they seek. Landing page optimisation, AB testing and user testing make your sites usable for humans almost as a side-effect so that any dreaded over-optimisation will be cleaned during the process. Readable copy, white space, usable forms, to the point descriptions and striking calls to action are some of the main elements for a successful conversion oriented website.

Consider user intent and ideally provide content and solutions for all three common user intents: navigational, informational, transactional. Make sure your users find exactly the what they need as expressed in the search query. Make sure they find enough background information on it by providing a glossary, an FAQ and other educational content. Make sure they find the product or service or a link to a matching product or service. Old school SEO often ended at the moment when the user clicked on the search result which led to “over-optimised” sites.

Optimise your site as if Google didn’t exist. Make sure all your visitors, direct visitors, social media visitors or referrals do find what they need. Try user personas and traffic segmentation to offer each audience what they are after. The returning visitor wants to know what’s new. The casual social media visitor wants to know why s/he should come back next time. The visitor coming from a referring site wants to find exactly what the other sites suggested s/he will find.

Write for social media users not just searchers. Most search users expect to find the keyword they entered into the search box on the page. They ignore fluff and hyperbole and focus solely on the keyword. Social media users are often different. They don’t look for a particular result they have on their mind. They are after the inspiration, something they don’t know yet so they can’t even search for it. Some bloggers add adjectives like “awesome” just to make social media users notice their articles. Find the middle ground between the SEO friendly and human readable enticing writing and do not just reduce title tags and file names to keywords.

Recent industry articles on the upcoming over-optimisation update:

• Google’s Pending Algorithm Update to Penalize Over-Optimized Content
• Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That
• Is An Over-Optimization Penalty Coming For You?
• Over-Optimization vs Optimization
• Over Optimization Penalty Speculation
• POV on Google’s “Over-Optimization” Update
• Google’s “Trust Us” Penalty
• Over-Optimized? Google Announces New Penalty for Too Much SEO

Are you afraid of the over-optimisation penalty? Do you care? Do we have to beware of the upcoming update or just keep calm and keep on doing SEO as usual? Please share your opinion in the comment section!

Images courtesy of the Blind Five Year Old and Bart Heird

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“We’ve been working with an SEO agency for about 6 months now. We ranked quite well for a few weeks, and then the rankings dropped. We don’t know what they do, exactly, but they send us 4 directory links and 2 article submssions a month. Oh, and they do a PR release for us, once a month”

It’s a starting point in a sales discussion I experience all too often. It’s often a precursor to the part of the conversation where we discover the business is being bled dry by a more-than-substandard SEO product that is completely ineffective and alarmingly expensive. No rankings, gone. No traffic. And, still paying! In some cases being told to pay more!

Crapola. Of the weapons grade kind.

Wil got frustrated with Google, specifically how they make liars out of the good guys. We’ve all done our tests, and, in the past, experienced SEO’s would tell you exactly what types of linkbuilding and SEO practices would (and still might) work. That’s fine – if you’re looking to generate a fast buck on a throwaway domain then I have no issues with that – it can be lucrative, fun and a challenging learning curve. Eventually Google will catch you, and you’ll move on. Noone loses.

If you’re that SEO agency, I don’t know how you can feel good about what you do. If you’re an ordinary, everyday on-line business, and that discussion feels weirdly familiar, fire that SEO company.

Stuff like this does not wash:

Neither does this:

Wait, what?!

It seems that Google are beginning a new wave of attacks on spammy linkbuilding practices, and I’m personally pleased to see it. There, I said it.

Detecting bad link-building practices – it’s extremely easy

Tom Anthony wrote a long post on detecting bad link activity with SEOmoz’s metrics. That’s a reasonable methodology to profile back links according to SEOmoz metrics, but if you really need to weed out the bad stuff, I recommend getting back to the old school and adding Domain PageRank to the mix. Niel’s SEO Tools have a =GooglePageRank function, which works really nicely for backlink weeding:

Which can lead to this with a simple pivot table:

Here’s what I did to make that table (excuse the voice over, I have a *slight* cold):

Please, think about where your links are coming from

Anyway – rant over, I suppose. Bad link building makes our whole industry look bad. Don’t help perpetuate it by casually brushing your due diligence aside. You’ll end up paying to reverse the damage being caused in the long run.

Image credit: Diana Parkhouse

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This time it’s not just the SEO industry though. The desired audience (as a pacifist I don’t “target” people) is much broader now. It’s the private side project of two very prominent entrepreneurs everybody knows who has been into SEO for a while, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot.

As you probably know Hubspot is dealing with much more than just SEO. They call it inbound marketing and it contains many of the disciplines SEOgadget specializes in as well. As of now the new community is populated largely by SEO practicioners it seems. I have participated for more than two months know and it’s apparent. The SEO people outnumber the other marketers. This is OK but it also brings a great responsibility with it.

It’s important to nourish the community first before you use it for “traffic generation” and such.

I’ve seen social news sites, whether niche or not, rise and fall in the past. There were a few reasons for failure. Some of the issues are already visible on Inbound as well. Thus I’d like to show my fellow SEO specialists other ways to approach the nascent niche community.

Always remember that participating in a social news community is a marathon not a sprint.

It doesn’t matter that you get some quick traffic from it once or twice. Also social news is not like social networking. It’s a special kind of social sites. So what are the actual use cases you can and should engage in on Inbound.org? How can you do it?

Get Traffic

You already can get around 300 visitors with a popular story on top of Inbound.org – Former search marketing community Sphinn could bring you around 1000 visitors in its hey days. So Inbound.org is already going strong. 300 might not sound much but it’s the movers and shakers who visit Inbound. It’s “quality traffic” in other words. These people are your industry peers and beyond. It’s obvious that you want them to visit your site or blog after all they are already interested in SEO and similar topics. Wait a minute though. Consider the other opportunities. Business people who do not consider themselves to be part of the SEO industry yet should consider them as well.

How to: It’s easy to get traffic on a community like Inbound. Just write something like the “what top SEO experts say about x”, make sure some of the people mentioned are on Inbound and you’re already in. Sharing a submission with you network might help as well. Just one vote other than the submitter’s is enough to appear on the frontpage. Then you have to be just relevant and other people will vote as well. Make sure you submit during daytime both in the US and UK. Otherwise your post might get overlooked.

Example: http://inbound.org/content/2012/02/content-chemistry-the-periodic-table-of-content/

See also the screenshot from Google Analytics above.

Build Authority

While getting traffic from Inbound.org may be a quick win to go after you don’t have to a social scientist to grasp that there is more to get from a niche community beyond that. I’ve been new to SEO once as well. Then in 2007 I have been new to the international SEO community as well. With sites like Sphinn I was able to build authority within the industry. After Sphinn has been disassembled part by part that opportunity vanished. Of course you could take part in SEO forums discussions or guest post on SEO blogs but a working niche social community is a fast track to recognition in an industry.

How to: Submit great articles from elsewhere first. Make sure only to submit stuff others care about and consider being of high quality. Ideally some regulars will start wondering who you are and start checking out your profile. Ideally they visit your blog then and submit one of your posts. Otherwise people will just remember your avatar and once everybody knows you and trusts you they will vote your won stories from your site as well. There are three URLs that get obviously more attention than others, SEOmoz itself, Distilled which is closely associated with SEOmoz and KISS Metrics. Being the first to submit those means getting more karma points. On the other hand it doesn’t mean your judgement or skill level is high enough to spot the gems.

You won’t get authority by submitting just the stuff that’s obviously popular. That’s not the way such communities work. People may even get angry at you for “stealing” the submission. So make sure you research stories yourself before submitting the usual suspects. Karma does not equal authority. So make sure not only to go after the number of karma points.

Debate

One of the key ingredients of a lively community is the debate going on there. This is perhaps the single most important one. Just think about sites like Reddit or Hacker News.  Inbound.org is a bit different though. You can only vote up comments, voting down is not possible, only flagging. Flagging is for obvious abuse not just for disagreeing. On other sites the main stream opinion always wins. You might be right but as long as everybody else does not share your background and beliefs you lose. On Inbound.org you join the debate in order to find out what’s best for you and your clients. It’s not just a way to express beliefs and get applause from those who are part of the same demographic as you.

How to: Some postings are fit for debate others are not. A Forbes article on how branding is better than SEO is a great place to start a debate. It’s not important that the article is right or wrong. You share or vote it up to make sure the broad spectrum of opinions gets mentioned. There is truth in every opinion. Otherwise there would be no need to have it and it would die out. The purpose of a good debate is to uncover it and make sure that other people who aren’t as advanced as you are on that subject matter can review and compare them to find out what they deem right or not at the end.

So don’t start a debate on posts everybody has to agree with. Many people comment on such posts saying things like “great post” etc. That’s not debate. That’s redundant. You may get a bit of karma but that’s not a debate. A successful debate is either one where either you can reinforce your knowledge or the others have convinced you that what you knew until now was wrong. That’s why I sometimes upvote both sides of the argument. I don’t care whether I’m right or wrong. The debate in the comment section is completing the post itself. On some blogs critical comments get deleted. A place like Inbound enables the community to really debate issue.

Example: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/02/seo-needs-an-antihero/

Educate Yourself

For me the most obvious use case of Inbound.org is to learn. After many years of SEO practice I am advanced when it comes to some aspects of my know-how. Others, like conversion optimization, user experience or entrepreneurship are still new to me though. This seems to be a use cases many SEO practicioners overlook on Inbound. I see lots of SEO articles with known techniques voted up by the dozens while submissions dealing with the other aspects get only a bunch of votes.

A niche community is truly about the niche, even the niche within the niche. So you don’t only need to read half a dozen of link building posts. To me the most intriguing ones are those I have no clue about yet. That’s why I voted up most submissions about Pinterest. It’s not about the hype. It’s about educating yourself and finding out what you don’t know yet.

How to: The front page is already dominated by good old SEO topics and the publications associated with SEOmoz. Look deeper than just the top posts on the front page. Most importantly visit the categories. They are hidden under the archives link at the bottom. Or you can click the category each post is categorized in to find more resources on that topic. Do nut just look for the popular posts there, check out those you know less about.

Dispel Myths

Ideally only “true” posting get popular on social media but we all know that they don’t. Search for [seo] on Topsy and you see that some of the most popular posts about SEO on Twitter are rants and jokes, not the resources. SEO is dead all over again every year, at least twice. The good thing about a niche social site is that you can dispel myths like that without having to share the post in question again and thus making it even more popular. Repeating myths doesn’t make them go away. So the next time someone sells crap advice on social media make sure to submit it to Inbound.org – not because you agree with it but because you want experts to speak out about it.

How to: Submit it and share the Inbound URL instead of the original one on Twitter etc. Make sure to comment below to express your disagreement with the post.

Mingle with Industry Top Dogs

I’ve noted above already that Rand Fishkin and Dharmesh Shah are behind the project. Danny Sullivan also is an avid user. The others may not be as prominent but most of them are influencers and publishers. In short, these people are linkerati.

By providing quality resources these people may notice you, even follow you on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook to get more of your curated wisdom or intriguing writings. I have followed many people on Google+ where I am mostly active recently just because they are on Inbound.org- One reason for this was that someone has created a Google circle with the top 50 Inbound users and shared it. I have also manually added other users to my circles.

I may be not as influential as those mentioned above but like many other bloggers and curators who are active on Inbound, the likes of

• AJ Kohn
• Jason Acidre
• Jon Cooper
• Gianluca Fiorelli
• Wayne Barker
• Aleyda Solis

are looking all the time for the next person to link to or even interview.

How to: Just look at what Jon Cooper does. This is an amazing kid. He’s not even half as old as I am but he rocks the SEO industry already. He does on Inbound as well. I bet I am not the only one to vote his stories up again and again. Looking at this kid I always think they teach SEO, social media and blogging in school nowadays. How else can you be so savvy at such an early age? He indeed performs so well that it seemed to me at first that Point Blank SEO, his site is run by a company with dozens of employees.

Jon doesn’t submit his won blog all the time. The others do. They probably know from Twitter and other channels. Point Blank SEO is one of the most popular sites on Inbound. He even managed to interview Rand Fishkin himself.

Example: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/02/link-building-strategies-the-complete-list/

Find your Tribe

While admiring your industry icons is a thing many people do it won’t pay your bills in the long run. What you need is to socialize with your peers and find your tribe. This is a strategy you can follow even in case you just want to get hired by an SEO agency. Whatever your goals are you have to focus on your peers and band together.  Other bloggers or social media users who share the same interests but do not yet have celebrity status can support you in the future. It’s a give and take but not just barter as in exchanging links. I have been sharing links by other people for years and most of the people you share links of notice sooner or later unless they already have hundreds of others that do so.

How to:  Do not just focus on SEOmoz and Search Engine Land when sharing links. There is at least one story each day you might want to share from those but when you do you risk to omit the dark horses. Check out blogs via RSS you like to read but where the bloggers aren’t the household names yet. Not everybody wants to be popular.

Some people are perfectly fine with being important in their area or niche. These people are often not even competing with you for attention. Submit their stuff and they may submit your stuff next time. In case they don’t , no problem, you like them anyways and their writings are good enough by itself to be submitted. Don’t just submit to endear yourself to somebody. After a while those who you support will become your friends naturally. Some of the people I have “met” on Sphinn five years ago are still my most ardent supporters.

Expand Your Social Circle

While searching for your tribe you will find lots of new like-minded people on Inbound you share a lot of interests with. These may not become your best friends but I already could gain lots of insights from them. Especially those who weren’t on your radar yet are often an enrichment of your daily dose of inspiration. Fresh voices and unexpected views are always great for creativity. Next time you create flagship content the things they have contributed might inspire you the most.

How to: Do not just heck out submission from the people you know already. In contrast focus on those you haven’t seen yet elsewhere. Just think about it. Do you always order the same drink at a bar? Why not try something new. It’s about opening your mind to more influences. Expanding your social circle is easily done on a social news site that focuses on one set of topics. The choice is limited and thus easier.

Get Peer Review

One of the things I missed most about Sphinn was the peer review. Everything can get popular on social networking sites like Facebook or Google+. Google+ even pushes sexist jokes itself. A niche community is for peer review though. People won’t only clap their hands and say “thank you great posts” like bot commenters on blogs. When they want to add something, question your assumptions or dismiss your opinions altogether. It’s always great. It might feel bad at first when everybody disagrees with you or just a few. I had people accusing me of trolling just because I pointed out a mistake in their strategy.

Next time you will remember your mistake and improve your strategy though. You will remember what the others said any you will try to add it your strategy. You will look out an do not repeat the mistake again. You won’t blog about it. People might not even tell you on your blog. They just will think that the blog is low quality and not come back. On a niche social news site like Inbound you can get free peer review by experts. Sometimes it’s worth much more than the simple upvote. Getting feedback from your peer, being it appreciation or criticism can have a positive long term impact on your career. I’ve learned a lot this way in the past.

How to: Why you or someone else submits your story just listen and do not accuse critical commentators of “not understanding” you and your post. Do not just repeat your points over and over. Listen and adapt. Update your posting. Do more research. Admit your mistakes. This is just plain old common sense but many people are too proud to do so and consider negative feedback to be some kind of attack.

Example: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/02/why-wikipedia-is-top-on-google-the-seo-truth-no-one-wants-to-hear-e/

These use cases are not just for SEO specialists.

Entpreneurs of all kinds can submit their case studies of SEO failure and success and get traffic and feedback in the best case.

I’ve seen posts on how business get popular on Pinterest on Inboud or how going after social media sites was more successful than SEO. You are welcome to post them.

Also you will surely find even more ways to contribute and profit from Inbound.org – It’s the place to be for all those who want to succeed on the Web using legitimate techniques, whether it’s SEO or inbound marketing. Give it a try and tell my what you think in the comment section.

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Way back in September we released the first version of our content strategy tool, and due to popular demand and awesome feedback I’m excited to be releasing an even hotter version of the tool! This blog post takes a quick look at some of the cool new features in this latest update.

Since the launch of the first version of the tool, there have been numerous updates across a number of websites forcing the xpath to return a null value, or to change the value returned. The first part of this update restores values for any empty fields, and reformats a number of elements of the tool for a cleaner, more digestible appearance.

More Insight from Google Insights

We all know how useful and powerful Google Insights can be for identifying trends and finding out what is ‘hot’ right now to provide you with the ability to spot opportunities to create new content.

Both sets of data for ‘Top Searches’ and ‘Rising Searches’ can now be found within the content tool:

Find out what’s growing in popularity relating to your niche, pop the keyword/phrase into the content tool and be inspired for a unique angle on a hot topic!

Taking the next step…

“I’ve been playing with the tool, and came up with an awesome content idea but now what?”

In the previous version of the tool there was a sheet called ‘Source and Place’, which featured a breakdown from Topsy of experts relating to your specified keyword to help find potential content placement opportunities. With this in mind, the newest feature of the tool takes this process to another level with the help of followerwonk.

We want to track down bloggers and editors who we can potentially get in touch with, that may be interested in our awesome new content idea. The tool now automatically scans twitter bios for mentions of ‘blog’ (blogger) and ‘editor’ + your specified keyword(s), to return highly relevant outreach contacts for the idea you’ve just come up with!

The data returned for each user can be broken down as follows:

• Twitter name
• Real name
• Location
• Influence
• Number of tweets
• The number of people they are following
• Number of followers
• Age of account
• Website URL

Find editorial and blogger contacts

Oh, I also forgot to mention that the tool pulls in 50 results for both editorial and blogger contacts, so that’s 100 potential new outreach contacts right there, on top of the outreach data found via Topsy!

Getting started

1. Access the tool here
2. Log in to your Google account
3. File > Make a Copy
4. Enter keyword into cell ‘B3’ and hit return (for multiple keywords please use the ‘+’ operator e.g. london+hotels)

I really hope you enjoy the new features of the tool. I look forward to hearing your feedback. PS. If you have any problems accessing the tool please drop me a comment below or hit me up at @dbseo.

Featured image credit:
kennymatic

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The session covered my link building process right from researching opportunities through to getting your pitch right and maximising your success rate. Within the presentation I mentioned quite a few resources that I’ve found particularly useful when link building; see the links at the end for your viewing pleasure!

As per usual, any questions just let me know in the comments!

Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni – Think Visibility

Resources

Google Docs Scrapers

_{https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AirDJzKdcf0RdFdhWEc0ZjN1a3F2dWI2anc0TW1STHc}

_{https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AirDJzKdcf0RdFQzMUkxdEN0T0I2UDJ6Y0FWZ2sxTmc}

_{https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AirDJzKdcf0RdFQzMUkxdEN0T0I2UDJ6Y0FWZ2sxTmc}

Useful Plugins

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-links/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/similarweb-sites-recommendatio/

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I also gave a preview of a new tool we’re testing to help keyword researchers predict keywords for the fresh index. More on that later, because it’s buggy as hell at the moment and I’d like to save it for launch when it’s ready.

Check back later for the video, because with some luck I’ll have managed to record my part of the session.

Advanced Keyword Modelling – SES 2012

Here’s the video:

If you’d like to hear about my updates on this post, follow me on Twitter.

A few useful resources:

- SEO Tools for Excel

- Adwords API Extension

- Using Keyword Categories in Excel

Video Transcription

Hi everybody. Earlier on today I gave a presentation with Ron Jones at Symmetry all about advance key modelling, specifically how to use data to make decisions about your SEO strategy, site architecture, that kind of thing. Ron talked about some of the principles behind keyword categorisation and using categories to design and architect a better website, while I took more of a practical viewpoint and actually showed how to create keyword categories and how to do some basic to advanced Excel, actually, to help solve problems in understanding how people search. I’m going to switch to Microsoft Excel and just give you a run through of what I demonstrated earlier on today.

Okay. So thank you to Zack at Prezzybox for always letting us use a little bit of retail based data in our keyword research examples. We’ve got a few things. So we’ve got some search engine ranking data here, which I’ll explain why we’ve got that in a moment. We’ve also got analytics data from an anonymous time period, but very retail birthday based. Then we’ve got some raw Google search volume data.

So, one of the biggest challenges with keyword research is being able to actually categorise this raw data into something meaningful. Ron was arguing that if you create a keyword category that’s relevant to a specific area, like if you’re in automotive, then you might want to understand what the most popular car makes and models are, or what colours do people prefer when they’re buying a car. When it’s retail, it might be that somebody is interested in outdoor toys, but which outdoor toys? Using categorisation in that regard in SEO helps us structure a website more meaningfully. But getting to that structure is a bit of a journey because, as you can see, this is relatively meaningless. We’ve got local search volumes, great. So we know that 74,000 people searched for the word chocolate last month in theUK. But so what? And that’s what this presentation is about.

So I’m going to show you how to create a keyword category and I’m going to go one step further and show you how to visualise that category. Then I’m just going to show you a few other things that AdWords API extension for Excel does. If you’re not familiar with our AdWords API extension, in as short a demo as possible, it does this. You’ve got a keyword, and I might want to get the AdWords average search volume for that keyword. This will default toUKexact, I believe. So pressing Return and running that formula will get me the total number of searches in theUKfor that term. That’s how the extension works. When we’re looking at this data here, this is an export of the Google AdWords API using the array formula. So you can find out how to install that on our website.

Let me just make this data a little bit simpler, and we’ll just delete that out. Let’s just imagine for a moment that we want to create a category, and for the purposes of this demo, I’m going to show you how to create a category to help us understand a little bit more about how people search for birthday gifts in retail.

Now to do that, we need to be able to create the category. If you head to SEOmoz or Google SEOmoz keyword categories, you’ll see a post on how this is done. Here’s the practical example. I’m just going to grab my formula and go back to Google search data. So, imagine for a moment that in any category there might be markers or strings that describe the fact that the keyword itself belongs to that category. So if you’re optimising for occasions, you might be interested in Christmas or you might be interested in Valentine’s, right? So that might create a category called occasions. Price, it might be cheap, it might be discount, might be sale and so on. Each of these types of keywords might belong in a phrase that would indicate that a user’s search is based around price. Similarly, if somebody’s searching for a gift for an 18th birthday present, you’d see the characters “1, 8, t, and h” appear in the string. So, that’s basically how categorisation works, and it’s really down to us just to find a formula that will allow us to filter by all of these keywords, all in one go.

That formula is called an array formula and here’s how it works. If we go back to our search data, I’m going to paste in the formula that I copied a moment ago and I’m going to just grab, from my keywords type list, that row of birthday strings. Let’s call them markers. So we’re going to highlight all of those, and then pressing F4 will anchor that range. Now if I do a CTRL-Shift and Enter to make it an array formula, it’s started to filter. Now I’m going to just neaten that up a little bit by saying “Birthday,” and in my formula I believe that it’s looking at “O” not “C.” So it’s actually fetching the column header here and saying whether or not it’s found that marker in the keyword. Let’s say CTRL-Shift and Enter again, and there we go. So now I can filter the keywords that might be related to birthdays. So, that’s pretty cool, and that’s the first part of the demo.

The next thing that I wanted to show the audience was, okay, we know how many people are searching for those keywords, but how many entries did we get? That’s relatively simple because we’ve got some basic analytics data here, and we’re going to use what’s called the VLookup. Now VLookup simply says, “Find me this value in another place in my spreadsheet, like another keyword, and fetch the data that’s adjacent to it.” And you specify how many columns to the right in VLookup you want data to be fetched.

So, back to my Google search data. We’re going to create a VLookup. Now for those of you familiar with tables, you might have noticed that I’ve named my table, and I’ve named it “Analytics,” which makes it nice and simple when I’m forming the VLookup. Column index was two, was the column next to the keywords, and I want to match exactly. I found an extra bracket there, there we go. Let’s call that “Analytics.” Now we’ve got analytics entries, local search volume, and the keyword.

The last thing that I might want to combine with this is search ranking. Now in my ranking table, let’s just call this “Rankings Data.” Notice that we’ve got the keyword and then one, two, three, four, five columns to the right. So, the VLookup needs to look a little bit like this. Double click the table name when it appears in the tool tip. It was column index number five, and we want to match exactly with the zero, and off it goes to fetch those rankings. Now, you might have just noticed that some of those are errors. That’s because there is no data in this case. So we can wrap our query, our formula inside an IFError. So, IFError, do this thing, basically. So the value of IFError might be no data. There we go. Cool.

So, the last part of this is, well, how do we visualise this data? How do we make it into something that is relatively actionable, and quite often I like to just create a pivot table, which I’ll show you really quickly. So, if you go to insert pivot table, add that to a new spreadsheet, drop my keywords at the bottom, we’ll want our local search volume, we’ll also want our rankings. We always need to make sure that our ranking is set to sum in this case. I want to be able to filter by search volume and filter by rankings and, of course, the keyword category that I’ve made up.

So, now I’ve got my local search volume. Show me all keywords where search volume is higher than 46. I might want to sort by largest to smallest, like so. Only show me keywords that rank on page two. So let’s select some low hanging fruit terms that we might want to target with a bit of SEO, some link building, or maybe improve the on-page optimisation of our website. Finally, only show me keywords that are related to our birthday category.

So there we go. We’ve got an interesting data set from which we can visualise with a chart. So I’m just going to insert a bar chart. Now, we’ve got two sets of data here – the rankings and the search volume. Now, the rankings really need to go on a separate axis. So we can do that by formatting our rankings. We’re going to format that selection. We’re going to put it on a secondary axis. Then we’re going to change the chart type with a right mouse button click, change series chart type to dots. Now the next thing I want to do is reverse my axis, because I want to see the top ranking keywords at the top and the bottom ranking keywords at the bottom. And values in reverse order, click close. Then the only final thing that we need to do is if we format that data series, let’s take that line out because the line is irrelevant. The data isn’t technically joined. There we go. It’s a very, very simple chart that shows, on the right-hand side, rankings from position 1 to position 30, our keywords along the bottom with local search volume.

So that’s how you visualise your keyword priorities. You could use this data to make some decisions about your site architecture. In what order should you be linking to things, what content should be on your home page versus content that perhaps can just link to a little deeper because it’s not quite as high a priority.

In the session, I also covered a couple of other bits and pieces, because the brief for the session was actually to show how I might expand keywords. I just wanted to share a tip, which is based on the AdWords API plug-in and how to generate a keyword list based on a particular geo-location. So, in this case, we’re looking at keywords related to the word “hotels.” I’m very interested in how people search for keywords related to hotels in foreign climes. So let’s look atTaiwan. This is a query called “=arraysGetAdWordsIdeas.” It’s part of the AdWords API toolkit. While that’s running, I’ll explain what its doing. It’s looking at a table called Root4, fetching that keyword, and then playing back an exact match search volume for all keywords that are related to the word “hotel” according to the Google AdWords API Suggestion Service. You’ll see here that’s the country code forTaiwan. I’m asking it to show me all search volumes on the Web, and I’m asking for 100 keyword ideas. That will go quite high, around about 800 to 1000 per API call, and because it’s the API call, it is actually one API call. So that’s only $0.25, sorry, I beg your pardon, it’s only $0.25 for every 1000 API calls. So in theory you could have 800,000 keywords for $0.25, which is pretty cool.

This is something else that I shared, which is Ubersuggest. If you’re just trying to expand a keyword list, head to Ubersuggest and get the HTML link for your own search results. So, you’ve got here the query for cats. Now if I just grab this XPathOnURL query, which is courtesy of Niels Bosma’s SEO tools, the XPathOnURL query, which you saw in the previous video, if I go and select a range and press F2, then paste my query in which is referencing the URL in A3, which is the Ubersuggest URL, if I make this an array formula with CTRL-Shift and Enter, it’ll go off to Ubersuggest and fetch all of the results on that page, eventually. It takes a moment. So it should just be coming any moment now. There you go. So there are the top keywords related to the word “cats” according to Ubersuggest with setting toUKsearch, which is immensely powerful if you think about how you can combine that with your search volume data.

Anyway, thanks a lot for listening. That’s the end of the presentation. You can watch this video, or you can go and download the presentation by following that bitly link. Thanks a lot.

Image: PSD

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- SEO Tools for Excel

- Check your Sitemap for Errors with Excel

- Fun With The SEOmoz API – Get Links Data Straight into Excel

- Adwords API Extension

Video: Excel Tips and Tricks

Excusing the occasional hesitation, I hope you find this video useful. I’ll update this post with my slide deck after the session. Enjoy!

Image credit: Lynn Friedman

Here’s the presentation

Tools of the Trade: Excel Tips from Richard at SES London 2012 is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Why a nice clean sitemap?

Google have invested a lot of time and effort into improving the sitemaps functionality in Webmaster Tools and the advice I’ve always heard from Google people is advice like; keep your sitemaps as error free as you can, use the correct canonical URL. I’ve always felt that a sitemap file with a very low load time is also advisable if you can speed up the dynamic elements of the file generation.

Bing’s Duane Forrester was on a Whiteboard Friday talking about exactly this topic back in March last year. His comments about sitemap cleanliness were of particular interest:

We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it’s really critical that they understand that this isn’t something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error.

Duane Forrester

If you’ve not seen the video, I recommend taking a few moments to review what’s said:

Checking for problems during a site audit

When I’m working on a site, I sometimes need to work out what state the XML sitemap is in. If I know there’s been a recent update to the file(s) it’s not always a good idea to totally rely on the data coming from Webmaster tools. If you’re ever in that situation, here’s how to get a fresher impression of the state of your sitemap.xml file.

Import your XML sitemap file into Excel

Firstly, head to Data > From Other Sources, and select the “From XML Data Import”:

In the “File name” dialogue, type or paste in your sitemap XML file URL:

Click “Yes” when this dialogue appears:

And eventually, your entire XML sitemap appears, all nicely formatted in Excel:

Fetch the HTTP status code for each URL

Back in the old days, the quickest way to check the server header response of a list of URLs was to crawl the list with XENU on 0 crawl depth, and then VLOOKUP against the original list. Thanks to Niels Bosma and his SEO Tools for Excel, this process is much, much quicker.

Just create a new column and insert the following query into the first cell:

=HtmlStatus([@[ns1:loc]])

Check that the canonical in the page header matches the declared URL in the sitemap

Aside from a rarely updated sitemap, the other common mistake i encounter is non-canonical URL submission in the sitemap file. The URL in the sitemap and the URL described in rel=”canonical” don’t match!

=HtmlCanonical([@[ns1:loc]])

Check out the “Match?” column – we’re checking to see if the canonical declared in the web page’s header matches the actual URL in the sitemap. Oh my, it’s a simple formula:

=EXACT([@[ns1:loc]],[@Canonical])

Learn this stuff

Learn this stuff! If you’re not familiar with some of the tips in the post – that’s ok, I more or less have to relearn the more complicated stuff every time I start a new task with Excel. It’s enormously satisfying to make the time to teach yourself new tricks and Excel is brilliantly simple once you have the gist of it. Here are some resources to get you started:

• Using Tables in Excel
• How to Use VLOOKUP
• How to Make a Pivot Table in Excel
• How to Find Orphaned Pages in Excel
• How to Extract Your Competitor’s Keyword Strategy
• HTTP Status Reports with Xenu, OSE and VLOOKUP
• What are My Most Linked to Subfolders
• Categorise Your Links with Excel
• Keyword Research wiith Categories

Image: Splorp

Check Your XML Sitemap For Errors with this Excel Tip is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Great Ways to Use Survey Tools

If you are an online marketer or SEO, then you should consider the following uses for online surveys.

Prospective Client Surveys

Before getting started with a new client, you might want to get to know them first by providing a simple online survey form for them to fill out. Some great questions you could ask include the following.

• What websites do you own? (main domain, blog, additional sub-domains)
• What social media profiles do you use? (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+)
• What local search profiles have you claimed? (Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp)
• Have you worked with another online marketing or SEO agency? If yes, what services did you use? What were the results?
• Will you be working with more than one online marketing or SEO agency simultaneously?
• What are the top 10 pages you would like your online marketing strategy to be focused upon?
• Do you have any special online tools that could be used to attract links? (online calculators, widgets, industry-specific database)
• What are your online marketing goals?
• Do you use Google Analytics? If yes, can we have access?

Basically, ask them about anything you think you will need for your campaign so you know what you are working with early on.

Client Satisfaction Surveys

Client satisfaction surveys can be very useful not only to find out if you are on the right track with your client’s online marketing campaign, but also to find out if you can expand your services with them. So instead of just asking if they are happy with their results so far, if they are receiving enough communication about their campaign, and so forth, you can also ask them if they are interested in additional services they are not taking advantage of.

To keep your survey fresh from month to month, you can also ask about specific new trends. For example, this month would be a great time to ask your clients if they would be interested in mounting a campaign on Pinterest and optimizing their site with images so it will be Pinterest friendly.

Website Usability

If part of your online marketing involves creating or optimizing websites for conversion, some basic website usability testing might be required. Invite people to try out the website, then send them a survey about their likes and dislikes of the website’s functionality. You might learn about a particular pain point that others experience which you might not have even thought about.

Link Bait

Whether you are creating link bait for a client or for your own website, survey tools can help. One of the top trends in blogging is crowdsourced posts – posts where you get various people in a specific niche or industry to answer one or more questions, then compile the answers into a blog post. Not only do you get a lot of great information, but you get the promotional power of everyone you include in the list sharing it with their audience.

5 Top Survey Tools

The following are some great survey tools that will allow you to get the answers you need. The best part – they all offer free basic membership!

Google Docs Forms

Google Docs offers their own survey tool with their Forms application. Simply log in to your Google Account, go to Google Docs, and create a new Form. You can choose text based answers, multiple choice, list answers, and more, making answers required when necessary. You can also choose from almost 100 pre-designed themes. You can embed forms onto your website using iframe code, share the link to the form, or email the form directly from Google Docs. Return to the form within Google Docs to see survey results!

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a widely recognized survey provider. They allow you to create surveys from scratch or choose from over 60 templates for different categories and industries including the following for customer feedback.

• Website Feedback
• Business to Business
• Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Service
• Software Evaluation

Their account options range from free for 10 questions & 100 responses per survey to $65 (US) per month for unlimited questions & responses, customizable survey forms, and more features.

KISSinsights

KISSinsights allows you to add customer feedback directly to your website with easy, targeted questions that will pop up on your site. It is the perfect way to do quick usability testing with your website’s visitors! Plans range from free for surveys with up to 30 responses to $49 (US) per month for customizable surveys with an unlimited number of responses.

Zoomerang

Zoomerang is on eof the best survey tools for feedback. Surveys can be sent via email, Facebook, Twitter, or your own website. Zoomerang offers a variety of different types of surveys including the following.

• Customer Satisfaction
• Business
• Marketing
• Market Research
• Meeting & Event Planning
• Social Media (Twitter & Facebook)
• Mobile SMS

Plans range from free for an unlimited number of surveys with up to ten questions and responses to $599 per year for unlimited surveys, questions, and responses, customization, data export, and more.

Smart Survey

Smart-Survey offers affordable software which you can use for customer satisfaction, specific industries, employee opinions, training feedback, and more. They allow you to cancel at any time, or simply downgrade your account and upgrade when you need it without losing your survey data. Plans range from free for an unlimited number of surveys with up to 50 responses per month to £29.99 (UK) per month for unlimited surveys with up to 1,000 responses per month, custom themes, and more.

Do you use survey tools to learn more about prospective clients, customer satisfaction, or website usability? Have you had success with crowdsourced posts? Please share your tools & tips in the comments!

Image credit: The Bees

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From now, our Adwords API extension supports V201109 and, if you’re still using the old plugin by then, you’ll get errors from the 29^th February. Eek!

How to replace the old Adwords API extension

Replacing the currently installed version is remarkably easy. Here’s how, in 6 simple steps:

1) Download and save the ZIP file (found in this post) on your desktop. Open the ZIP and decompress the “distribution” folder like this:

2) Go ahead and open the setup.xlsx file. You’ll need to click the “Enable Content” button, just here:

3) See those uninstall buttons? Click either – the first one if you intend to keep the same API credentials, the second if you want to start from scratch. After completing this step, close down Excel and re-open the setup.xlsx file.

4) Reopen the setup.xlsx file, and click “Add API Credentials” (if you’d deleted them previously) and follow the instructions in the dialogue:

5) Click “Install Add-in” – if you’re successful, you’ll see this dialogue:

Congratulations, you’re done!

The update itself offers only a little step change in functionality for now, in that it now offers support for the country codes found in the API documentation here. Instead of specifying say, “GB” in your queries, you can specify “2826″ if you wish to. All of the original codes have been hardcoded, so you can continue with your standard alphabetical country codes if you wish to.

What we were hoping for (and to be honest we’re scratching our heads over this) is there’s a gorgeous list of city codes. Unfortunately (though the adwords API accepts the digits), we’re getting “0″ back as search volumes when we specify a city. The fact that it’s a 0 (as opposed to an error response) tells me the API is returning these values, as opposed to there being a problem elsewhere. That’s a massive shame, as the targeting service would be enormously powerful if it supported this level of granularity. Needless to say, I’ll update you should we learn more on the topic in the near future.

Reach

While updating the core code, Tom built a new helper function: =SEOGadget_locationDetails(“LOCATION”)

This helper is designed to fetch the correct geo-location code for an area name. For example, =SEOGadget_locationDetails(“PARIS”) would yield the following response:

Note the “reach” value, which is defined as: Approximate user population that will be targeted, rounded to the nearest 100. * This field can be selected using the value “Reach”. This field is read only and should not be set. If this field is sent to the API, it will be ignored. How Google calculate the approximate user population is anyone’s guess, my guess would be a normalised count of searches from unique users in a 30 day period.

I’ll publish more on this targeting issue as I get more information. If you’re reading this, and you have experience with the support (or lack of) in the Adwords API targeting service for city codes, give me a shout!

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For my first post here on the SEOgadget blog I thought I’d write about something I’ve been trying out and getting a little bit addicted to; combining already existing data and reports to provide more insights from the information you already have. I recently wrote about something similar over on State of Search, but this time I wanted to talk specifically about bringing together exports from Advanced Web Ranking and Screaming Frog. You could do the same thing with exports from similar tools; but these two in particular are absolutely fantastic and have definitely become part of my daily work, so for the purpose of this example I’ll be talking focusing on them.

It’s also worth pointing out that there are SEO tools that provide similar information, and some of them really are incredible. However, if you’ve already got ranking exports and crawl exports, why not make more use of them? The other benefit is that you can start to play around with things until you get the perfect set of data to suit your specific needs.

What’s the Story?

When you’re taking a look at a site for the first time it can sometimes be hard knowing where to start. By looking at where certain sections of the site are ranking, and comparing that to technical data on the page itself you can start to see whether or not there might be technical issues that explain poorly performing pages; or perhaps give an indication of what could be improved. This is by no means an exhaustive site auditing process, but it can definitely help improve your ‘birds eye’ view of a new project or help when revisiting a site with a fresh focus.

To help explain what can be done and how to go about it I’ve set up an example report based on a fake URL with fake ranking data. For the keyword selection, I’ve used a set of keywords to represent the head, mid-level and also the long tail. If you were working on a new site and wanted a larger set of data I’d suggested exporting non-branded keywords from Google Analytics.

For this example report, I’ve set it up to display the following information:

• Keyword
• Keyword Category (self assigned)
• Ranking URL
• Rank
• Level of the Page Within the Site
• Status Code
• Number of Similar Pages
• Instances of Duplicate Source Code
• Number of Links Directed at the Page
• Number of Links on the Page
• Canonical Version of the Page

If you’re familiar with Screaming Frog, you’ll know that the capabilities are huge. Using this export plus other tools and API’s, you could easily extend your report out to include information such as:

• Missing Meta Titles
• Missing Meta Descriptions
• Number of Missing alt tags on the Page
• Page Authority
• Social Activity of the Page
• Visits
• Search Volume
• Bounce Rate
• Conversion Metrics

That’s all pretty useful stuff that you can start to comparing against rankings and trying to ascertain why a website might be performing the way it does. The true beauty of using Excel to work this way is that you can include or cut whatever you want. If you wanted to extend it out and use other data then simply carry on the process as explained below with the example. Taking this one step further, you’d probably want to start playing around with pulling in data via the SEOmoz API and also the Adwords API. For now though we’ll keep it simple and go through an example with a relatively small set of data. Perhaps a ‘Mega Report’ might be a potential post for the future?!

Building the Report

I’ve made a handy little screen demo to show you how I’ve started to put all this together, but because I’m no Steven Spielberg you might want to keep reading for a full list of instructions!

The Prep:

AWR Export – Unfortunately VLOOKUP won’t work with duplicate data. Because we’re going to be using this function quite a bit you’re going to have to de-duplicate both the keywords and URLS. The end result is one keyword per URL; but that’s cool because this report is giving you a bird’s eye view of a sites position and helping to compare rankings with on-page issues. Once you’re happy with the data you’ve got, move the keywords into the leftmost column and convert the data to a table (ctrl + enter)

Screaming Frog – The first thing I do with this export is to remove any columns that I won’t need for the report. Once you’ve got everything you need, again convert the data into table as this will make working with the data much easier. Once you’ve done that it’s really quick and easy to start filtering out the URL’s you don’t need. If you don’t need to check anything other than the main URL’s, simply filter everything else out by selecting text/html:

The URL’s– You’ll find that AWR and Screaming Frog will export URL’s slightly differently (e.g with or without trailing slashes). In order for VLOOKUP to work when finding data from a URL match, you’ll need to make sure that both sets are the same. To solve this, you can do a quick bit of work with find ‘and replace’ to resolve any discrepancies.

The Main Report

Once your exports are all sorted out you can start to build up your main report with the columns of data you require. The first step is to dump in your keywords, ranking URLS and the positions they are ranking in. To make filtering a bit easier I’ve assigned each keyword with a tag of ‘main’, ‘category’ or ‘product’. That allows me to quickly look through and check each level of the site to see if any patterns start to emerge.

To start combining the exported data together, I’m using a combination of the VLOOKUP and COUNTIF functions. To give you an example of each I’ll explain how I’ve populated the ‘Level’ column and the ‘Similar Pages’ Column. It might take a little bit of playing around, but once you’ve got to grips with these two functions you can simply repeat the process to build out your report to include the information you need.

=VLOOKUP

To fill the ‘Level’ column I’m using the VLOOKUP function. This finds the match for the URL in my ranking report with the appropriate data for the same URL in the Screaming Frog Export. The formula I’m using is:

=VLOOKUP($C$2, Table5,3,FALSE)

However, it’s highly likely that your worksheet will be set up slightly differently. The easiest way to make sure the formula is correct is to enter =VLOOKUP( into the first cell of the ‘Level’ Column and then hit ctrl + A. Doing that provides a handy little pop up to help you through:

Lookup_value: highlight the first URL in your main data table.

Table_array: highlight the Screaming Frog export.

Col_index_num: enter the column number within the table that you want to pull through the numbers from. In this case, ‘Level’ is the 8^th column in the Screaming Frog export, so simply enter ‘8’.

Range_lookup: enter ‘FALSE’ to get an exact match.

Once completed, hit enter and if you’re working in tables mode you’ll automatically populate the entire column. Understanding how many steps a URL is from the homepage can be pretty useful for finding out potential architecture issues, and whether poorly ranking pages are buried deep within the site.

=COUNTIF

To fill the ‘Similar Pages’ column we’re looking for the number of pages that have the ranking keyword or phrase within the meta title. This should give us an idea as to whether duplication or keyword cannibalization might be the cause of a page not ranking particularly well. For this we’ll be using the COUNTIF function rather than VLOOKUP:

=COUNTIF('Screaming Frog'!D:D,"*"&A2&"*")

Simply paste this formula into the first cell in the ‘Similar Pages’ column and edit to make sure it’s selecting the correct values for your worksheet. In the example above, ‘Screaming Frog’ is my array table, ‘D:D’ is the meta title column within that table, and ‘A2’ is the keyword I’m looking to find a number of matches for.

You’ll notice that my keyword cell ‘A2’ has been wrapped with “*”&A2”*”. If you don’t wrap the cell in this way, the COUNTIF function will return the number of meta titles that match the keyword exactly. However, we’re looking for the amount of titles that include the exact phrase. By wrapping the cell with “*”A2”*” you’re telling the function to return the number of titles that include the phrase; perfect!

Getting Quick Answers

The whole point here is to find some quick answers to ranking problems. When you’re taking a look at a new site one of the best questions you can ask yourself is: ‘why is this website ranking the way it does’? Maybe certain sections of the site are ranking nicely whilst others are struggling; if that’s the case then comparing all of this information directly against rankings should help you to identify some answers.

Depending on what information you want, you can start to filter through all the data in any way you want. I’ve personally found it particularly useful to use the keyword categorisation to look at different sections and levels of a site, or to start filtering down via ranking positions to investigate the pages that are ranking lower than others. Find the problematic rankings, see if any onsite issues match up, and start building a quick list of fixes!

If you want some further reading on using Excel to manage your exported data, then you should definitely check out this great post about using SEO Spider Data in Excel.

I’d also recommend checking out some of these really good posts on using Excel for SEO:

-How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

-Keyword Research – Using Categories to Make Your Process More Actionable

-Categorising Your Links with Excel and Open Site Explorer

-Using VLOOKUP to Match Keyword Volume & Rankings Data

Photo Credit – Kyle May

Combining AWR and Screaming Frog to Spot Quick Wins is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

This process has (so far) gathered us and our clients additional links from China, Japan, Ukraine, Russia, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Brazil and Mexico. This isn’t all that surprising considering infographics naturally gain placement all over the world, but all too often we dismiss these potential links as beyond our reach.

Previously, I said regarding non-English placements, “Whether you think they are worth pursuing is up to you, as the return on investment for your time won’t be as obviously beneficial”, which ( ignoring the value we assign to incoming TLD diversity) was probably wrong. Just as a warning, I had mentally filed the method I’ll show you under ‘won’t work but test anyway’. It’s pretty brutal and you’ve probably already thought of it. Yes. http://translate.google.com/.  There are plenty of reasons why this sounds like a terrible idea, and some of my decisions may puzzle you. Bear with me.

Method:

• Before we begin, you’ll need to find the sites with your content that you would appreciate a link from.
• If the site is in English, ignore the TLD and hosting and clean-up as normal.
• If the site is in Russian or any other non-English language, and you can find contact details (having Chrome translate as you go can assist), you’re in business.
• We aren’t just going to send them a translated email, but we are going to send them something fairly template-ish.
• As ever, the people who reply to your outreach will almost certainly give you or your client attribution, and a subset of those who don’t reply will attribute also. Keep those records!

This format is, for good reason, a little more restrictive than vanilla outreach. Here’s a rather ugly example (transcribed below) that can be made pretty and tailored to your needs:

“Hello [name],
http://contentwebsite.com/1/207.htm
Sorry for the English. I am glad you liked my client’s work “Vertical image with text and numbers”. I would be grateful if you could attribute them for producing it:
http://www.clientwebsite.co.uk/
It was originally placed on http://originalplacement.com/infographics/originalinfographicdonotsteal/
Thank you very much; I look forward to hearing from you.
Oliver”

Past the obvious “include a translation”, I’ve applied a few tweaks to what you might consider an ordinary approach. I’ll break these down and offer a little commentary on their importance.

The URL of content as the subject line:

This may be cryptic but it will, all things being equal, significantly improve your conversion rate. It’s non-aggressive and catches their interest. It also helps them find what you’re talking about (which I repeat in the body of the email for their ease).

An apology for the mother tongue:

I do this right at the beginning. It acknowledges that I know how absurd and non-ideal this method of contact is. It’s polite, too.

The language used is pretty simple:

This is probably the most important aspect. You can’t assume that Google Translate is of the same level of quality across languages (it isn’t). You can avoid compounding the obscurity this entails by introducing neither complexity nor indeterminacy.

The aim is to avoid making Google Translate, or your readers, work more than necessary. In the same vein, you should aim to keep it short. Ideally, you want some of the translation above the fold if at all possible.

Inclusion of original placement:

This step is optional, and whether it merits inclusion varies with placement. Mostly, this step acts as proof that you or your ought to be attributed, which is helpful in cases where they have already attributed someone else.

The English is before the non-English:

This is counter-intuitive, but it somehow works much better than the other way round. My hypothesis, and the reason I recommend translation after the initial English, is because the translations will always be inaccurate and come across disjointed, pretty much like the seo spam mail webmasters receive daily. Given that my email account has “seo” in it, this could throw one manual spam flag too many.

One benefit of this tweak is that it can pique interest. It’s certainly different. My sample size here would be too small to attribute significance to, but for what anecdotal evidence is worth, including a translation (however poor) helps. My guess would be it comes across as less rude, showing you’ve made some effort to accommodate them and that you don’t have a full on Team America mentality. As for method, that’s pretty much it.

Some Thoughts:

Some issues may crop up whilst you’re out there. One I’ve mentioned before is ‘fan-translations’, watermarked versions that attribute someone else as the creator. I don’t tend to worry too much when contacting the creators of these, as they tend to feel a little embarrassed by the contact and will be willing to help out so long as you aren’t too aggressive. One way that I’ve found that skirts the around issue is suppressing your outrage reflex (mine is now dead) and offering  the original version to host side by side with theirs. This has the added benefit of reducing the visual/layout ‘staleness’ of the page.

If you’re more serious about this than me, you could hire or bribe fluent speakers to translate your emails for you. I haven’t done this, because I’ve had email chains six emails long, and I don’t really want to bring in an intermediary for every stage, but you may be more flexible (or come up with an elegant solution).

Lots of webmasters speak English. In addition, all of the responses I’ve received have been in English. It might be reasoned that the translated part of the email I send isn’t load bearing. Anecdotal testing would suggest it is, and common sense suggests it shows you’re at least somewhat considerate, and probably aren’t spamming. However, a little under half of these responses have been in, from what I can tell, Google translated English. My gut feel is that I wouldn’t have been as successful with this subset had I gone without the appended translation.

I’m hesitant to play around with this too approach too much, since it works so well for me, but it’s worth noting that I have the mentality of not always wholeheartedly testing things I incorrectly believe hold too much opportunity cost. The lion’s share of benefit, however, comes from the contacts you gain from your outreach.

There are definitely possible solutions less hideous than mine, but I’m yet to try one as easy to implement or with as high a success rate. Any suggestions?

Image Credit: doberes

Get More International Links With This Infographic Linkbuilding Tactic is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

The best link building clients were the ones that were open to link building towards any of their pages, including and especially to their great content. There is nothing easier than link building for a website that actually has link worthy content – infographics, videos, whitepapers, tutorials, lists, or even just informative blog posts. The only thing you run into with these clients is keeping up with all of the great content that there is to link to on their site.

The Purpose of a Content Audit Spreadsheet

This is where a content audit spreadsheet comes in handy for link building. A content audit spreadsheet for link builders is simply an analysis of the top pieces of link worthy content on a website, organized in a way that makes it easy for link builders to find the right pages to propose in their link requests to other sites based on category. The main goals of this spreadsheet are as follows.

• To help link builders organize the information about each page so they are not always looking up the site to find a particular piece of content and what to write about it when it comes time to actually email a prospective link opportunity.
• To keep information organized so that it can be passed on to different link builders throughout the course of a project.
• To serve as a checklist for on-site optimization and baseline statistics.
• To keep track of overall links built to each page.

Now that I’ve hopefully sold you on the benefits of a content audit spreadsheet for link builders, let’s look at the information you will want to keep in yours.

Information for a Content Audit Spreadsheet

The following pieces of information are crucial for a great content audit spreadsheet that will serve as your ultimate link building tool for each client.

• Type – Whenever you are link building, you might find opportunities for specific types of content. For each link worthy page on a website, note the type of content on that page – infographics, video, tutorial, whitepaper, free trial download, widget, tool, application, blog post, and so forth.
• URL – This is the full URL for each link worthy page on the website for quick copying & pasting when needed.
• Shortened – For social sharing, keep track of a custom Bit.ly link that you can use for social promotion of the page. This way you will have social statistics including clicks and latest activity for that URL.
• Title – This is simply the title of the piece of content. While you might want to link everything to keyword phrases, there is nothing more natural than linking to a page by its title.
• Description – This is the description for the content which you can use when emailing a prospective link opportunity or filling out a form that asks for the page’s description.
• Keywords – These are all of the applicable keywords and keyword phrase anchor text that fits each link worthy URL. You can enter multiple keywords in one column, or add additional columns per keyword.
• On-Site Check – This can be per page or for the entire website, but it is simply a date of when someone last checked on-site optimization. If anything should happen down the road with the website’s rankings, it might be a good thing to check back up on. A number of times, I have seen client’s websites rankings drop simply because they changed their website design and their old URLs were not redirected or the newly designed pages were no longer optimized properly.
• Page Authority, Links, Tweets, Likes, and Google +1′s – One thing I like to do with any website is grab a simple baseline measurement of stats before I start working with it. This way, a month or two down the road, you can see if your link building activity is making a positive impact by checking the current stats. These stats also serve defense in case the customer starts asking about results. Grab these stats using the SEOmoz Toolbar and the official social sharing buttons on the page. If the page doesn’t have social sharing buttons, you can always plug the page’s URL as the URL to share in the official button code pages for Twitter, Facebook, and Google (under Advanced Options) to see the numbers.

Additional Tabs

Most link builders probably have your own tools for recording links. If not, just add additional tabs to this spreadsheet for each piece of content or one additional tab for all of the links. On the link recording tab, enter the anchor text used for the link, domain the link was placed on, domain authority, traffic, page the link was placed on, page authority, contact name, and contact email. This way, you have great information to give to the client if they need proof of work, and you also have a great record of contacts to get links from on future projects.

Get the Spreadsheet

Not in the mood to create a spreadsheet from scratch? Just grab the sample spreadsheet on Google Docs!

For Google Docs Users

If you are signed into your Google account, simply use the File > Save option to save this spreadsheet to your documents and start filling it in with your information.

For Excel and Open Office Users

If you don’t have Google Docs, or would prefer to save it on your local machine, go to the Google Docs version and use the File > Download As to save it as your desired file type. I’d suggest Open Office or Excel if possible for functionality.

How do you organize content for link building? What other details would you include? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and happy auditing!

Image credit: Joe Hall

Content Auditing for Link Builders – Why You Should Do It, Tips, and a Spreadsheet is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

“The quality or state of being scarce; especially: want of provisions for the support of life”

That’s extremely useful…but in a nutshell if you reduce the quantity supplied of a product or its availability you create a scarce product. This perceived scarcity then allows you to sell more.

Here are some clever and awesome scarcity techniques to increase sales.

1. The classic limited stock

Displaying low amounts of stock available creates a sense of scarcity. Revealing a number between 1-3 in stock usually converts better. Here’s an example of a hotel booking company that implements this classic style.

“Act Fast! Only 3 rooms left at this price!”

2. Interactive limited stock?

Revealing low stock levels is a simple and great win but the visuals could be much better. If we look at Argos these guys make scarcity much more interactive.

You can check the stock in your area and reserve it. If you enter a postcode and click on the check stock button you’ll receive this pop up.

Notice how it’s in stock on home delivery, out of stock in one area but only 1 left to collect in another branch close to my location. These guys are integrating framing with scarcity in clever way. Also pay attention to the fact that these guys give you the option to check stock in another area on the pop up. When you make scarcity interactive in particular and show something being generated it makes it more trustworthy to your users.

3. Real time scarcity

Booking.com utilise a clever scarcity technique which is to show the number of stock, the number of people viewing the page and when the last purchase was just made.

Notice the 2 messages that pop up at the bottom corner. Combining the stock level with the last purchase and how many people are ogling up my hotel is awesome but the execution could be much better.

Those messages can be argued to look like a windows error message, a site error message or even some type of spyware on a quick glance. When you make scarcity real time it becomes more believable and is much more powerful than some of the classical methods.

4. Auctioning and scarcity

Bidding fee auctions utilise the principle of scarcity whereby a user bids incrementally against other bids and against time. When time runs out the final bidder wins and pays for the product at a fraction of the retail price and the auction company generate a skyrocketed profit margin on the product. A really good online example is Madbid.

Each product has a timer countdown and pits users against each other. The concept of scarcity is used in an extremely powerful state on this site.  Imagine this technique being used on retail site for clearance items?

5. Treasure hunts and scarcity

Everyone loves a good old treasure hunt. But how do you relate this to scarcity and sales?

Create competitions that require intelligence or solving a something such as a riddle or mystery. For example solve the riddle to receive the hidden code – which can be used to obtain a unique limited edition item. A recent example of this is Jimmy Choos.

Here’s what they did…

“Shoe lovers in London have been glued to their mobile devices and computer screens in a race to win a pair of free Jimmy Choos.” (Reuters 2012)

Jimmy Choos created an internet style treasure hunt. A picture of the bag is left at a random location on the site with clues provided on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Once a user has figured out the clue it’s a mad dash to the location to claim their prize.

Awesome right? For those that miss out there’s a real desire to get it the next time. The integration of social, competitions and scarcity are seen in one campaign. The result a 33% uplift in sales! See the case study!

The Hoxton Hotel $1 sale is an awesome case study using similar principles check out Sam Crocker’s post!

Final thoughts

Scarcity is a powerful sales tool and can create a “Black Friday” effect. We implemented a simple scarcity technique for a retail site and got a 30% uplift in conversion rate which is proof it does indeed work but it needs to be executed properly. Its success depends on your audience and how it gets executed. It’s only when you pit people against each other and create competition for a product that you skyrocket your sales.

I’d love to know your thoughts as always drop me a comment below or catch me on twitter.

Image Cred: tinamathis

5 Forms of Scarcity to Skyrocket Your Sales is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

What product are you actually sending me? Where are you sending it to? When will I have my order? How can I track my order?

Ok, let’s pretend that the order confirmation email has already been sent, and now we’re looking to do some after sale follow up, so let’s analyse the above email from that perspective.

You will notice that the email requests for the customer to leave a review on a 3rd party site, trustpilot.co.uk. This is just one of numerous sites which Google looks at in Google Shopping for trusted review data, and they are capitalising on that for enhanced visibility.

Why the hell should I leave a review? I mean, what’s in it for me?

This email doesn’t answer those questions, but it did spark my interest to pull together a blog post looking at ways we can improve emails like this, to not only encourage repeat sales but improve effectiveness of our marketing strategy as well.

As we touched on 3rd party review sites, we’ll start with this…

How can I generate more reviews on trusted review sites?

Here is a quick list of some of the main review sites which are being attributed to Google Shopping:

• Ciao UK
• Kelkoo UK
• PriceGrabber.co.uk
• TrustE-Marketing
• Trust Pilot
• Dooyoo.co.uk
• ReviewCentre.com
• ResellerRatings.com
• Reevoo
• Google Checkout Reviews

When contacting customers, rotate the requested review destination to heighten visibility across these key platforms.

Ok, so what can we do to encourage these reviews? Think of the rewards:

• Discount code
• Entry to a competition to win X
• Complimentary gift/freebie
• Free delivery on next order
• Redeemable points
• Exclusive deals

Encouraging customer engagement

So where can we hook up with our customers online?

Inviting them to connect on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in the email is such a simple addition yet there are still so many situations (like the above example) that ignore this opportunity altogether.

Why should they join? More exclusive deals, competitions, freebies as well as news on the latest products and offerings – shout about it in the email!

Related products

This is more likely to be seen as part of the check-out process but there is certainly no harm in offering other products that may be of interest in a follow up email.

Or if your site has integrated with Facebook, why not show products that have either been purchased/liked by their friends.

Introduce a friend

Referrals from friends can be very powerful, so why not give a greater reason for customers to introduce their friends.

Perhaps this could be in the form of a Tweet, Facebook Share, G+ post etc and the customer could receive X% off their next order. Why not take it even further and friends who sign up via a ‘discount url’ promoted by their friend can receive X% off of their first purchase:

“I just bought an X at @[site] – now you can get 10% off your first order [discount url]”

Personalisation

What data are you collecting from your customers that you can potentially use to personalise these very template-y emails? How can you use this data to pull at the heart strings of customers, enticing them to come back to the site or spread the word?

Some typical data collected:

• Gender
• Date of birth
• Name
• Purchase history – therefore an insight into the interests of the customer
• Type of customer – did they purchase cheaper or more expensive products
• Location
• Wish lists/Saved lists

Based on this data we can transform emails to be much more personal, but ok this has been mentioned before right, so what else can we do?

Has your site integrated with Facebook Connect? Here is some data that we can get by using Facebook:

• Birthdays for friends and family, anniversary, engagement etc.
• See which products friends have commented on/reviewed/liked/added to wish list
• Which products on the site have been purchased by friends/family
• Your interests – music, movies, television, sports, books, games etc.
• Facebook pages, brands etc liked by the customer

There are naturally going to be some privacy concerns, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend displaying products which X friend has purchased, unless they have given consent to do so. But that doesn’t mean you cannot use the data here to power personalisation of emails!

Reminders and related offers

“Hey, your brother’s birthday is coming up in 2 weeks! But don’t panic, we’ve pulled together a selection of gifts just for the occasion…”

Personalised wish list

You know which products they have purchased on the website, and you now know what their interests are based on Facebook; put the products in front of them in the form of a ‘dream wish list’.

Friend’s purchases

You know what their friends have purchased on the website, and based on the theory of sharing similar tastes with friends, put those products in front of the customer (without disclosing who purchased what unless consent is given).

Social sharing

If you have written a blog post or produced something that coincides with their interests – share it here!

What your friends think…

We all rely on reviews, so when they are enhanced to show exactly what your friends/family think of a specific product, the persuasive influence becomes even stronger.

Now the power of Facebook is naturally limited to the size of the active community on your site, and some parts are more applicable than others, but hopefully this gives an insight into ways of using data to add more personalisation.

My take on what this email could look like

Taking all of the above points in to consideration, here’s a mock up of how we can incorporate the above features. Please note that this is not an email template, this mock up is purely for illustration of the above features only.

[Please click on image to zoom in and read annotations]

Image credits:

Mail box by Ed Siasoco

Tips for Making Your After Sale Emails Work Harder is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!