All posts in Search Engine Optimisation

Posted by great scott!

They scrape you, they copy you, you license your content, you need geo-targeted versions of your pages…whatever the reason, duplicate content happens. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday we’ll look at how to deal with duplicate content in ways that will help you make sure you’re the one who ranks for your material (as you should) and what traps to avoid .

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Dealing with Duplicate Content from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your copy of our new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD series, I’ve got good news! We’ve extended our special launch pricing of 20% off plus free shipping for another week. This sale price will only be available until December 18th, and then it’s gone for good, so order your copy soon!

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By great scott!

Posted by Dr. Pete

You’d have a hard time telling by my posts (let alone my Twitter stream), but I’m supposedly a psychologist or something, so I thought it was time I did a little psychologizing here on the Moz blog. One thing I like to think I’ve learned over the years is the subtle art of persuasion – not the manipulative, why-won’t-my-clients-be-reasonable variety, but the art of communicating in a way that helps promote win-win situations with clients, prospects, and partners.

This post is the first in what could be a series (if you like it) about the art of professional persuasion. Whether it’s your boss, client, prospect, co-worker, or website visitor, your success often hinges on the ability to communicate persuasively.

The Yes/No Question

Every web designer has a version of this story – you work your little fingers to the bone to come up with the perfect design, research your client’s color preferences, industry competitors, and TiVo playlist, finally present your masterpiece to them, and then gasp in horror as they rip your baby to shreds like a pack of wolves on tainted Slim Fast. What happened? Whether you realize it or not, you forced your client against a wall by asking them a Yes/No question:

On the one-hand, you have your design, and on the other hand, nothing. Your client can only approve or disapprove. If they approve, great; if they don’t, then they start to do what all people do: rationalize their decisions. On a gut level, there’s something about your design they don’t like, so they look for things to pick apart. You (naturally) get defensive, and it’s all downhill from there.

The Yes/Yes Question

So, what happens if you give your client two options? You’ve turned a Yes/No question into an A/B question. Instead of “Do you like it?”, you’ve made the shift to “Which one do you like?”:

Not to over-illustrate what may be obvious by now, but you’ve just asked a Yes/Yes question, and the answer to a Yes/Yes question is almost always “Yes”.

Isn’t That A Lot of Work?

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it for years: isn’t creating two designs a lot of work? Pardon a tangent, but I should say that design is just one example – you can apply this principle to proposals of just about any kind (except maybe the marriage kind – “Will you marry me? How about Chad?”).

A designer friend finally turned me on to the secret – take the original proposal and make some modifications you can live with it. At first, I have to admit that this seemed like cheating. If you just tweak a couple of colors and fonts and act like it’s a whole new proposal, isn’t that a bit shady? Well, no, and here’s why. First, what amounts to “just tweaking” for you only seems easy because you’re a professional. Second, every one of us, in the process of creating anything, inevitably makes choices along the way. Many times, we make a decision because we have to, but we could’ve gone more than one direction. Revisit those decision points, and use them to generate a second proposal. Ultimately, you’ll be able to present people with options that aren’t too difficult to create and still maintain your integrity.

What if They Mix and Match?

There’s another worry people have with this approach, and it is justified in some cases, if a bit overblown. What if you present two options, and your target audience mixes and matches in ways you can’t live with? This could be true for designs as well as sales proposals. The complicated answer is that you eventually learn to engineer your choices in a way that makes mixing-and-matching a bit more palatable.

The short answer is: So what? Would you rather have a discussion about how Element B doesn’t fit Site A and have to get creative or have your client tell you why Site A sucks and they don’t want to pay you? If you can get your client to mix-and-match, then at least they’re telling you what they like. Hearing a laundry list of what someone doesn’t like is useless – hearing what they do like gives you options.

How Much Choice Is Too Much?

So, by my own logic, if two choices are good, how about three or more? More is always better, right?

Sorry, got carried away for a minute there. Unfortunately, more choices won’t necessarily yield more excitement for your target audience. Recent research certainly suggests that there’s such a thing as too many choices. In most cases, 2 options will be sufficient – in some situations, especially where a lot of money is involved or the risk of a bad decision is high, 3 or more choices may be required.

Let your own decision path be your guide. If you naturally encounter points along the creative path where you can’t decide which of two options is better, that may be a good place to diverge and create a second version of whatever you’re working on. If this happens frequently, then 3-4 versions may be natural. Just don’t invent versions for the sake of bombarding your audience with options – the goal is to give people a choice, not overwhelm them to the point of decision paralysis.

A Few More Examples

I’ve used the website design example to illustrate this concept, but there are many more cases where I think Yes/Yes questions can help you persuade someone in a win/win way:

• Sales proposals – Try 2 package options or pricing levels
• Boss proposals – Bosses love choices – 2+ options boost the odds you’ll get 1 of them
• Copywriting – Provide a long and short version (if applicable)
• Logo design – Consider color options to allow for client preference
• Christmas lists – I would like a (1) Upscaling DVD player or (2) HD TiVo – it’s your choice

Of course, never present an option you can’t live with. The whole point is to create a choice that helps you get an end result that’s positive for both you and the client/boss/etc. Get creative, and you’ll be amazed how often a little extra work up front can save you hours of headaches down the road.

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Speaking of persuasion, this is where I try to persuade you to check out SEOmoz’s 6-DVD Advanced SEO Training series. The introductory price (20% off + free shipping) has been extended until December 12.

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By Dr. Pete

Posted by randfish

I’ve been a big fan of Chris Dixon’s excellent blog for a while now, so you can imagine that I was really excited to see him writing about SEO in a post last week. Chris kindly called out SEOmoz, which humbled me, but he also espoused some thinking in the comments that made me a bit concerned and was the catalyst for this post. Here’s how it went:

RAND: Chris – I think the biggest thing you’ve forgotten to mention is that 70%+ of the weighting/ranking used by all of the engines depends on links. If you’re not thinking about how your content and pages will incent users/bloggers/writers/media/other sites to link to your work, you’ll lose out to someone who does.

A while back I got riled up about the lack of SEO in startup marketing and wrote about it – http://j.mp/4q9zkh – might be relevant/useful, though I did write with a bit more anger than was likely deserved.

CHRIS: Rand – totally agree re links. But isn’t getting links primarily about creating great content?

Read the article you link to btw and am in complete agreement.

RAND: Tragically, at least in my experience, the answer is a resounding no. Great content is easily missed by the web’s link-heavy audience, while some pretty crummy content that’s been marketed well (or made the right connections or comes from the right sources) will tend to overperform.

The web’s link graph isn’t a meritocracy – like everything else in life, it’s a popularity contest. Those who find the best ways to distribute, promote and market their works to the audience most likely to link to it are going to succeed much more so than just the “great content” producers.

Just think of it like politics. The best, most rational, reasoned, intelligent arguments are the exception, not the rule. Instead, the conversation and media attention (and thus, public awareness) is focused on concepts that are easy to grasp, virally distributable (which often puts rumor and innuendo above fact) and fit a compelling narrative (rather than add complexity).

A post on this topic – http://j.mp/4tYThK

I would love to tell Chris that he’s right, that the better the content, the better, higher quality and greater quantity of links that content earns. But, perhaps sadly, that’s not the case. What those in the content world woudl call “better” does not always (nor even mostly) garner the links and rankings. Instead, those who have “better optimized” for attracting links tend to far outshine their peers with rankings and traffic.

This may seem like a tragedy, or even a travesty of the democratic structure the web is supposed to represent, but in fact, it’s the way all marketing has worked for generations. The “best” restaurants are often family-owned, hole-in-the-wall, never-marketed-themselves joints whose fabulous epicurean creations are a secret to all but the most diligent culinary Clouseaus. Meanwhile, the affront to humanity and cuisine that is Olive Garden advertises relentlesslly, conducts impeccable market research and appeals to the lowest common deniminator in town after town to achieve geographic and market-penetration ubiquity (BTW – my wife is Italian and thus recoils at the very mention of this estabilishment and the tarnish it’s brought to her beloved cuisine).

Like many parts of life – it’s not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field. It’s a strange, almost paradoxical leap of logic, but one you internalize this principle, it gets easier to accept and to spread to your clients and managers.

p.s. I’m also a fan of Chris Dixon’s startup, Hunch – I’d urge you to check it out and try answering a few dozen questions. The results are quite fascinating.

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By randfish

Posted by willcritchlow

Bing recently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it.

For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenu for mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form.

The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like:

• linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site – more on this below)
• linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title)
• linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page)

The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query – with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com.

How do you use this for SEO?

This is a linkbuilding tip post – the idea being two-fold:

1. suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those links (more on this below but it’s very effective for building highly trusted links)
2. sometimes the “one-step-removed” linkbuilding model can work superbly well for identifying linkbuilding targets. If I were running a cooking blog (wait, I do – it took superhuman effort not to drop a shameless link there), it might be a good idea to look at something like this as a superb linkbuilding target list

The information contained in the second approach is typically findable through other means (or the targets are likely to appear on your radar in other ways) and there is a lot of searching through chaff to find wheat. I wanted to run through a worked example today to show you how powerful method #1 can be:

Worked example

I had to pick a niche and a target for my worked example. I decided to imagine I was linkbuilding for a technical but not-specifically-web-related company. I’m trying to get links from trusted authoritative domains so I start with big educational institutions.

As some of you may know, I studied at the University of Cambridge (ending with a year at the Statslab). I don’t want them getting link requests from all you lot, so I picked Oxford (**).

I’m pretending my imaginary client works in some area of telecoms and has resources and technical papers on subjects like wimax and spectrum usage.

First up, wimax:

• Start with the linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain%3Aox.ac.uk+wimax&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n
• Pick out an interesting-looking resource: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html
• Dive over to the labs tools to find ox.ac.uk links to this page: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/backlinks?uri=http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html&linktype=page
• This highlights this kind of page: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/details.php?id=O08C835H6J

It turns out that conted.ox.ac.uk is a goldmine for linkbuilders. It’s the Continuing Education section of the Oxford University site and seems to be very generous with linking out. I might suggest that my client gives a talk or writes a resource for a CPD course. At the very least, it might be worth creating some content to target this kind of page.

Tip: I find it best to look for links to pages that aren’t homepages because it’s typically easier to find where the link originates from. Bing doesn’t have an effective link: operator meaning that we have to use Yahoo, Linkscape or similar. Because we are then not using the same index, it can be tricky to track down the link found by linkfromdomain.

Another example starting with spectrum auctions – sometimes it’s funny where this kind of research can take you:

• A different linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain%3Aox.ac.uk+spectrum+auctions&filt=all&first=11&FORM=PORE
• A different kind of interesting-looking (and, as it happens, off-topic) resource: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html
• A demonstration of using Yahoo! instead of labs tools to find the source of the link: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Farts-entertainment%2Fbooks%2Freviews%2Fdead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html+site%3Aox.ac.uk&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35
• Leads to a new strategy – find a way to write about this college and drop them a line: http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/news/media.html

(Incidentally, I found a very similar opportunity on the Cambridge site, but no, I’m not going to tell you about it.)

In an unexpected turn of events, I also found some pretty active blogs writing about my target subject matter on ox.ac.uk URLs. Even I’m not mean enough to fill up those guys’ inboxes with outreach from you lot just because they picked the wrong university.

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(*) I don’t know about anyone else, but I am rooting for a more balanced search market (particularly in the UK, where Google has a ~90% market share). I think competition is good for consumers and for businesses.

(**) seriously, we don’t get on (US folks, think of the relationship between Duke and UNC) but I’m not encouraging anyone to spam Oxford University. Really. I’m not. Even though the varsity match is this week.

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There are some other great resources on linkfromdomain – I really liked PPC blog’s tip about expired and for sale domains.

Rand has also written about the uses of linkfromdomain for finding spam you are linking to as well as teasing you with the fact that he “gave up” a similar tip to my worked example above at SMX Advanced.

Technorati Tags

linkbuilding, bing, linkfromdomain

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By willcritchlow

Posted by inflatemouse

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

In late October Forum One Networks put out a white paper titled “Online Community and Social Media Compensation.” I applaud their efforts, but, I think they create an unrealistic view of the job space in online media.

 One, I think the surveyed companies over-represent corporate jobs.

Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

Their average respondent is in a department of 9-people and have at least one sub-ordinate. I suspect the truth of the job landscape is that there are far more web jobs (social media, web design/development, SEO, PPC and web analytics) in small business than in large corporations.

Two, they fail to address critical issues like education, work experience and job duties.

Forum One claims that in social media the average woman makes $75,624 and the average man makes $86,644. I feel simply looking at the averages is too shallow to make a good argument about compensation.

So, I am doing something about it. I think the SEOmoz community has a wide range of people and will contribute a broader, and more realistic, perspective on what jobs on the web really look like. I put together an 18-question anonymous survey (it will take less than 5 minutes to complete) to create a better look at salary and compensation on the web.

Once I collect the data we will make all of the findings transparent, free to download and creative-commons so you can use the data freely. Help the community by creating better data resources.

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By inflatemouse

Posted by jennita

Disclaimer: This article consists of our favorite articles of the past year and does not have actionable SEO techniques. Please read on if you’re interested in knowing more about us, and what we like!

This week I’ve been personally invested in Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge aka #best09. The idea is that each day in December you reflect on the past year and write about a different topic each day. Obviously you can write every day, or pick and choose which topics you want to cover. It’s only been a few days but I’ve enjoyed reading through some of the blogs and tweets from people participating. Today the topic is:

December 3 Article. What’s an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious’d and reference throughout the year.

Since the topic is right up our alley, the SEOmoz crew decided to put together a list of our favorite articles from 2009. Some of these are search related, but many of them are not. Take a peek into our minds and I think you’ll find it interesting the types of articles we love.

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Not sure if it “qualifies” since it’s from last year, but I shared this article, about what it really means to be a billionaire, with a ton of people. It’s absolutely fascinating, especially if you’re someone (like me) who fantasizes about how you would potentially spend great sums of cash

On the flip-side of the equation is this excellent article from the Washington Post illuminating the incredibly high cost of being poor. Fascinating and eye-opening. 

Together they pack a one-two punch that sheds a ton of light on just how drastic wealth and class disparity can be, even in the U.S.

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I’m a big fan of this GapingVoid post from October: The moment

From an SEO standpoint, I’ve been getting a lot of mileage from Eric Enge’s interview with Google Image search engineer Peter Linsley. It’s a topic that doesn’t get covered often, and the information in the article is incredibly useful.

This Smashing Mag post is Usability-oriented, but great stuff for any web person. Unlike many of these kinds of articles, almost every point in this one is directly actionable:

Of course, I also think this post was pretty good – the author is clearly a genius

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Life lesson: There is no speed limit – talks about how education is designed to get everyone through and how many people take this slow pace with them throughout their life.

We Have Been De-googled! – One blog talks about the impact of being kicked out of Google for seemingly no reason.

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The article that made the biggest impact on my life this year was this one from SEOmoz. It is Lindsay’s first post and it was an announcement of the job opening I ended up getting.

Personally this short post helped me get my personal goals organized.

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Rand’s favorites from the past few months:
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/youre-just-getting-started/
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/11/24/on-self-promotion/
http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/
http://www.everywhereist.com/borough-market-a-place-for-love-but-not-vegetarians/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?hp
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek
http://cdixon.org/?p=1391

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I’ll continue to add to this list if any of the other team members decide to add theirs as well. 2009 has been a wonderful year for us and we look forward to many great articles in 2010. Please tell us about your favorite posts and articles from 2009. And we encourage you to be a part of the blog challenge!

By the way, there’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! We’ve only got a few passes left, so you should probably hurry. SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal (and if Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010).

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By jennita

Posted by great scott!

Not unlike investing, when it comes to link acquisition diversity is key.  Evidence points to a strong preference by the engines for a diverse link profile rather than a homogeneous one, even if the links in a narrow profile are from strong sites. In this week’s WBF, we’ll look at why a wide variety of linking domains is better than repeated links, even from very strong domains: it’s all about trust.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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By great scott!

Posted by Nick Gerner

As we rapidly approach the end of 2009 and opening of 2010, we’ve got a much anticipated index update ready to roll out gang.  Say it with me “twenty-ten”.  Oh yeah, I’m so gonna get a flying car and a cyberpunk android    …Ahem.  I thought this would be a great time to take a look back at the year and ask, “where did all those pages go?”  Being a data-driven kind of guy, I want to take a look at some numbers about churn, freshness and what it means for the size of the web and web indexes over the last year, and the hundreds of billions, indeed trillion plus urls we’ve gotten our hands on.

This index update has a lot going on, so I’ve broken things out section by section:

• Analysis of the Web’s Churn (or why having ten trillion URLs isn’t very useful)
• Canonicalization, De-Duping & Choosing Which Pages to Keep
• Statistics on our December Linkscape Update
• New Updates to the FREE SEOmoz API (and a 90% price drop on the paid API)

An Analysis of the Web’s Churn Rate

Not too long ago, at SMX East, I heard Joachim Kupke (senior software engineer on Google’s indexing team) say that ”a majority of the web is duplicate content”. I made great use of that point at a Jane and Robot meet up shortly after.  Now, I’d like to add my own corollary to that statement: “most of the web is short-lived”.

After just a single month, a full 25% of the URLs are what we call “unverifiable”.  By that I mean that the content was either duplicate, included session parameters, or for some reason could not be retrieved (verified) again (404s, 500s, etc.).  Six months later, 75% of the tens of billions of URLs we’ve seen are “unverifiable” and a year later, only 20% qualifies for “verified” status. As Rand noted earlier this week, Google’s doing a lot of verifying themselves.

To visualize this dramatic churn, imagine the web six months ago…

Using Joachim’s point, plus what we’ve observed, that six-month old content today looks something like this:

What this means for you as a marketer is that some of the links you build and content you share across the web is not permanent. If you engage heavily with high-churn portions of the web, the statistics you monitor over time can vary pretty wildly. It’s important to understand the difference between getting links (and republishing content) in places that will make a splash now, but fade away, versus engaging in lasting ways.  Of course, both are important (as high-churn areas may drive traffic that turns into more permanent value), but the distinction shouldn’t be overlooked. 

Canonicalization, De-Duping & Choosing Which Pages to Keep

Regarding Linkscape’s indices, we capture both of these cases:

• We’ve got an up-to-date crawl including fresh content that’s making waves right now. Blogscape helps power this, monitoring 10 million+ feeds and sending those back to Linkscape for inclusion in our crawl.
• We include the lasting content which will continue to support your SEO efforts by analyzing which sites and pages are “unverifiable” and removing these from each new index. This is why our index growth isn’t cumulative — we re-crawl the web each cycle to make sure that the links + data you’re seeing are fresh and verifiable.

To put it another way, consider the quality of most of the pages on the web, as measured, for instance, by mozRank:

I think the graph speaks for itself. The vast majority of pages have very little “importance” as defined by a measure of link juice. So it doesn’t surprise me (now at least) that most of these junk pages are disappearing after not too long.  Of course, there are still plenty of really important pages that do stick around.

But what does this say about the pages we’re keeping?  First of let’s take out any discussion of the pages that we saw over a year ago (as we’ve seen above, there’s likely less than 1/5th of them remaining on the web).  In just the past 12 months, we’ve seen between 500 billion and well over 1 trillion pages depending on how you count it (via Danny at Search Engine Land).

So in just a year we’ve provided 500 billion unique urls through Linkscape and the Linkscape powered tools (Competitive Link Finder, Visualization, Backlink Analysis, etc.). And what’s more, this represents less than half of the URLs we’ve seen in total, as the “scrubbing” we do for each index cuts approx. 50% of the “junk” (including canonicalization, de-duping, and straight tossing for spam and other reasons). There’s likely many trillions of URLs out there, but the engines (and Linkscape) certainly don’t want anything close to all of these in an index.

Linkscape’s December Index Update:

From this latest index (compiled over approx. the last 30 days) we’ve included:

• 47,652,586,788 unique URLs (47.6 billion)
• 223,007,523 subdomains (223 million)
• 58,587,013 root domains (59.5 billion)
• 547,465,598,586 links (547 billion)

We’ve checked that all of these URLs and links existed within the last month or so.  And I call out this notion of “verified” because we believe that’s what matters for a lot of reasons:

• Our own research on how search engines rank documents
• Your impact on the web (as in traditional marketing) and ability to compare progress over time
• Sharing reliable, trust-worthy data with customers, both for self and competitive analysis
• Measuring progress and areas for improvement in search acquisition and SEO

I hope you’ll agree. Or, at least, share your thoughts

New Updates to the Free & Paid Versions of our API

I also want to call a shout out to Sarah who’s been hard at work on repackaging our site intelligence API suite.  She’s got all kinds of great stuff planned for early the coming year, including tons of data in our free APIs.  Plus she’s dropped the prices on our paid suite by nearly 90%.

Both of these items are great news to some of our many partners, including:

• Buzzstream – a tool for social media, PR and link management
• Brandwatch – a reputation monitoring tool
• Grader.com – Hubspot’s popular site analysis tool
• Quirk’s Search Status Bar
• And at least three of these top “10 Link Building Tools for Tracking Inbound Links”

Thanks to these partners we’ve doubled the traffic to our APIs to over 4 million hits per day, more than half of which are from external partners!  We’re really excited to be working with so many of you.

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By Nick Gerner

Posted by randfish

Thanks so much for all your votes and feedback on our PRO Webinar Series over the holiday weekend. We received 285 responses and we’re taking your suggestions very seriously and conducting the webinar as you’ve requested

Here are the stats from the questionairre/form (you can still fill it out if you’d like to give more input):

Will you be able to attend the PRO Webinar on Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London)?

• 74% – Yes, I’m planning to attend!
• 20% – I’m unsure if I can make it (but would like to)
• 6% – No, I’m busy at that time (but would like to join in others in the future)
• 0% – I’m not attending (because I’m not a fan of webinars or uninterested in the subject matter)

What topics most interest you for the webinar (check all that apply)?

• 79% – Link Building & Link Acquisition
• 51% SEO Metrics, Analytics and Key Performance Indicators
• 44% – Social Media Marketing for SEO
• 41% – Keyword Research Tools & Processes
• 40% – Navigation & Site Architecture for SEO
• 35% – Content Creation & Optimization
• 24% – Avoiding Spam, Penalties & Filters
• 20% – Incenting UGC & User Participation for SEO

What webinar format would you prefer?

• 47% – 45 min. presentation, 45 min. Q+A (90 min. total)
• 37% – 30 min. presentation, 30 min. Q+A (60 min. total)
• 12% – 30 min. presentation, 60 min. Q+A (90 min. total)
• 4% – All Q+A (60 min. total)

Based on this, we’re going to be running a 90 minute webinar, with a 45 minute slide deck presentation (and possibly video as well, though it will likely just be of me on the webcam) from 11am – 12:30pm Pacific (2pm – 3:30pm Eastern, 7pm-8:30pm London) on Thursday December 10th. The webinar will cover the following rough outline (obviously, in more detail):

• Link Building Strategies for 2010
• What Goals Can Link Building Help Us Achieve?
  • Bolster Individual Rankings
  • Improve a Domain’s Ability to Rank Pages
  • Achieve Full(er) Indexation
  • Drive Direct Traffic & Branding
• The 8 Basic Link Building Food Groups (with examples)
  • Manual Link Submissions/Requests
  • Competitive Link Research + Acquisition
  • Links via Embedded Content
  • Content Based, Linkbait & Viral Link Attraction
  • Content, Technology & API Licensing
  • Link Exchanges & Trades-in-Kind
  • Paid Links
  • Link Reclamation
• What are the Right Kinds of Links to Accomplish my Goals?
  • Links for Individual Rankings
  • Links for Domain “Authority”
  • Links for Indexation
  • Links for Traffic & Branding
• How to Use Tools & Processes to Make Link Building Easier
  • Tools for Competitive Link Research
  • Metrics for Evaluating a Link’s Value
  • Building a Link Acquisition Process (i.e. the “Link Conversion Funnel”)
  • Making Processes Scalable
• Link Building Shortcuts to Take (and Avoid)
  • How to Get Your Community Link Building for You
  • How to Get the Anchor Text and Target You Want
  • How to Avoid Links that You Think Are Helping Your Competition (but really aren’t)
  • How to Spot Strategies that the Engines May Devalue
• Wrap-Up / Q+A

I’m certainly open to feedback about what you’d like to see in there, and happy to make some inclusions where possible. All PRO members will receive an invite via email in the next 2-3 days with a link to register. You’ll be able to dial-in or hear the webinar via your computer speakers/headphone and ask questions via a chat interface. You can see an examples of a past presentation I’ve made below:

This lengthy one came from my HostingCon keynote and serves as a fun introduction to SEO (BTW – let me strongly recommend against creating slide decks using photos of a whiteboard; it’s fun and the audience likes it, but it took about 12 solid hours of surprisingly intensive whiteboard drawing and erasing, nevermind the editing, cropping and pasting):

I’m very much looking forward to spending the morning with our PRO members next week! If you’re not yet PRO, Scott’s got some pretty sweet offers still available including the SES Chicago ticket + 1 year of PRO for $799 (and you can trade in the Chicago pass for any SES event in 2010) and the Advanced Training DVD for PRO members at $199.

Note that the other topics that received lots of votes – SEO Metrics & KPIs, Social Media Marketing, etc. will likely be the topics for webinars in January, February and March.

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By randfish

Posted by randfish

Yesterday night I stayed up way too late authoring a post on Google’s Indexation Cap. Today, despite getting up way too early, I wanted to follow up and answer some of the questions from the comments, Twitter and my email. I think SEOs who read the post rightly asked for more direction in solving this problem – a fair request. Below, I’ve done my best to tackle these problems visually, as I believe we all think about site architecture and crawling issues in a visual structure.

First off, here’s a sample site hieararchy to set down the concept and give the colors I’m using in the following diagrams more context:

Next, I’ve illustrated in a more representative fashion, how those hieararchies might look on a website, and noted the external link potential of each:

In this next piece, I’m trying to explain a very important concept and something that’s frequently misunderstood by SEOs. Once upon a time, search spiders would crawl the web largely recursively – hitting a homepage that had been submitted to its index (remember way back when search engines had submission?!), then crawling in an outward fashion based on the links they discoverd there. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and as we all see with crawl paths (if you’re looking at the requests Google/Yahoo!/Bing make to your domain), multiple entry points are nearly universal and crawling pushes “outward” from those priority URLs. It looks a bit like Minesweeper, right?

Finally, I’ve got a graphic to help understand how to positively approach these problems and solve them.

There are certainly more recommendations that can be provided around these issues, and I look forward to a discussion of them in the comments.

p.s. I covered site architecture and navigation in a good bit of detail at the PRO Training this summer, but I like this image format so much, I think I might re-craft something new for next year. It feels like structuring sites properly is still a big pain point for SEOs (but possibly that’s less to do with lack of knowledge and more to do with lack of influence during the design phase?)

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By randfish