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How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

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.

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One

First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.

Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.

We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.

Keyword Lists and Tables

Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.

I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).

In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:

=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)

You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.

The Impression That I Get

No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.

The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.

Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.

If You Ain't First Page, You're Last

Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.

The More You Know

The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.

Mo Money Mo Metrics

Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.

Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.

Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.

One Report To Rule Them All

Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.

There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:

The master report.

Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.

Pivotal Success

Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.

Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.

Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.

Pivot Table Fields

This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.

For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.

Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.

The final product.

Conclusion

Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!

Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.

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Publ.Date : 2012-02-04T09:04:41+01:00

Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?!

Posted by evolvingSEO

The 80/20 Value of Titles

Recently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I've seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral. He touches briefly upon the importance of your title for click through rate and sharability, but in this post I'd like to take a more in depth look at titles and how they help spread your content. (By the way, this is my first YouMoz - woohoo!)

In my opinion, the elements of writing click worthy titles deserve more attention. In the wonderful marketing book "Made To Stick", the Heath brothers note that any good news or editorial writer may spend 80% of their time crafting the title (or "lead") and then whatever time they have left on the body of the content.

For those familiar with 80/20, what this means is, the size of the title compared to the actual content (and time spent crafting it) disproportionately affects the success of that content. It's one small piece of text with a lot power!

Note: to clarify, I am not necessarily referring to the title tag exclusively. I'm referring to simply the title of a page, post, article... which as you will see below can be the same as your title tag, but doesn't have to be.

A Quick Analogy: The Internet As a Highway

If your webpage was a store on the side of a busy highway, the title's job would be to capture attention and get people in the door. As many of the right people as possible. If you've ever driven on Route 1 heading into Boston, MA, you know what I mean (see photo).

Lots of people may pass by your links, tweets and shares, but few may actually stop to come in and check things out.

I hope this little analogy illustrates the extreme importance of crafting a clickable title - and that you will join me as I suggest some ideas for making your titles more clickable. Let's go!!!

7 Ingredients of a Click Worthy Title

Assuming all other factors neutral for the moment, let's look at what I think are 7 most important ingredients of your titles;

Curiosity
Benefit
Emotion
Tangible
Appearance
Sound
Expectation

Ingredient 1: Curiosity

Your title should be clear enough that people know what they're going to get when they click, but also leave an element of curiosity - so you almost can't help but to click. You just have to find out what's on the other side. Some examples of elements that can entice curiosity;

Curiosity A: Unexpected

How do you make something unexpected? Combine two things that usually do not go together, like this;

"Diet Coke" is not something you usually expect to see in a post about SEO. 77 thumbs up.

Curiosity B: Incomplete Thought or Question

Pete's title here makes me curious, because he asks an open question, which I wonder how/if it will be answered within the post.

Curiosity C: Present A Conflict (Plot)

Rand does a great job here of introducing curiosity because there is an inherent conflict; a choice requiring resolution. Which one will he choose and why? Which do I choose and can I offer an alternative opinion? Will I agree with him?

Curiosity D: State What Something Isn't

I'm left thinking; It isn't? What Is? Do I know them? What's John going to say?

Ingredient 2: Highlight The Benefit

Benefit is congruent to differentiation. On the whole, people will visit a page because there is some sort of benefit to them. Useful content, entertainment, or even content that will make them look good if they share it. Why should someone click and visit your page? What are they going to get out of it? Some examples that imply benefit;

How to...
7 Ways...
Find Out How...
Introducing.... (implies newness)

These are all common elements of a title that hint at benefit. Like this;

Providing a clear benefit is also a way to differentiate your content from others, in that you're implying it holds unique value that can't be found elsewhere. I also like "face-off" - there's a lot of meaning (visual, emotion, tension, etc) packed into those two words.

Ingredient 3: Elicit Excitement/Emotion

People also act on emotion - excitement, fear, hope. Your title should conjure the right emotion in viewers. I don't think people always click purely on emotion, but emotion can certainly support the other ingredients. Things like;

Thanks for the tweet Tom :-) I think the emotional aspect (as in this case) can apply more to social media - the title you might craft in a tweet of something, such as Tom's "ridiculously awesome" text here. Some other emotional words are;

killer
amazingly
fantastic
FREE
mistakes
mind-blowing
surprising
staggering
surprisingly
uncommonly
unusually
myths
irresistibly
seductively
tempting
uncontrollably
unexpected
unbelievably
astonishing
astoundingly
remarkably
insanely
stupidly
wicked
viral
epic

You get the idea :-)

Note that adverbs (ending in "ly") are quite popular. Honestly, I'm just using the thesaurus for a lot of those :-) But if you're fine with describing your own work in such glamorous words, go for it! I typically reserve this for something I'm really confident about, or if I'm referring to something else, like a product review.

Also;

Exclamation points!!!!!!
ALL CAPS - You MUST Read This NOW
-------->Arrows. The Best Post Ever ---> Read Now
*Asterisks* - I Just *Love* The Ideas in blah blah blah....

Just remember that not all special type characters work well across different platforms (social, blog themes etc) so use carefully. And they can also get annoying quickly, so use sparingly.

Ingredient 4: Make It Tangible

The Health Brother's book "Made To Stick" talks a lot about making your ideas concrete or tangible. I highly recommend going to this page of resources and downloading the free PDF "Made To Stick Success Model" (and read their book!)

Great example here though by Mike King;

I'm sure we all get an instant clear picture in mind of the "Cat In The Hat", as it's a familiar tangible graphic. Also keep in mind that, in Mike's case especially, a great post can naturally lend its self to a great title.

Ingredient 5: Appearance & Length

Although, in my opinion, not as important as 1-4, but if you can get your titles to look aesthetically pleasing, even better. Like this;

I like what Neil has done here, however intentional or not. The title fits on one line. It looks pleasing graphically, and its seven words long (which is supposedly the recommended length of a title or headline).

Ingredient 6: Sound

I don't know about you, but I "hear" myself saying the titles in my head. Just like appearance, this is of secondary importance, but if you can put an artistic touch to your titles, it makes them that much better.

I'm going to use Neil's title (noted just above) again as an example here. It sounds nice. It has a poetic ring to it.

The alliteration "Lessons Learned".
The "esss" sound in "Lessons" and "SEO" fit nicely
as well as the "sea" sound in agency.

Can you tell I am a musician?

Again, the appearance and sound of your title is secondary, I believe, to the first four ingredients, but in my mind if you can get all 7 elements into a title, you're a freakin' genius. :-)

Ingredient 7: Expectations

Don't advertise "the best burger in town" and then have it be a veggie burger. It could be the best veggie burger that ever existed, but you set the wrong expectation. This is where you need to have some serious alignment and harmony between what you promise in the title and deliver with the content.

For this, I'd like to cite an example where the wrong expectation may have been set;

While honestly, I've only skimmed this post, the 17 thumbs down and people's comments (some about the title directly) illustrate the point that you don't want misrepresent the content of your post. Whether intentional or not, this post unfortunately seemed to do that. But conversely it did get quite a bit of attention (101 thumbs up and promotion to main blog) so it was a well-written title, just may not have been best aligned with the content.

So some questions to ask yourself to double check this;

Does the title match the content? - What would YOU expect to see on the other side if you read the title? Does it match in what you imply the benefits will be?
Does it imply content type? - Do you use the words "photo, video, graphic, interview, read, slideshow" etc implying what the core content type is going to be? Does that in fact match what's in the post?
How long will it take to consume? - Do you call something a "complete guide", implying extensive length, when it is just a short overview? Do you call something a "quick recap" when in fact it's an in-depth look? Or say "7 steps" when in fact that's only a piece of the whole content?

Finally, note that you don't have to have all of these ingredients all of the time. Certain content may be more inherently exciting, or other content more controversial and thus evokes more curiosity.

Breaking The Rules

There are, of course plenty of exceptions to these ingredients in the real world:

Exception 1: Created By Influential Person/Business

If Rand or Danny Sullivan or Avinash posts a new article, there is an inherent trust and reputation built in. I think the concept of authority is explained well in Rand's post about thought leadership. Along those lines, when Roger (@SEOmoz) tweets out the newest blog post, since this is coming from a popular SEO company, Roger's reputation can boost up click worthiness and thus, the title is not quite as important.

Exception 2: Extremely Noteworthy or Newsworthy Content

During the time of SOPA or the Google (Not Provided) dilemma or now SPYW, if you were to post something with a decent title that was timely, this would be more likely to get clicks, just by nature of it being a hot topic.

Exception 3: Rebellion / Pure Artistic Liberty / Don't Care

Obviously there are sectors of the web or moments where you just want to throw your hair down and crank out an over the top, creative, artistic, rebellious title. Of course, as I'm now typing this, those sound like they'd get some good clicks as well! They just won't follow the "formula".

I shamelessly use my own example;

When I was first getting my SEO blog going, I didn't care so much about getting tons of traffic, because I knew I was just starting to blog about SEO, and thus it wouldn't be my best content. It was more for practice, and to have some content there to build upon. So why not have some fun right?

And as I imply, the "ingredients" as described above do not always have to follow this formula, depending upon your audience and industry and even goals.

Where / How The Title Appears Around the Web

When you come up with a great title, where do you put it? Should it always go in your title tag? Header?

Most often, some version of your title is going to be in three places;

Title Tag
Header (which should be the H1)
URL (in a "clean" format, with hyphens etc).

But there are exceptions and considerations. A balance needs to be found between what will appear on-site, in the SERPs in social media or even bookmarking. Some things to keep in mind about each;

1. The SERPs

1.The title tag IS the anchor text in the SERPs (unless Google decides to change it).

I know this is basic, but SO important to remember when we're composing the title tag not only for rankings but CTR. Doesn't help if it ranks but no one clicks!

2. (In My Opinion) The Title Tag Should Be 50% for SEO and 50% for clicks

What do I mean by this? Good practice technical SEO (for ranking) says to put your most important keyword/keyphrase in the title tag, and as close to the front as possible. I'm speaking more about blog posts in this case, but I feel that if the keyword needs to be towards the end, or split up/modified in some way, to create a click worthy title, this is essential. Obviously if you're trying to rank a page for an extremely competitive keyword in the e-commerce space for example, this is going to differ, but that case may be extreme.

3. URLs - This is where you can win for rankings!!

Look at the URL in Avinash's post;

His TITLE (with "change or perish" is click worthy) but his URL does not need "change or perish". Keep your URLs as clean, focused and optimized as possible. This again is simply my opinion and experience and what I would recommend to clients in most cases. I even recommend switching the order of your words in the URL to get the keywords in the front of the URL, if this was not possible in the title tag.

The header will likely NOT appear in the SERPs, unless it ends up in the description.

2. Twitter

What I find unique about Twitter is, the link anchor text is not the title, which differs from most other places on the web. Thus why I like Twitter as a tool for experimentation, because you can change the headline easily just by writing a new tweet, but it is important to know where the title can come from.

Via The Tweet Button

Normally, what will auto-fill by default is the title tag;

Yet another reason to optimize your title tag for CTR!!!

You can of course control to an extent what text auto-fills via the tweet button, and I recommend starting with the Twitter documentation for this.

What The User Inputs

Often it's the case that people will create their own text to tweet a link, but in many cases they will just copy your page header (this is what I do anyway if just sharing quickly) because it's the easiest thing to do. In many cases, your CMS (WordPress for example) will make your title tag and header the same thing by default (and also add the website name at the end of the title tag).

Twitter and URLs

This is an interesting and outlying example that Rand pointed out, where the URL can potentially help CTR. That is, when you hover over most URLs in Twitter, you can see the full URL as you hover;

Very useful, and this for me will make or break a click 100% of the time. I always hover before clicking. Obviously this is limited to desktop/laptop devices :-)

But here you can see that is not always the case, and in this case I am much less likely to click;

3. Facebook

Ahh... Facebook and the Open Graph. This is where things get interesting for sure. I remember when I first was learning about the Facebook like/share/recommend buttons, I was confused how it all worked. In short though - you have to properly add the Facebook open graph meta tags to your site to control what appears when people use Facebook share buttons, and even to an extent, when people simply cut and paste a link into Facebook.

And I would highly recommend reading this post and especially ---> this post by Aaron Friedman on Search Engine Land for more details on controlling your Facebook titles around the web.

4. Google Plus

As expected, Goolge Plus uses your title tag for the title of a link when sharing;

It's OK to share stuff about Facebook on Google Plus right?

So to conclude for implementation, in general:

Write Title Tags for CTR with enough SEO to help rankings.
Write URLs mainly for SEO but descriptive enough for clicks. Keep them clean looking.
Write Headers that closely match your title but also look and feel great on-page.
While all three elements should contain your core keyword, the three elements do not have to be exactly the same.

Analyzing The Effectiveness Of Your Titles

While an in depth technique for measuring CTR is out of the scope of this post (it still seems CTR is one of those Holy Grail metrics for SEO - deceptively hard to calculate average CTR and even actual CTR for specific sites. Not just in SERPs, but everywhere around the web. If SEOmoz developed a way to truly and accurately measure this, I would use it! Do you agree?) .. I can however point you to a few resources, which can help you get a basic feel for how your CTR is going;

Bit.ly Data

There are many options for URL shorteners, but I personally use and like bit.ly, so we'll focus on that here.

First, I recommend reading bit.ly's documentation on how they capture data and display metrics.

Secondly, Rand mentions how if you add the + (plus) sign to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see the stats for that link. This is awesome!!

For instance, take someone like Tim Ferriss, who has a relatively high amount of followers on Twitter. I can take a link he's shared on Twitter and see how many clicks its received. Not only that, I can look through his entire list of publically shortened URLs.

That said, I'm sure there are technical geniuses who can figure out a more robust method to measuring and using publically available data like this, but just eyeballing it is worthwhile, to study what titles have been effective.

External Resources

Click Through Rate For Twitter - Rand wrote a great post, which attempts to measure Twitter CTR in conjunction with some other interesting metrics.

SERP Turkey - The new tool by Tom Anthony, which allows you to test CTR in the SERPs. Admittedly I have not tried it yet, but would also like to say it deserves more attention! Richard Baxter wrote about it here in a fantastic post about how search intention may influence CTR.

Practice Writing Titles!

A/B Test Titles

Again, using bit.ly, you can;

Create two (or more if you want to go nuts) short links to the same article.
Tweet them both using two versions of the title in your tweet - try to keep other variables as similar as possible.
Look at your bit.ly stats and see which one got more clicks and shares.

This isn't to be scientific, as much as to practice and have fun!!

Re-Write Other People's Titles

I love this one. I regularly will compose tweets to other people's content and write my own title, use bit.ly and measure the clicks. Again, we're just having fun and practicing here, not necessarily being super scientific.

Write Ten Titles in 60 Seconds

Sometime you just have to get those ideas moving. Try setting a timer and jot down ten titles as fast as you can!! Just do it!! The creative moment can be a powerful thing.

Study Non-Web Sources

As Gianluca pointed out in his comments to Rand's post, look at how newspapers and editorial print publications compose titles. This is not a new concept, in fact as you'll learn in Made To Stick, the idea of crafting a lead has been around a long time!! You can gain a lot of inspiration from non-web sources.

Try Identifying the "Ingredients" Of Any Given Title;

Curiosity
Benefit
Emotion
Tangible
Appearance
Sound
Expectation

Inspiration & Resources

The Class I'd Like to Teach - 37Signals - Love this little piece by co-founder Jason Fried. He talks about writing a "one sentence paper" but the spirit of it certainly applies to titles.

6 Tips for Improving Twitter CTR - Get Elastic - Fantastic article with a wide variety of suggestions for improving CTR in Twitter (not just Titles), but things like link placement, length, word types etc.

Irresistible Headlines - Jonathan Fields - I confess, a few of my "ingredient" ideas for titles came from this post, and although Jonathan's SEO tips are pretty basic, there's some fantastic idea in this post. One interesting suggestion he makes is that the use of numbers, specifically the number '7' has shown highest success.

Anything You Want - Derek Sivers - Founder of CDBaby, Derek Sivers (I think) is brilliant at tangible little headlines. His work in general is of inspiration. But specifically, in his book "Anything You Want" he tells an interesting story about the value of user feedback when sending out huge bulk emails to their mailing list. If one sentence was slightly unclear, they'd get thousands of confused replies back, that would take $5,000 of man-hours to respond to. Many of us do not get this type of feedback loop from our webpages and titles. If something is unclear or uninspiring, all we get is silence. He makes the point - imagine you were to email thousands of people your webpage/article - would you get lots of confused replies back? To that I'd add - imagine your title was the subject of the email. Would it get opened?

Made To Stick Resources - The Heath Brothers - Previously mentioned a few times in this post, I probably learned the most about crafting a good title and making your words and ideas stick from their book. Highly recommend you check it out!

The Thesaurus - One of my favorite SEO tools!! Helps you find that perfect word.

Final Thought: Titles Are Timeless

Perhaps what I love most is the skill of crafting a click worthy title is timeless. While so many things in SEO change so fast, this is at least one facet that is deeply rooted in the past, and will thus endure for a long time.

To me, it's worthwhile and inspiring to step back and identify these timeless elements in a field that changes so rapidly. And it helps me remember that, despite the strong technical aspects to SEO, there is plenty of room for art and humanity. That, and we'll still all have jobs in 20 years :-)

What Did You Think?

As mentioned, this was my first YouMoz. *Wild Applause!!* Perhaps a bit overdue by my standards (I'd drafted and scrapped two posts prior to settling on this one). I would LOVE to hear your comments, suggestions and questions below: I will respond to all, promise :-)

You can also hit me up on Twitter.

Publ.Date : 2012-02-02T14:01:42+01:00

The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

If you're reading this blog, congratulations! You are a customer of SEOmoz. I've probably personally spoken to at least a few of you, and provided help and support to many more of you. Have you ever wondered how SEOmoz supports 15,000 PRO members and over 250,000 free members and blog readers? After all, Roger can't personally answer every email we receive here. He's not Santa Claus! Instead, the six mozzers that make up the Help Team answer all of the emails, phone calls, and chat requests we get every day. I want to tell you a little bit more about them and give you a look at the way we've built the SEOmoz support channels to meet our overall goal: to provide the best customer service on the planet. It's a hard goal to reach, but I can't think of any more worthwhile endeavor.

The Help Teamsters

Crissy Hall

Crissy is old school! She came to SEOmoz in the spring of 2010. Back then, the Help Team was just Sarah Bird (our COO) and Crissy, and I joined soon after. She loves the fact that she’s been able to watch our team and SEOmoz grow since she started. Things are always changing with our site and tools, and as she says, it keeps us on our toes! Her favorite part of working at SEOmoz is the balance between fun and productivity that makes our team and company such an amazing place to work. Crissy spends her time helping users with their tool and billing questions, planning kick-ass Help Team outings (we made terrariums together last month), and helping the Marketing & Ops teams keep track of our weekly membership reporting.

When she’s not in the office, Crissy likes to take her son Sam on adventures around Seattle. She likes to sew up a storm, particularly to make clothes for her toddler (instant gratification, according to her). In the "warmer" Seattle months she rides her bicycle, named "Tom Selleck," to work and back.

Megan Singley

Megan's been a help teamster for a little over a year now and loves connecting with our users. With several years of experience in customer service, she really strives to make every interaction with SEOmoz users a positive one. Besides responding to emails, calls, and chats, Megan plans and organizes our weekly software demos and investigates billing issues to keep any possible fraudsters at bay. She's also been known to do some writing, whether it be on the SEOmoz blog or in product messages throughout the site.

When not at the MozPlex, Megan likes to watch The Daily Show and Battlestar Galactica with her cat, Lily, and her awesomely-cool-fun-amazing neighbor across the hall, me! (Those are her words of course.) She also enjoys reading anything she can get her hands on (lately, it's been The Hunger Games series) and even started a library for the office. On weekends, she hangs out with friends (including lots of fellow Mozzers), goes dancing to anything from funk & soul to 90's hip hop, and cooks as much as possible.

Kenny Martin

Kenny joined up last year and is one of our few Washington natives! He grew up in a small, sleepy Northwestern town, thus is afraid of the sun. He compensates for a lack of natural energy sources by drinking copious amounts of black coffee. Kenny spends most of his time pursuing the TAGFEE dream by diagnosing tough technical issues, getting his hands dirty with a little web design, and filming each week's Whiteboard Friday.

He never wanders off too far away from his MacBook and for this reason alone his girlfriend mistakenly thinks he loves it more than her. It's probably because most of his spare time is spent designing websites or leaning about some fantastic new technology on the internet. He also loves the Daily Show, puppies, pizza, and tacos.

Nick Sayers

Nick joined our team in September last year and got up to speed lickety-split! Like the rest of our team mates, he answers customer emails, phone calls, and live chat questions. Nick has also spear-headed our new help documentation project that gives customers the resources learn anything about SEOmoz's tool set. This effort makes our company more scalable by answering customers' questions before they call, write, or chat with us, which gives them more instant gratification, as well. Needless to say, he spends a lot of his time creating screencasts and typing up FAQs. Nick has a passion for educating and helping others, so is constantly looking for new resources to show SEOmoz's customers.

Nick enjoys film, video games, reading, and cooking. He is an avid reader of anything from Eastern Philosophy to some of the nerdiest sci-fi/fantasy novels ever written. When not at work, Nick is usually spending time with his wife and partner in crime, Becky. On most nights, they cook new recipes together, play an unhealthy amount of Left 4 Dead 2 or Skyrim, and watch movies. On the weekends, Nick and Becky explore Washington and go to retro theaters. Nick is also involved in independent film-making and has produced, written, and directed a feature film and many shorts. On the sci-fi geek front, Nick has a huge collection of memorabilia from the Alien(s) films. He also has a cat named Ash after Bruce Campbell's character in the Evil Dead series. Of course, this means Nick calls her Evil Ash when she is bad.

Chiaryn Miranda

Chiaryn is the newest addition to the team, having been here for about two months. Don't let that fool you though: she's caught up real quick-like! She's been doing customer service for a long time and is working on learning new things about SEO every day. What better place to learn, eh?

When she's not in the office, she likes to make art and take photographs. She's been working on a sketchbook that will be going on a national tour. She also likes to take trips around the beautiful Seattle waterfront with her camera. When she can, she tries to take candid portraits. Check out some of her artwork on her Art House Co-Op page. She's also an avid movie fan, with a particular love of horror movies, and reads as much as possible. In her words, she'll gobble up pretty much any nonfiction book you put in front of her. That's why we call her Turkey Miranda! Just kidding - that's not why we call her that.

Aaron Wheeler

If you've made it this far, you've probably figured out that this is me! I started at SEOmoz in the summer of 2010 and am loving every minute of being here. A couple months ago I became the manager of the Help Team, which means I do what I can to support the lovely members of our team, and provide our customers with the best service on the planet. It's a tough goal - we have very discerning customers - but a goal I think we can eventually fulfill. Some background: I studied sociology and cognitive science at UC San Diego, but starting doing SEO after graduating. Turns out that ranking for attorneys in San Diego is tough work! I left San Diego early 2010 for Seattle, and eventually found my way at SEOmoz.

Besides working at a place I love, I enjoy reading (currently Steve Jobs), watching great shows (currently my third run of Deadwood), and seeing my favorite bands in Seattle's historical music venues (this month: Junip, Nada Surf, and The Asteroids Galaxy Tour). I also enjoy trying out vegan recipes with my girlfriend, Holly Haymaker, who has the coolest name in the world and a whimsical interactive e-cards site, to boot!

What Do We Do?

You know how, sometimes, you have a question about our site and tools? Or about your account or payment? We're the people you call, email, live chat, and post to our help forums for. Unlike huge companies with call centers and many tiers of support and different people doing phones and chats, though, everyone on our team does everything. It's a great way to keep everyone fully informed about site issues and keep our support fresh and agile. That's not all we do, though! Let me show you all of the ways we keep our customers happy:

Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System

When you send an email to help@seomoz.org, it gets forwarded to our ticketing system. We use ZenDesk, the same help desk software used by companies like Groupon and Box.com. ZenDesk allows us to manage customer emails, assign them to specific people, and easily share them with engineering and product so we can get answers to questions quickly! This is important because we receive over 2,000 emails a month: way too many to respond to from a single email address effectively.

How Does It Work?

When we receive an email, the sender gets an email back with a ticket number. As you see, it gets added to our queue of tickets to reply to. We try to answer 80% of tickets within 8 hours, but if it's a situation where someone has a billing problem or can't access their account (lost password, etc.), we try to answer even faster than that. Our goal is for each member of the Help Team to answer 20 tickets per day. If we don't have the knowledge to answer a question, we'll send the ticket to our engineers and product managers to get an answer. If it's a bug, we let the customer know and open a bug fix with our Triage team. They assign the bug to an engineer, who fixes it and lets them know. Triage sends it back to us when it's fixed, and we email the customer and close the ticket.

When we close a ticket, we send a one-question survey through SurveyMonkey asking how happy we made a customer with our customer service. We try to make 90% of our customers happy, and 30% of our customers delighted. Sometimes, though, we fail to satisfy a customer. When this happens, we ask for the customer's email address and ticket number so we can get in touch and make it right. I've found that when a customer has had a bad experience, reaching out to them to make it right almost always turns the situation around.

Phones: Not a Phone Bank

We get a relatively small amount of calls at SEOmoz: about 100 to 150 a week. Makes sense, as most SEOs do their research online. =) We don't have a sales team and don't do phone marketing, so the only employees that really have phones here are in Operations or the Help Team. We get a lot of calls from potential customers asking about what we do, though we do get a few from PRO members, too. Here's a chart with our phone stats for last week:

How Does it Work?

When a person calls in to SEOmoz, they usually start out talking to Hillari, our fantastic office manager. She makes sure they're not a spambot and, when they're a lovely customer, transfers them to the Help Team pool. The first available person picks it up and starts helping! Pretty straightforward process, as you telephone users know. After the call is over, we try to create a ticket and follow up with the customer to make sure they had all their questions answered. If it's an SEO question, we refer them to the Q&A or to our list of recommended SEO consultants.

Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It

When potential customers are browsing our software sales pages, they often have questions they want answered now. Same thing goes for existing customers with questions about a payment or their account status: these are the kinds of questions people want to know the answers to quickly. Live Chat comes to the rescue! Instead of requiring a customer to call or send in an email, we usually keep someone logged into Live Chat throughout the day so customers can get help immediately. This leads to happier customers and cuts down on our ticket and phone levels. We use the awesome chat widget SnapEngage, and installed it to a few choice pages.

How Does it Work?

Kenny coordinated with SnapEngage to create a custom view of the widget. When you click "Chat Now," it pops up a dialog box that displays three FAQs, and has a field for the email address of the customer and the question they have. When they've typed those in, all they have to do is click "Message" to open a ticket, or "Live Chat" to start talking! Interesting point: we didn't always have those three FAQs. Adding them reduced chats about these topics about 90%. Yay for preemptive answers!

After we finish chatting with a customer, the chat transcript is automatically added to ZenDesk as a ticket, where we can save it for future review and for long-term tracking. We can also follow up with a customer there. If we're offline, or if a customer chooses the "Message" option instead of the "Live Chat" option, it creates a ticket from the get-go instead.

We can also track the types of computers and browsers people are using when they chat with us, which helps us diagnose the issue faster and get an idea of what our average customer needing immediate support looks like. The chart to the left is a look at last month's chatters.

Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly

We maintain both our customer service and API forums through the SEOmoz help desk. We've also started adding all of our tool documentation, videos, and walkthroughs here to make them all available in the same place. This makes our Help Desk a one-stop shop for looking at frequently asked questions, checking out known issues with the site or tools, and just generally getting more knowledgeable about how to use a PRO subscription to its fullest. It's also where we ask customers to submit feature requests.

How Does it Work?

When a customer has a question, they can go to our Help Desk and do a search for the answer, or browse existing questions and documentation. Many of the forums are straight-up questions and answers, but a lot of them are longer-form pages that are part of our documentation project. We want to document the bejewels out of our tools! Yes, there will always be questions from customers, but the more information you can put in their hands early on, the more happy they'll be, and the more scalable our service becomes.

One cool feature: the Feature Request Forum has a voting system so customers can vote on the features they want to see most. Our product team reviews this feedback to get an idea of what to prioritize and what to put further down the roadmap. It's a great way to get customers more involved in SEOmoz's future!

This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies...

We do a bunch of other stuff to help our customers, and it's hard to get it all down in words! We give weekly software demos to help new customers get the most out of PRO,

represent at MozCations,

give tours of the MozPlex and help out at MozCon,

and bake plenty of cookies (you gotta help your fellow mozzers out, too!):

All in all, it's a wonderful life. SEOmoz has the best customers around, and there's no other place I'd rather be. I'd love to share more with you and hear your stories about great customer service, as well as get feedback on what you'd love to see more of in the customer service biznez. Please feel free to write me in the comments, shoot me an email, or tweet me at @aaron_wheeler. See you around the site!

Publ.Date : 2012-01-31T21:51:49+01:00

Find New Keywords: Simplifying Keyword Research

Posted by Karen Semyan

In December, we rolled out branded keyword rules and metrics to campaigns to help you segment your branded traffic. Now, we’re excited to introduce a companion feature to make your keyword research easier: Find New Keywords. With this feature, you can view keywords sending you organic search traffic, filter on your brand rules, and determine if you want to track them in your campaign.

First, the basics.

You’ll discover the Find New Keywords feature in a tab under your Manage Keywords section. (This feature requires that you connect your campaign to Google Analytics, so if you’re not connected to GA, you’ll find instructions on how to do this on the Find New Keywords tab.)

But wait, where did the Manage Brand Rules page go?! We’ve moved your brand rules page into a tab under Manage Keywords, as well, so you can easily move among these sections as you manage your keywords.

Now, on to the hunt for new keywords!

1. View the top 200 keywords sending you traffic that you’re not currently tracking.

Find New Keywords tab

Why stop at 200? We want to make it easier for you to add the keywords that may be most interesting to track because they are branded terms or common words heavily associated by searchers with your site. After that, you can go straight to GA to manually grab more terms. If we see high demand for showing more keywords, we’ll consider showing more terms in the future (so let us know what you think!).

2. Decide which keywords are candidates for tracking.
We show you a number of factors:

Keyword's position or "rank" in your current list of 200 keywords sending you organic search traffic.
Keyword’s traffic from the last week and last four weeks.
Branded vs, non-branded keyword filters, based on your brand rules.
Quick access to a full keyword analysis for keyword difficulty and full SERP analysis.

3. Add keywords of interest to your managed keywords list.
With some information in hand about the keyword’s relationship to your brand, traffic, difficulty, and SERP analysis details, you’re on your way to finding some keywords of interest to track.

One thing to note: If you are tracking all 200 (which we don’t necessarily recommend--please make your choices carefully), you’ll see a message telling you to check later for new keywords that have moved up the list.

We’d love to know what you think of the feature, so let us know! Leave a comment right here, e-mail help@seomoz.org, or share a feature suggestion in our feature request forum. Happy keyword finding!

Publ.Date : 2012-02-01T14:12:35+01:00

The 10 Golden Rules to Attracting Authority Links

Posted by neilpatel

In the world of link building, getting an authority link to your site/blog has been one of the most important aspects of growing your blog. Back in 2009 Page Level Link Metrics and Domain Level Authority Features accounted for over 46% of your pages own authority:

In 2011, that percentage has dropped, but only by 4% [42.58%], suggesting that link building will continue to be a critical factor to your blog/website’s success.

But we pretty much know that not just any link will do. The better the site the link is coming from, the better the link.

That’s why your link-building campaigns need to be built around attracting authority links. But how do you do that? And what exactly is an authority link? Let me explain.

Absolute and relative authority links explained

There are two types of authorities. There are the absolute authority sites like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Google’s blog. These sites are also labeled “informational” authorities versus navigational authorities like DMOZ.

On the other hand, you also have relative authority sites. These are sites run by bloggers or webmasters that are authorities in a niche. Bloggers like Robert Scoble, Dooce or Mashable are authorities in their markets. While the link juice they’ll give you if they link to you is not as high as what an absolute authority site could give you…they are definitely worth attracting.

But how do you actually get a link from these sites? Here are the ten golden rules to attracting authority links.

Rule 1: Write content that attracts Editorial In-content Links

The most fundamental tactic of attracting authority links is to write content that is worth a link. What does this content look like?

Cornerstone – this content fills an obvious gap in the web information world that you fill with expert advice, detailed posts and well-reasoned arguments. This content will also define you, so it’s important to establish up front what your blog/site is going to focus on. This is also a large portion of the content you share.
Personal content – About a quarter or less of the content should contain personal stories about yourself that helps your readers to understand who you are and where you come from. My How Being a Patel Made Me Somewhat Successful is a great example. It stays within the cornerstone content of the site, but it gives you a peek into my personal life.
Spicy content – This is a small fraction of your content and is made up of controversial posts you write about. Typically you attack a high-profile idea or person or explain why something popular is really dumb. These are for linkbait purposes typically, but generally also give your readers an idea of who you are.

Building up a blog/site with this kind of content will take time, so you may not pick up a natural authority link out of the gate. Better yet, once you have a solid archive of content, approach these authority sites and ask for a link. Give them a good reason, which could be one of the following:

You wrote about the author and now he might be interested in sharing with his circle the blog post that you published.
You wrote a post that works well with a series that he wrote our compliments it. You could even critique something he or she did, which might spark an across-blog debate. If that sparks a firestorm of other responses…then you’ve won!

Rule 2: Fix other people’s broken links

Links die all the time. People shut down website or pull web pages. When these documents or sites vanish all the links pointing to them are dead.

For example, if you work through a web page by a publisher who links out a lot and the page is a few years old, you are bound to find at least one or two dead links on that page. Work through the entire site and you could find dozens.

Mashable is a good example of a site that links out a lot and will probably have a lot of dead links on older pages since they tend to report on startups that don’t always last.

You can easily solve this in 2 ways:

Manual - Make a list of all the dead links you find, then approach the author of those pages. It’s better if you focus on one author/one person and offer several options for content instead of having to contact different authors for each dead link. That can become an administrative nightmare.
Link validator – Use a tool like the W3C’s Link Checker to find dead links on a website or blog. It’s pretty easy to do. Here are the steps I took to check Mashable.

Drop link into sub form:

Choose your options:

Click “done” and then wait 644.47 seconds:

You can then work your way through the status report:

From that report you can build a list of dead links, the pages that need to replaced and the authors you can approach if it is a multi-author site like Mashable.

Rule 3: Create a desirable image library

If you have high-quality images on our site, you can use those images as an incentive to get people to link to you. Imagine you have a gallery of large, high-resolution pictures…well, then offer a contact form that allows a person to grab the file and linking code right there on the page.

You don’t have to go all out like a photl.com:

Or freepixels.com:

But more like a Haw-lin:

The last site specialize in photos, for you though being a content publisher looking for ranking juice, you could build a sub-domain devoted to photos like these.

Here’s what you have to do, though.

Hire a decent amateur photographer - If you are not a good photographer and to keep it inexpensive you could hire a local photographer who is good but not really good to charge outlandish fees.
Use your phone - Now a days, however, most cameras on smart phones can take high-quality photos. It’s often the skill of taking a good picture…like having the right angle and light…that a decent photographer should know about. In any case, the better the photos, the more likely you will get interest in the images.

And to help you benefit fully from this tactic, keep this in mind when building a library of images:

The higher the quality of each image the better link building potential these photos will have.
Search out affordable ways to take pictures. This could mean hiring a inexpensive photographer or buying a decent smart phone with a great camera.
Each image should be posted on its own page.
The delivery service should be as easy as possible. Test different set ups and use the one that makes adoption easy.
Add images on a schedule, whether one a day or once a week.

Rule 4: Offer to write a column or do a guest post

Giving a publisher practical, highly-researched content as a guest post is a great way to get links to your site from him or her.

Keep in mind this tactic typically be easier to pull off for those relative authority content sites than absolute authority sites due to their blogging policy. But if you have a guest posting strategy that involves focusing on building links, traffic and exposure via guest posting on a select few relative authority sites, you’ll eventually have an arsenal of content that you can pitch to the absolute authority sites.

Some authority sites like Open Forum or Huffington Post have so much need for content that you can usually get a post on there. But you typically still have to provide a portfolio of posts so they can understand what level of writing you are at and not just someone off the street.

Here are some resource to help you write, submit and get published guest posts:

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Writing Your First Guest Post
Neil Patel’s Guide to Writing Popular Blog Posts
Write a Guest Post for I Will Teach You to Be Rich (while Ramit Sethi focuses on tips on how to write for his blog…they are valuable for any blog, really.)
Why Submit Your Best Posts as Guest Posts?
How to Land a Guest Post Without Fail: 21 Secret Tips

Rule 5: Go to where your target audience hangs out

As bloggers and people of the internet we often forget about all of the face-to-face connections that can provide us with valuable links from relative or absolute authority site publishers.

For example, travel to conferences and hook up with some of the people you want to influence and convince to link to your site. Don’t be a pest to these people, but hang out, be cool to them, and then leave them alone for the rest of the events. You then need to go to the after-event event at the bar. This is where you can make things happen by simply buying them a drink or two.

If you really want to take it to another level, offer to take them out for dinner and pick up the check. During that dinner suggest they link to you in some purposeful way…perhaps you offer to create an infographics or a beginner’s guide.

But even if you don’t get some agreement like that you can say as you grab the check, “No, let me get this. You give me a link or something.”

That way the person thinks, “A $50 dinner for a link? You got it.”

Rule 6: Fill gaps in content

As I mentioned above, when you are talking to content publishers, ask them what content they are missing…and offer to create it for them. It could be a video interview of Guy Kawaski or a periodic table of the fundamentals of link building. It could be an idea they’ve had for an ebook.

Whatever it is, offer to create it for them.

Once you create the content you will get the credit as a link back to your site. Make sure you offer content that you can create professionally and will attract people who are in your target audience. Creating a weight-loss calculator for a site when you are in real estate will drive traffic to your site…but it will be the wrong traffic. You might as well done nothing.

Rule 7: Contact big media at the right time

When you are trying to attract the attention of big media sites like CNN or The Economist, knowing when they publish their content is important.

For those sites who are less tied to a content schedule, like a Drudge Report, you will not need to know when they publish their links because they do it pretty much as the story breaks.

Still, having some kind of bead on when that time is will improve your chances. Here’s a guideline to follow:

For many absolute authorities like the one I mentioned above, you can be certain that they will plan Monday’s content on Sunday.
Around 6:30 am to 9:30 am, the media staff will put together a list of their top 15 stories for the day. This is the news list. Contacting them during this time is more likely to influence their decision even more than if you called or emailed them the day before.
The next step for the media staff is to present the completed list of news stories to a team who will then decide which stories will get front page billing. This usually happens around 9:30 am to noon. This is your last chance to send anything. Do it now, because unless you have something spectacular, sending anything over after 1 pm will end up in the trash.

And even if you do get coverage…it won’t be a lot and it probably won’t be a link. Late content entries are typically reduced to the show that doesn’t impact SEO at all.

8. Approach government or education sites

A sure sign of an authority site is a .edu or .gov. This could be a link from a college like Harvard or Stanford or a link from the White House or Usability.gov. Getting those links are not always easy.

One example is to look for ways you can register accounts with these institutions. For example, Harvard has The Harvard H20 Playlist Project. It’s simply a series of links to books, articles or content that hopes to spark content.

Simply create a playlist and add a link to a useful post inside your site.

Creating meaningful, researched content or break an interesting story and these sites might naturally attract these sites might link to you. Examples of content that you could write that might actually grab their attention include:

Write a solid, thorough review about one of their programs, pulling in information from historical data sets, current events and future predictions. This will likely catch their eye.
Sponsor a student event. This will not cost very much.
Volunteer to be a guest speaker for graduates.
Approach their business school and offer to be a case study.

The kind of content you could create that would attract a government link could be:

Create a community page/sub-domain on your site that supports some club or event in your city.
Create content that supports some sort of charitable cause.
Put on an event. Not only the .gov sites will approach you, but the local press will do so as well.
Run for an office in your community. The commitment is usually low, so it’s not like you will be consumed with it.

In some cases you will just have to approach these institutions. When you do, you are more likely to get an answer however, and a positive one at that, if you inspect their site, identify the content gaps and then offer to fill them.

Again, it’s going to be important that you have something to show that you can pull off the content professionally, so don’t try this tactic until you have a good catalog of posts in your archives.

9. Buy links without penalty

It’s no secret that buying links violates Google’s policy and the penalty can be very stiff. So you may be wonder why I’m suggesting you buy links.

There are ways to buy links that will not be a violation of Google’s policy. Here are two:

Donate to a charity – Depending on how much you donate, some organizations will display you name and donation amount on their sites.
Offer to pay influential bloggers to post on your site – The content is simple. Give an authoritative blogger some kind of incentive like cash to write a post you can post on your site. In all likelihood they’ll link to it once it’s published.
Fund research – Sometimes when you fund research projects people will link back to your website to show people who provided them with the funding. It’s their way of saying “thanks” and showing appreciation.

As you can see these examples are based on an exchange of value between two people and their websites that can relate to the relevancy of content…so it’s an ethical way of buying links.

Rule 10: Know the difference between a good and a bad site

Finally, one of the most fundamental rules to link building is knowing the difference between a good website and a bad one. This might sound obvious but it’s sometimes easy to get tricked into asking a site that looks like an authority but is in reality spammy.

What are the elements that determine if a website is a bad one? Here are five ways:

Negative PPC – If you come across a site that has SEO links based on pills, casinos or porn, then it’s not a good site to get a link from.
Link overload – Also avoid sites that have a high link-to-content ratio. Anything above 20% links to 80% content is probably too high.
Keyword stuffing – Some sites that rank high in search engines will be notorious for keyword stuff. You’re first clue is the title description. If it looks like someone treated it like a keyword meta tag, they are probably employing spam techniques elsewhere, too. Perhaps it’s in the footer, behind images or in the source code.:
Ad overload – These sites will be like a sore thumb when it comes to the number of ads they have. They’ll have ads down both sidebars, above the header and multiple times throughout the content.
Poor content - Another clue this is not a great site is the low content-to-ad ratio. This one can be tricky because even absolute authority sites can push the limits when it comes to displaying ads. Look at Marketing Pilgrim, for example:

Ads easily dominate 2/3 of the real estate. But it’s a legitimate website with pretty good content. If that’s the case, then evaluate the copy. Is it well written, heavily researched and specific? Is there an author attached to it? Is there a convincing author bio page? These are all elements you need to look at to determine whether you should write a guest post for them or not.

Poor design – Does the site look like they used a free theme? Are the fonts irregular in size or shape? These are usually signs that someone has not spent anyone on the site…which is a signal they could be spammers.

Conclusion

Trust me when I say that you will not be wasting your time if you invest it in attracting authority links to your website or blog. Remember: nearly half of what determines the rank of your site is based upon the types of links driving to your site. Hopefully this guide has given you the tips and the tools necessary to help you succeed.

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

Publ.Date : 2012-02-01T22:08:14+01:00

Strategic Link Building: Why You Don\'t Need To Outrun Lions

Posted by oline123

One of my favourite SEO anecdotes goes like this: two men are walking through an African game reserve when they come across a lion, one of the men calmly puts down his backpack and slips on the running shoes he has been carrying.

The other man chuckles and says, “You’ll never outrun a lion."

To which the other man calmly responds, “I don’t need to outrun the lion; I just need to outrun you."

SEO, contrary to popular belief, is not about ‘beating Google’ or ‘cracking their enigma code’; it is about beating the competing websites on the keywords that matter to your business. This means SERP analysis and competitor analysis should be key components in shaping your SEO strategy.

I am not advocating creating a carbon copy link profile for your site by building competitor links like for like. This methodology is about learning from their site and link profile in order to close the natural search gap; understand what is working (and to a certain extent, the limits); and then eventually to outmanoeuvre them.

In this post, I am going to explore a number of different eCommerce verticals and identify what I think makes that SERP ‘tick’ as well as the different link building tactics which can be utilised to ensure natural search dominance.

I wholeheartedly believe that when it comes to link building, quality and sustainability are the ‘end game.’ Google will eventually fully understand the true quality of a link. However, different markets have different ‘requirements.’ If you understand what it takes to rank in the market you are trying to target then you can ensure you are working strategically rather than adopting the “throw links at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

I will also be exploring how analysing the counterpart market in a more SEO-advanced country can help you understand the future of your home market.

The Data

Far too often in the world of SEO, sweeping statements and all-encompassing judgements are made with little evidence or data to back it up. This is just a snippet of the research I carried out which helps to underpin the conclusions I make later in this post

SERP 1 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com.au

According to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty tool, this keyword has a 71% difficulty rating.

On the face of it, this would seem like a highly competitive keyword to try and target.

The number 1 result (http://www.oo.com.au) has over 36,000 external links, a high domain authority (59), and a domain mozRank of 4.9. A seemingly challenging keyword target. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be easy; however, if we dig below the surface, we can get a clearer picture of just how OO.com.au is ranking which can help shape our link building strategy.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
36,478	6,706	11,967

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 84,683

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
17%	3.7%	3.8%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 7.35%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools. Cemper (the makers of Link Research Tools) guard their link power algorithm closely, but they have said that the link power is usually measured by looking at the number of links pointing at that page. A buried page in a rubbish web directory is likely to be considered low power as there will be very few links and certainly very few good quality links pointing at that page.

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
94%	94.2%	91.1%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 77.01%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
78%	76.2%	88.7%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 73.37%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
94%	73.4%	90.1%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 89.13%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .au domains according to Link Research Tools

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
81.1%	13%	15.3%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 25.7%

Social Metrics

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
1,094 Facebook Shares	298 Facebook Shares	314 Facebook Shares
12 Google +1s	9 Google +1s	1 Google +1

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 465 Facebook Shares and 10 Google +1s

*Note – with regards to the social metrics, the figures are for social signals pointing at the homepage of the sites and have just been included for comparison purposes.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

An immediate takeaway from this mini-study is that it would seem social signals aren’t weighted that heavily in this particular SERP.

Despite the furore around social media, this data right here proves that links should be your immediate focus and social should be a part of your SEO strategy in a long term sense. Google will undoubtedly get smarter on the social front; not only that, but also as competing websites become more social, there will be a natural progression towards social signals carrying more weight. No site wants to be left behind when/if this happens. Building links, certainly in this niche, is still the activity which delivers the results right now however.

To rank for this particular keyword, it could be argued that two particular factors appear to be the most pertinent: link volume and anchor text. This would seem to go against common wisdom that link quality is the overriding factor as, in this scenario, and according to Link Research Tools’ automated analysis, the vast majority of links pointing at the websites which rank highly are of ‘low power.'

Whilst some would say, high quality links are what you need to rank; for the keyword “online shopping,” you need to mix high-quality links that deliver longevity and stability with less powerful links that have the right anchor text in relatively large volumes.

Conclusion

In this scenario, suitable link building tactics include:

Thematic/ quality article submissions – despite Google’s Panda update, we still notch up good results utilising quality and thematic article submissions as a way of generating volume and anchor text specific links.
Guest Posting – a proactive link development campaign which involves content placement on niche and relevant websites in return for a link.
Infographic Promotion – developing an engaging linkable asset like an infographic can be a good way to generate high volumes of anchor text links by including an anchor text attribute link at the bottom of the graphic which automatically gets placed when somebody uses the embed code. Obviously, in some situations, this will be removed by a webmaster using the graphic on their website, but we have seen this work successfully.
Shopping Directory Listings – numerous submissions to good quality general and shopping directories still provide value in conjunction with other link development tactics.
Social Bookmarking – another link building tactic which is seen as low quality, but when used with other methods can deliver the kinds of results you need.

Remember, the methods discussed above do not constitute recommendations across the board as they are very much SERP-specific; you will see the need to tailor your tactics as we explore other SERPs.

SERP 2 – ‘online shopping’ Google.co.uk

On to our second SERP. For this one, I have chosen the same keyword; but this time, we’ll look at the UK SERP.

According to SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool, this is a terrifying 87% difficulty score. :)

ASOS.com, which ranks #1 in the UK for the term ‘online shopping,’ is similar to OO.com.au in Australia. It's a real juggernaut of the retail world with over 157,000 external links pointing at the domain; a domain mozRank of 6.26; and domain authority of 85. How on earth do you go about competing in a SERP like that then?

Link building with strategy ensures you are focusing on the SERP-specific metrics that appear to matter.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
157,292	461,891	118,578

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 2,678,561 (this is skewed by Amazon.co.uk which has a colossal 15million external followed links).

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
0%	0%	0%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 0%

In this SERP, anchor text doesn’t appear to be a ranking factor at all. Indeed, to demonstrate this a little further, I continued with my research, and the 16^th result had 1.2% links containing the anchor text ‘online shopping.’ Other than this result, the others were 0% anchor text.

This in itself would make building a great deal of anchor text links very suspicious indeed and likely very ineffective if you are looking to target this particular keyword.

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
0%	0%	67.4%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 30.23%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research Tools

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
34%	41.1%	48.1%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 61.73%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
88%	88.7%	91.2%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 91.61%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .uk domains according to Link Research Tools

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
9.7%	22%	31.1%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 28.46%

Social Metrics

#1 – ASOS.com	#2 – Tesco.com	#3 – Next.co.uk
46,739 Facebook Shares	2,122 Facebook Shares	9,879 Facebook Shares
338 Google +1s	272 Google +1s	136 Google +1s

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 1393 Facebook Shares and 73.85 Google +1s

In comparison to its Australian counterpart, this SERP has a much higher average number of Facebook shares and Google +1s.

This bigger social signal sample appears to allow Google to make ranking decisions which are much more closely aligned with what the social signals are telling them rather than weighting link metrics so heavily, as is the case with the Australian SERP we investigated above.

Does this mean social should form more of an integral part of efforts to rank for this term? Almost certainly, but that doesn’t mean link metrics should be forgotten about.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

On the face of it, this SERP appears very brand heavy with limited options for a website looking to break into the top 10 for this keyword, so what can be done? And what kinds of tactics are likely to be effective?

We would look to deploy combination link development and social tactics in order to help clients rank for this term.

Linkable assets – think Evolution of Western Dance Music, why witty job titles are all the rage, 12 awful Christmas presents, and Why Bill Gates is selling nuclear power to China. Linkable assets or linkbait come in all shapes and forms, not just infographics as the above examples demonstrate. Even news stories can be turned into link generation machines with a great title and the right composition.
Contests – great competitions and creative contests can generate a great deal of social attention and will usually attract links from blogs, forums, competition directories, and more.
Discount codes – a well-planned and properly seeded discount code or saving coupon can have a dramatic impact on the number of links you generate and the social activity you see around your site.
Blogger Partnerships – reaching out to bloggers and industry website owners by contributing your content, expertise, or even products for them to try can be a very effective way to build high numbers of good quality links; particularly as many bloggers read other blogs so the feature can very often have a viral effect.
Online press – if you have a product that you can create an engaging story around then generating online press is often easier than you might think.

This SERP is also a good example of a fast-paced environment where ongoing activities are vital in order to stay ahead of competing sites.

Referring Domains Discovery

The chart above looks at the number of referring domains linking to some of the top 10 results in the UK SERP for the keyword ‘online shopping.’ It gives a snapshot of the quarterly growth or decline in links from unique referring domains. This helps to give a more accurate reflection of the link profile as number of backlinks can be misleading if, for example, there are multiple links from the same site.

As I am sure you will notice, over the past 5 years, the sites have all followed near enough the same pattern. Only once or twice does a site rise or fall above the general trend: presumably as a site has a promotional push or something happens which causes a reduction in the number of unique referring domains.

This emphasises the importance of on-going link development and SEO campaigns. It also highlights an opportunity, because Google has recognised that there is, in some respects, a fault in their algorithm; there is nearly always a lag time between a page being important and useful enough to mean it should rank and when it has enough links to compete in that SERP.

In response to this, Google developed ‘Query Deserves Freshness’ or QDF which means a page doesn’t need as many links as the incumbent sites that rank if the page is generating a good number of fresh links. Google, logically, has determined that fresh links might indicate a more relevant page than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stale links.

The internet is a dynamic place so it makes sense that a link profile should be constantly developing.

So in this particular scenario, we would also look at link building tactics that deliver fresh links in great numbers as an attempt to beat the incumbent sites on velocity rather than volume.

This makes tactics like contests and linkable assets such as infographics highly suited to ranking for keywords like this. It also makes it that much more important to coordinate your efforts to ensure maximum link and social impact.

SERP 3 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com

The final SERP we will take a look at is ‘online shopping’ in the US which, according to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, is extremely competitive and more challenging than any of the others we have looked at.

The top result, Overstock.com, has a domain authority of 90; a domain mozRank of 6.52; and nearly 300,000 external followed links, so this certainly looks the most challenging SERP to conquer.

As a side note, you might have seen the spot of bother Overstock.com got themselves into early on in 2011; it was encouraging links from college websites. Anyway, it cleaned up its act to the satisfaction of Google who released the retailer from the “sin bin” in late April 2011.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

#1 – Overstock.com	#2 – HSN.com	#3 – Forever21.com
215,325	1,106,867	99,587

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 6,860,105 (this result is skewed by Ebay.com’s nearly 30million links)

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

#1 – Overstock.com	#2 – HSN.com	#3 – Forever21.com
0.2%	56.4%	0%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 0%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools

#1 – Overstock.com	#2 – HSN.com	#3 – Forever21.com
0%	0%	0%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 3.75%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

#1 – Overstock.com	#2 – HSN.com	#3 – Forever21.com
26.7%	79.9%	20.5%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 48.4%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

#1 – Overstock.com	#2 – HSN.com	#3 – Forever21.com
86.2%	94.5%	95.9%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results =65.81%

Link Locality

Analysing the locality of the links is a little more challenging with US SERPs because of the worldwide nature of the .com domain. We don’t know whether the link originates from the USA or elsewhere in the world.

Social Metrics

#1 – Overstock.com	#2 – HSN.com	#3 – Forever21.com
7,008 Facebook shares	217 Facebook shares	20,083 Facebook shares
194 Google +1s	72 Google +1s	459 Google +1s

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 19,708 Facebook Shares and 1441 Google +1s

Links over time

Similarly as we analysed the UK SERP of ‘online shopping’ for ongoing activity over time, below is a graph showing the non-cumulative view of referring domains pointing at the top 5 search results. You will note that Overstock.com and WalMart.com have largely mirrored each other in terms of link profile growth and decline over the past 5 years, and it could be argued, therefore, that they have been tussling in a competitive sense -- vying for the top search engine positions.

Referring Domains Discovery

This graph once again highlights the need for on-going activities to maintain and enhance positions as competitors react to your SEO. That isn’t to say that you need the same or even a greater volume of links in relation to your competitors. For example, Forever21.com ranks better than WalMart.com, but has fewer domains linking to it. But as the graph highlights, there is a need to be building or encouraging links on an ongoing basis. Overstock.com, at the start of 2011, acquired links with greater velocity than competing sites like Forever21.com and HSN.com, which likely contributed to their #1 position for this competitive keyword.

Analysis – how can we come out on top?

To come out on top in the US SERP – natural or certainly a natural appearance is the name of the game.

Link quality is paramount in order to rank for this keyword. There are next to no ‘low power’ links apparently contributing to the rankings of the top 10 results. This is different to the other SERPs we have analysed, because in the case of the UK and Australian SERPs, there are sites that are still very much enjoying prominent positions helped by low quality links.

Social is an equally important factor as we can see the top results have a much higher average Facebook share and Google +1 count -- in terms of the remaining 7 top 10 results -- than the other SERPs we looked at.

Also, in comparison to the other SERPs we have looked at, the distribution of links is also an important factor; it is natural for a website, particularly an eCommerce website, to have links to various sections and categories of the site rather than the majority of inbound links pointing at the homepage. Given this and the fact that Google is stepping up its efforts on unnatural linking patterns and communicating these warnings to site owners, I would think that HSN.com, which has a very high percentage of links to the homepage, is at least inviting a manual review from a Googler.

It could well be argued that the US SERP is the guinea-pig-lab-experiment for Google. This would seem to align with the way they roll out new features, e.g. US >> English Speaking Countries >> Rest of the world. If this is the case, the US SERP is probably the UK SERP of the future and so on.

It is also easier for Google to work more legitimate signals like social into the ranking algorithm and tuning down others in a Google.com SERP because there are more data points which would make the results more consistent with their quality expectations. In the Australian SERPs, there are sub-1000 social shares in most cases; whereas in the US SERPs, there are in most cases many thousands. Google, at this point, could not tune down link factors too much in the Australian SERPs because it would likely send the search results crazy as most sites that deserve to rank haven’t got the social signals in place to react to a switch of that kind.

My theory is that the difference in SERPs isn’t just down to a Google whim; it’s also the market as a whole.

What can we take-away from all this?

There is a trade-off that needs analysing…

Studying each of these SERPs as we have certainly raises the question of strategy.

As an SEO, you have to be strategic with your budget and resource allocation. Depending on your market and how ‘SEO-advanced’ it is, these factors will impact how and what you need to do to rank now and also continue to rank into the future.

It is a case of balancing appropriate financial investment, short term results, long term stability, and mitigating risks. Identifying not shortcuts, but fast and safe routes to the top is what any good SEO does.

Clients and agencies are fearful of low-quality link building; but as the data above suggests, in some markets, this is still a very effective tactic.

Although you don’t need me to tell you, only a fool is still freewheeling off the back of low-quality links alone.

From the above, we can deduce that in the US market -- arguably a more ‘SEO advanced’ market -- lower quality links are starting to wane in terms of effectiveness as the social signal dial gets turned up a little. So for anyone reading this in Australia, you could say that the US is our canary down the mine; and therefore, learning from what is working there and balancing it with what works here presently is the smartest strategy to adopt.

However, Wil Reynolds argued a strong case that -- even in markets like the US – links are still the dominant factor and not necessarily good quality links either; in fact quality and social signals don’t appear to impact rankings as much as you might think.

Balance your link building tactic portfolio – adopting a combination approach

You are likely familiar with the Boston Matrix, which is an established tool for analysing the product or service portfolio of a business.

Below is an adapted version of the Boston Matrix, which should help you to visualise and more effectively plan your link building efforts. Thus, ensuring you are getting the results you seek now whilst being mindful of future developments.

A balanced ‘portfolio’ is essential. Too much in one area can be hampering short-term success; too much in another area could be jeopardising long-term stability.

It is a balancing act, and what might seem like extra ‘paperwork’ is actually a quick and effective planning tool that can also help clients to better understand your approach.

How to use the matrix

Understand the segments (see below).
Categorise your tactics (depending upon your market).
Assign a percentage of your budget to each one (understand your own or your client’s objectives and expectations and then assign accordingly).
Monitor regularly (SEO is a constantly changing environment, and as such tactics will likely move through all stages of the matrix at some point).

New recipes

This is the ‘development kitchen’ for your link building efforts – where you explore new tactics which might or might not be providing value.

By new tactics, I am not specifically talking about ‘unheard of in the industry,’ but perhaps just new to your market or your site. Some verticals still have very few infographics, for example.

Consume in moderation

This segment is for tactics which offer medium to long-term value, but little in the way of short-term gains. So it should be consumed in moderation if you are looking to maximise return on investment.

Staple diet

This is the bread and butter segment and likely to be where most resources are allocated. You know these tactics work, and they provide short-term gain without compromising medium to long-term stability.

Fruitless

The graveyard of link building tactics. Obviously, it is up to you when you feel that a certain tactic is no longer pulling its weight. It can be an idea to keep a track of the ‘fruitless’ tactics and perhaps a note as to why; then if things should change, you have the option of pulling it back into your portfolio via the ‘new recipes’ section.

Furthermore, Google’s crackdown on unnatural link patterns means that now is definitely the time to be varying your anchor text to ensure your site’s profile is as natural looking as it possibly can be.

Overall conclusion

The overall conclusion we can draw is that link building is certainly not a one size fits all approach. Different SERPs, keywords, and markets require very different strategies.

You also need to be thinking SERP-specific when it comes to link building tactics. Certainly, there are other ways to view link building, but this is just the way I look at it so as to make it more tactical. Some would argue that by looking at what competitors are doing, you are always going to be chasing their tail. I would say this isn’t the case; as with my proposed methodology outlined above, you are learning from their successes and their mistakes. Then you are executing, using your own well thought out tactics, which should close the natural search gap and then outpace the competition over time.

An interesting point, up for discussion and testing, would be whether a company can leap-frog the lower-end link building and overcompensate with the more legitimate tactics and get this recognised and rewarded by Google. My instincts and research tell me no, but I would love to hear from you in the comments if you have any data or experiences that would go against this.

By David Klein, Founder and Director of Orange Line - SEO and online marketing specialists based in Sydney, Australia. Visit us for more information about our link building services and methodology.

Publ.Date : 2012-01-30T11:33:27+01:00

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