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• Four Creative Link Building Tactics - Whiteboard Friday

  "Posted by Aaron Wheeler In this week's Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin clues you in on four link building tactics that you likely haven't heard about. Given the importance of link building to SEO, this video should prove to be worth its (virtual) weight in gold. (I mean that in the best possible way ;-p) if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed('wistia_174843',640,360,{videoUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin',stillUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin',distilleryUrl:'http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x',accountKey:'wistia-production_3161',mediaId:'wistia-production_174843',mediaDuration:397.13}) View statistics for this video Embed video . <object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_174843" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_174843&mediaDuration=397.13"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_174843" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_174843&mediaDuration=397.13"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed('wistia_174843',640,360,{videoUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/03f8ba29261b82e8cb35f0e4ca815aac8fb05286.bin',stillUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/84d0a346a0b96ddee80f29e3c55a927d31548e09.bin',distilleryUrl:'http://distillery-app.wistia.com/x',accountKey:'wistia-production_3161',mediaId:'wistia-production_174843',mediaDuration:397.13})</script> <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz - SEO Software</a>   Video Transcription   Hey, SEOmoz fans!  Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.  Today we're talking about link building and specifically four tactics that are relatively creative, not talked about a ton in the SEO sphere, that can help you get some direct links to virtually any kind of site.. . Let's start with number one up here, giving testimonials.  I know this sounds a little odd.  You're thinking to yourself, "Wait, I'm a marketer.  I should be trying to get testimonials about my product, my service, my company."  But in fact, give and you shall receive.. . So in this case, if are you are a site owner and you have a business and you say nice things about a product that you use, products that you like, free web apps, tools on the webs, blogs, resources, whatever it might be, or specific products or companies, and you email them and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really like your service.  I enjoy using it.  If you'd like to use this as a testimonial, feel free."  You can say some nice words and then have a, "My name is Rand Fishkin and I am the CEO of SEOmoz."  When they publish that, they will take it and put it on their GoodProduct.com website, and you can see that gets embedded right into their site and it will link back over to your site.. . So, it is a great way to build up a repertoire of contacts, build good relations, and do something nice for the people who are doing something nice for you.  I would definitely not do this disingenuously.  Make sure that you are actually recommending things that you would recommend to a real friend.  It will come back and bite you otherwise.  But if you do this, you can get those great links too.. . The second one, design galleries.  This is an odd case because you do have to jump through some hoops.  If you can contract some of those exceptional, high quality, CSS and web design folks to build a really great looking site, something that looks nothing like this horrific drawing.  I don't even know why I put so many boxes and lines.  I am sure there was a reason.  You can get featured on sites like CSS REMIX or Drawer or CSS Gallery.  If you do a search for CSS galleries, in fact, you will find literally hundreds in the first few hundred results of places where you can get a live link pointing back from those pages just by submitting your site and having a site that looks great.. . Now, what I would recommend is that before you go through the design process make sure that you visit a lot of these places and get inspired.  See what makes it.  See what is hot right now.  Those designs have the added benefit of being often very good for users.  Using CSS properly means that you're loading pages, you are keeping code and design separate.  It can often increase your rate of attracting links as well.  Linking and quality of design are a direct relationship.  As the quality of design rises, so too does the likelihood that people of all kinds, not just design galleries but of all kinds, will link to your site.  They'll find you more credible.  They'll want to show you off.  They'll want to share.  This is a great investment both for the direct links you can get and for the future.. . Number three.  This is sort of an interesting one.  Thanks to sites out there like HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, and a few others, I think PR Newswire runs one as well, you can be a press source simply by combing through databases or lists of people who say, "Hey, I am a reporter in need of a story about a business that keeps dogs in their office and what the impact of having dogs around is.  Can we interview you, show off your business?"  Those stories when they get written about, they might appear in sources as big as "The New York Times" or as small as your local newspaper, but they appear online as well.  When they do, that link will point back to your site giving you a link from a nice press resource, which is a great place to get a link.. . Number four, the last one here, turning raw numbers into a data story.  I like this a lot because the idea here is that people produce a lot of interesting data about virtually every industry, but they don't always do great things with that data.  They'll produce interesting numbers or numbers that seem boring on their surface but can be used in interesting ways.  It is up to you to be creative about, hmm, okay, comScore published this, Nielsen published that, Forrester published this data research.  If I combine some of those numbers or if I think about how they play out, I can come up with a great story and maybe some cool graphics too about what that means.  I can take some of the data over time and build a story about what's happening.  I can show that data next to something like Google Trends data or Search Insights data or data from a second or third source.  When I combine those, I have great link and media bait.  The nice thing about producing this is it is not just sort of classic link bait where, "Oh, that's interesting, I want to share that." But it is interesting because when you are the reference resource for the data, everyone else who writes about the story or who wants to share it has to link back to you.. . A good example of this, check out www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts and you'll see a bunch of places where we have taken data from great folks like Eightfold Logic used to be Enquisite, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Forrester, and we've combined them into unique and interesting ways to view that data.  We didn't even do much with it, just showed sort of, "Hey, they said that 30% of searches come from Europe and 40% come from Asia, etc., so we're going to build a pie chart of that that looks great and people can embed that."  Now when they do, they link back to SEOmoz and have the source in there.  We'll always say what the original source is too.  But by hosting this stuff and creating it, you get all these great links.. . All right everyone, I hope we have helped out your link building efforts here today.  I look forward to the discussion in the comments.  We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.  Take care. Video transcription by SpeechPad.com If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, please post it in the comments! This post is very much a work in progress.. Do you like this post? Yes No "

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• A New Day, A New SEOmoz

  "Posted by randfishIt's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah. If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we? Big Improvements to PRO Membership It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available. If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect. Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post) There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out. The Web App is Now in Public Beta Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking. We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab. As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better. Still Ironing Out Some Kinks There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon. I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues. We Love Your Feedback If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post. Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-). Do you like this post? Yes No "

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• Day 1 at the SEOmoz Training Raceway

  "Posted by Dana LookadooThis 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.I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.   Presentation Off Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).   Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion: Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you  never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch: . You pitch SEO before that. Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all. Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.. He showed the Mozzers how  to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data. He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions. Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>  Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger: Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy. In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc. Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic: <If you're taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...> Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back. “Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average." Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords: Show competitors in SERPs. Match it with yeyword demand. Show how they are doing, side-by-side.   And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will. OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race. Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.” She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions: 1.     What is your website trying to do? 2.     If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground? 3.     What is the biggest threat to your success? You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus) Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including: Social Network Filters – combine Google Image Search - Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation. Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised. MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any  number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar(). Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.” Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist: Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships Take the resulting insights and dive deeper Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company Show the action items (not the data) to your company Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance. Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds: Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time: High Priority Tactics: Sitemaps Education 301s Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking Rel=canonical Rewriting urls How much it will make? What's the cost/traffic potential Low Priority Tactics: Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals. URLs Link Flow Video SEO Duplicate content CMS Overhaul W3C compliance Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point. Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle: Optimize all assets! Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating. Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race: rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem. Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap. Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors. Title is the most important element. Analytics suck!!!!!!!! Omniture – over reports search referrers Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images) Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.  Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize. Tom Critchlow Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:   Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan forMid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDFLong-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before. QDF = Query Deserves Freshness QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links. Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!  Keyword harvesting tools: Google Search Suggest Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific Google Related Searches       Mozenda + API = WIN Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool. Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche. Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche. Look at how people tag stories on Delicious The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)    Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.) Build an SEO friendly CMS: Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:   Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following: Delicious tags – todo, toread (API) Foursquare top checkins (API) Local events calendar (API) Yahoo Answers (API) Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish) No API? – Mozenda ftw! More: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was: It’s not that hard! <sigh>   Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc  that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.   Thank you, Tom! Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach. Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time. The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework: She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale: Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific. She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now. Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site. Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand. Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked: How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ... Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design: Unclear call-to-action Too many choices Asking for too much info Too much text Not keeping your promises Visual distractions Lack of trust We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.. Do you like this post? Yes No "

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