Internet Success Hub » SEO

SEO Monitoring Tools and Tips

Internet Success Hub — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:16:33 +0000

In the real world, things go wrong. While we might all wish that everything we did was "fix once, stay fixed", that's rarely the case.

Things that were previously "not a problem"(TM) can become "a problem"(TM) rapidly for a variety of reasons:

someone changes something unrelated / without realising it would impact you or just screws up (e.g. deploying a staging version of robots.txt or an old version of a server config)
the world changes around you (there was a Google update named after a black and white animal a while back)
the technical gremlins gang up on you (server downtime, DDoS etc.)

In all of these cases, you'd rather know about the issue sooner rather than later because in most of them your ability to minimise the resulting issues declines rapidly as time passes (and in the remaining cases, you still want to know before your boss / client).

While many of us have come round to the idea that we should be making recommendations in these areas, we are too often still creating spectacularly non-actionable advice like:

make sure you have great uptime
make sure your site is quick

Today, I want to give you three pieces of directly actionable advice that you can start doing for your own site and your key clients immediately that will help you spot problems early, avoid knock-on indexing issues and quickly get alerted to bad deploys that could hurt your search performance.

#1 Traffic drops

Google Analytics has a feature that spots significant changes in traffic or traffic profile. It can also alert you. The first of these features is called "intelligence" and the second "intelligence alerts".

Rather than rehash old advice, I'll simply link to the two best posts I've read on the subject:

Here on SEOmoz by Rebecca Lehmann - 7 essential google intelligence custom alerts
Over on Blueglass by Annie Cushing - stay alert with google analytics

This is the simplest of all the recommendations to implement and is also the most holistic in the sense that it can alert you to traffic drops of all kinds. The downside of course is that you're measuring symptoms not causes so you (a) have to wait for causes to create symptoms rather than being alerted to the problem and (b) get an alert about the symptom rather than the cause and have to start detective work before paging the person who can fix it.

#2 Uptime monitoring

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realise that SEO is dependent on your website. And not only on how you optimise your site, but also on it being available.

While for larger clients, it shouldn't be your job to alert someone if their website goes down, it does no harm to know and for smaller clients there is every chance you'd be adding significant value by keeping an eye on these things.

I have both good and bad reasons for knowing a lot about server monitoring:

the good: we made a small investment in Server Density in May last year (and scored our only link from Techcrunch in the process)
the bad: we've been more enthusiastic users of our portfolio company's services than we might have hoped – some annoying server issues have resulted in more downtime for distilled.net than I care to think about. To add insult to injury, we managed to get ourselves hit with a DDoS attack last week (see speed chart below)

There are three main elements you might want to monitor:

Pure availability (including response code)
Server load and performance
Response speed / page load time

Website availability

There are two services I recommend here:

Pingdom's free service monitors the availability and response time of your site
Server Density's paid service provides more granular alerting and graphing as well as tying it together with your server performance monitoring

Here's what the Server Density dashboard looks like:

And here is the response time graph from pingdom:

You can see the spike in response time during the DDoS attack and the lower average response time over the last few days after we implemented cloudflare

Incidentally, you may not have noticed (it had passed me by until Mike gave me the heads-up the other day) that Google rolled out site speed to all analytics accounts without the previously required change to the GA snippet so you can get some of this data from your GA account now – here's the technical breakdown from some of Distilled's pages:

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

This was the most ambitious of my ideas for SEO monitoring. It came out of a real client issue. A major client was rolling out a new website and managed to deploy an old / staging version of robots.txt on a Saturday morning (continuous integration FTW). It was essentially luck that the SEO running the project was all over it, spotted it quickly, called the key contact and got it rolled back before it did any lasting harm. We had a debrief the following week where we discussed how we could get alerted to this kind of thing automatically.

I went to David Mytton, the founder of Server Density and asked him if he could build some features in for you lot to alert when this kind of thing happens – if we accidentally noindex our live site or block it in robots.txt. He came up with this ingenious solution that uses functionality already present in their core platform:

Monitoring for any change to robots.txt

First create a service to monitor robots.txt – here's ours:

Then create an alert to tell you if the MD5 hash of the contents of robots.txt changes (see a definition of MD5 here):

If you copy and paste the contents of your robots.txt into an MD5 generator you get a string of gobbledegook (ours is "15403cbc6e028c0ec46a5dd9fffb9196"). What this alert is doing is monitoring for any change to our robots.txt so if we deploy a new version I will get an alert by email and push notification to my phone. Wouldn't it be nice to get alerted in this way if a client or dev team pushed an update to robots.txt without telling you?

Spotting the inclusion of no-index meta tags

In much the same way, you can create alerts for specific strings of text found on specific pages – I've chosen to get an alert if the string "noindex" is found in the HTML of the Distilled homepage. If we ever deployed a staging version or flipped a setting in a wordpress plugin, I'd get a push notification:

Doing this kind of monitoring is essentially free to me because we are already using Server Density to monitor the health of our servers so it's no extra effort to monitor checksums and the presence / absence of specific strings.

#4 Bonus – why stop there?

Check out all the stuff that etsy monitor and have alerts for. If you have a team that can build the platform / infrastructure, then there are almost unlimited things you could monitor for and alert about. Here are some ideas to get you started:

status codes – 404 vs 301 vs 302 vs 500 etc.
changes in conversion rates / cart abandonment
bot behaviour – crawling patterns etc – given how disproportionately interested I was in the simple "pages crawled" visualisation available in cloudflare (see below – who'd have guessed we get crawled more by Yandex than Google?), I feel there is a lot more that could be done here:

PS – today is the last day for early bird discounts on our Linklove conferences in London and Boston at the end of March / beginning of April. (There's also a sign-up form on that page if you want to make sure you always hear about upcoming conferences and offers). I hope to see many of you there.

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Being Nice Isn’t a Marketing Tactic. Or Is It?

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:49 +0000

Posted by wrttnwrd

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.

Being nice doesn't have to mean you have an ulterior motive. But if it does, that's OK.

Ever since the Great Diet Coke Delivery that Charles made to my office, folks have been buzzing. I've watched the comments on Charles' YouMoz post regarding the whole adventure, and there are three schools of thought:

I rewarded Charles with a link and mention because he did a really nice thing.
Charles did a nice thing knowing it might result in a link and a mention.
This is a savvy, cynical marketing 'stunt' that's worth repeating, and now SEOs the world over will be sending each other soft drinks.

I had no plans to comment on the whole discussion. I took the gesture at face value: A #1 with a strong dose of #2. It totally made my day, week and month.

But then I read a comment by Sha Menz that I found particularly telling:

Now I suppose anyone in the SEO world that receives a silly surprise in the mail from me is going to assume there is some sort of ulterior motive behind the gesture. Of course, that's just tough for me (and the people I will think twice about surprising in the future).

Is 'good' still 'good' when you do it expecting to be rewarded? I dunno. That's getting pretty deep for a bunch of marketing nerds. But here's why I wish everyone did more stuff like Charles, even if there is an ulterior motive:

Nice is nice

A genuinely 'nice', helpful act, performed with an ulterior motive, is just fine in the marketing world. That's called 'customer service' or 'networking' or 'being a mensch.' Zappos does it. Tiffany's does it. So does Virgin Airlines. It gets people talking. It also makes people happy.

If I can build my business and make people happy… wow. Just wow. That's a perfect marketing utopia. Read Guy Kawasaki's Enchantment if you want to learn just how perfect it can be.

Nice is currency

I'm not saying this cynically: Nice is a currency. It has value. That value declines if you overdo it. For example: The telephone customer service rep who keeps saying "I'm really sorry, I understand your frustration" after two hours' of frustrating troubleshooting. Yeah, I'm frustrated. You want to make me happy? Fix my cable!

Overuse reduces value.

Irrelevant niceness is spam

Send me a free pair of boxing gloves. You know what they are for me? Crap. So I remember you for sending me crap. AKA spam.

Those gloves might be the best on the market: State of the art boxing gloves that the best fighters would beg for. Doesn't matter. My only punches are verbal.

Send me a free pair of cycling gloves, when I already have three pairs? More crap.

These kinds of gifts fail, because I don't need them. If I don't need them, right then, then the chances I want them are pretty slim. And the odds that I'll appreciate the gift are slim, too.

Note that all of this assumes these gifts are sent to me from strangers. I'm not a completely ungrateful wretch. If a friend sent me boxing gloves, I might look at them strangely, but I'd still say 'thanks'.

Nice proves you listen

Most important, a truly 'nice' act proves you listen to me. The generic "I'm really sorry. I understand your frustration." fails because it's overused, and because the person saying it sounds like they're reading from a script. Which they are. They're not listening to me, at all. That reduces the niceness quotient to about zilch.

Charles showed up with Diet Coke. Just a short time after my panicked tweet. Clearly, he listened. He went out of his way, just a bit, to respond. Totally fantastic.

Nice is intrinsically rewarding

If you do a favor with an ulterior motive, don't whine if you get nothing in return. That's tacky. If the warm feeling you get from the favor itself (the intrinsic reward) isn't enough, then you shouldn't be taking action at all.

The extrinsic reward – the link, or the tip, or the new customer – is gravy. If you can't grasp that, stop.

Rules for genuine niceness

Go ahead and commit acts of kindness for strangers. Even if you do so expecting something in return. Just follow these rules:

Be nice when appropriate. Don't slather it everywhere like cheap syrup on lousy pancakes.
Do relevant nice things. Don't send crap to random people, or do favors no one wants.
Listen first. The closer the match between the favor and the context, the more the recipient appreciates it. No match at all may mean you're a stalker.
Do it for the intrinsic reward. Sure, expect something extrinsic. But ask yourself if the intrinsic reward (the warm glow you get) is enough. If it's not, you're making a mistake.

I'm a pretty cynical guy. But I do think marketing communications can make the world a far better place. One of the ways it can do that is by rewarding acts of kindness, good behavior, etc. informing the community. So be nice!

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Historical Link Analysis is Here!

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:48 +0000

Posted by Samantha Britney

Season's Greetings, fellow Mozzers! As if this month hasn’t been exciting enough with the release of Custom Reports and Branded Keywords, today we have a special surprise for you. You asked for it, and we are happy to deliver. Introducing Historical Link Analysis for PRO!

(Photo credit: Dana Pleasant Photography)

Being able to see your link metric data over time helps demonstrate the effectiveness of your link building strategies. And hey, who doesn’t like to see progress? Read on to see how this new feature works.

Subdomain Link Metrics

This update to the Links section is full of lots of little goodies. Not only are we now storing your campaign link metrics over time, but we have also added Subdomain Link Analysis metrics for you and your competitors.

Historical Data Charts

What matters most in viewing historical metrics is how you are faring against your competition. For each metric, you can view historical data over time in comparison to your competitors. This way you can distinguish between the effects of your hard work to improve your link metrics and fluctuations that affect the entire index.

You can view historical data via the History tab or by using the menu link next to a given metric on the Summary tab. You can also export all historical data to a CSV file.

You may notice that we have made a few additional improvements to the Link Analysis section, including:

adding Total External Links to Root Domain Metrics (to align with what is reported in Open Site Explorer)
moving Link details to a separate tab for better readability
updating the Summary PDF report to include Subdomain metrics

Linkscape Index Updates

Your link analysis metrics will continue to be updated every time a new index is released. With the rollout of this feature we'll now be able to store your data from previous indices as well, starting with data from the October 28th index. However, this data only goes back as far as you campaign does. When you create a new campaign, we'll only begin storing link metrics for you and your competitors from that point forward.

In order to give you the best data, we’re continually improving our Linkscape crawlers and the data they return to the Index. As indices change, it’s possible that your metrics may change as a result of what is included in one index vs. another. This may occur even if a site’s link profile hasn’t changed at all. I encourage you to check out Rand’s Linkscape Index blog posts (released with each new index) to better understand additional factors that could affect your metrics. Best practices indicate that you should always compare your progress against your competitors, versus solely comparing to your past performance.

Let Us Know What You Think

We hope these product updates bring a little cheer to your holiday season. As always, we would love your feedback! Feel free to share your thoughts, or holiday stories, via a comment on this post. For feature ideas you can always share via the feature request forum.

Happy holidays!

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8 Things You Can Give Away to Earn Links + Mentions – Whiteboard Friday

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:48 +0000

Posted by Kenny Martin

Happy Holidays Everyone! It's that time of year again and Rand gets into the giving spirit with this year's special edition of Whitebeard Friday. Presented here are 8 generous tips that will encourage you to get into the holiday spirit of giving yourself. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below!

Video Transcription

Ho, ho, ho. Welcome to this year's special edition of Whitebeard Friday. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukah. Happy Holidays, whatever you celebrate. Festivus (the "Airing of Grievances"). Whatever you are celebrating this holiday season, I hope you're having a wonderful one. Welcome to the special edition of Whitebeard Friday. Every year I put on this ridiculous getup, and hopefully none of you who celebrate Christmas mind Jewish people like me wearing Santa Claus outfits. I apologize if I've offended anyone. But I have, you can see, drawn a Christmas tree with a Fesitvus pole in the middle and a Star of David. Huh, huh? A little cross-cultural segment there.

All right. This week on Whitebeard Friday I am talking about, I was originally talking about 12, to emulate the 12 days of Christmas, but it wouldn't fit on the whiteboard. So we're doing eight, eight things you can do, you can give away, to earn links and mentions to help your marketing efforts. Obviously, Christmas, the season of giving away. Even when I was a kid, my parents celebrated Christmas. My parents with my whitebeard. I was very, very young. This was like the 17th century. We want to talk today about some of those great methods of things you can give away as part of the holiday season, the giving season, and earn back great things for your marketing.

So, number one, your writing. This is a pretty obvious one, right? When you guest post for someone, when you guest comment, when you leave your written work or allow others to publish it, that earns you links back, links and references back. And I have a pro tip for each of these. So the pro tip here, make a search like this – you see this tiny writing here – "guest author," guest plus author or write or blogger or contributor, if you use that plus the word "blog" or the word "news" or your keywords, you will find posts that contain this stuff. Another pro tip, use Google blog search and Google discussion search. Both of those are great at providing this kind of stuff.

Number two, your videos. See, we're doing a video right now. Do you feel this wonderful video content? The pro tip here is use Wistia. I believe both Wistia and – people are walking by in the SEOmoz offices and think this looks hilarious – use Wistia or I believe Vimeo Pro also does this. When you put your videos up, if you'll notice the embed link for this video in particular, which I think maybe it's in the right-hand corner, that corner, that corner, one of the corners, the embed point will actually point back to your site, which is phenomenally great because it means when other people embed the video, you control the anchor text and the link of where it points back to.

Number three, your product. Whatever it is that you sell, whatever it is that you make, whatever it is that you do, you could have a service, giving that away often earns you links and references in return. Pro tip, be careful of those direct giveaways. If you say, "Hey, here's the product, I want a link back," that can get you into trouble. But if you instead use events, or charity, or sponsorship, or you give it away without a request and ask and people cover it, that's an organic and natural link, an editorial link. That can work for you.

Number four, very similar, your time. Donate and dedicate your time, like me, Father Christmas by helping people out, donating what it is that you do best. If you are a marketer, that could be helping other people with your marketing. If you are a consultant, it could be doing consulting work. If you are helping people in business or you are an expert in a particular realm or product, helping those people do those things, accomplish those things. Finding people who you know have needs in that area and giving it away can help you earn good will, and then that brings links back to your site and references back to your site. A wonderful way to give and receive.

Number five, this is something I hate when marketers don't do this. Give away your contact details. What I mean here is when you are participating out on the Web and you are hoping to earn links and references back, make your contact details public, make them easy to find, make sure that there's not a big challenge here. Make it clear you are open to contributing and helping and participating and that you hope that by doing these things you spread your brand. This will invite people to email you, to tweet at you, to link to you, to reference you when they are seeking contributors to these types of things. Contact details, by the way, also important to make sure that those are easily accessible and findable from your site and anywhere you do participate.

Number six, your photos, your images, or your graphics. The pro tip here, have an images or photos section on your site if you can, especially if you have a large media library, and then make sure it is open to licensing in exchange for a link. You can use the creative comments licensing, you can create your own licensing, you can create little things that make it easy to embed any of your images or any of your graphics and earn that link back. By the way, another pro tip on this, if someone is using your images, or you suspect that they are, use Google's similar images link inside. Here, I'll show you right here. Let's say I have just done a search for an image, and I have clicked on that image. Now you're going to see the image here, and there is a little X, and then Google has a sidebar over here with some links after I have clicked it, and one of those is "similar images." If you click on "similar images," that will show you other images like this one, oftentimes, people who have taken your image but haven't given you credit. You can then reach out to them and be like, "Hey, what's the deal?" Does it look weird having Santa kind of give a . . .

Number seven, your full feed, your full RSS feed. The pro tip here is, especially, this is important to not go partial feed but to go full feed when you're giving RSS because lots of people will republish that, lots of people will reference it, email it, subscribe, etc. Great for marketing. And pro tip, use absolute links. Don't use /blog whatever. Use www.mysite, the full link, because when it gets referenced on other sites, it will point back to you and that link will count and pass value.

Number eight, last but not least, your data. Undoubtedly, if you're doing interesting things in the world of product, of marketing, of customer research, of embedding yourself in a community, you are collecting valuable, super cool data. A great way to do this is to first build a list of likely writers, people who you think would be interested in the data you're providing. This could be white paper kinds of data. It could be research and survey data. It might be data you've generated from all the users of your product or from whatever it is that you're collecting. And then reach out. Before you have it, reach out and ask if they want access. By doing that, you create this wonderful confirmation, because you said, "Hey, Dear Writer, Do you want access to this cool data that we've got? Would you like to share? Would you be interested? Would your customers be interested? Would your readers be interested?" A lot of the time they'll say, "Yes, I would be interested. Please do share that with me." If you instead just reach out and say, "Hey we have this cool data," you get a lot of ignores. But if you first reach out and say, "Hey, Kenny, I know you write on the SEOmoz blog. Would you be potentially interested in some data about the social media marketing field?" Kenny will be like, "Hmm, yeah, that's sounds interesting. Send it over to me." Then you send it over and say, "Hey, we'd love if you could at least tweet or share it, and if you blog about it, that'd be even better." This is a great way of making sure they get your data and then link to you.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this silly edition of Whitebeard Friday. It's been a fantastic year. Hope you have a great holiday, and we will see you again next week. Yes, even between Christmas and New Year's we're going to be doing Whiteboard Friday. See you next week for another edition. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The Best of 2011 – Posts & People Who Rocked Our World

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:46 +0000

Posted by jennita

What's better than unicorns and kittens happily leaping over rainbows with gold at the end? The Moz community, that's what!

At the end of every year we like to take a look back, not only at which posts made an impact, but which people made an impact on the community as well.

This year we're taking a peek at the top content on the blog based on thumbs up, visits, root domains, tweets and comments. Plus we have the added bonus of looking at community members who left the most comments, and those whose comments were the most thumbed up. If you've missed any of these posts over the past year, I invite you to grab a cup of coffee and start reading. I look forward to hearing about your favorite posts, plus your thoughts on why these posts did so well this year.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, I wanted to again remember GoodnewsCowboy, a long time community member whom we lost to cancer earlier this year. GNC was an amazing man and is sorely missed around here.

For quick reference, check out the Top Posts of 2011 by:
Thumbs Up
Unique Visits
Linking Root Domains
Tweets
Total Number of Comments

And the community members who rocked our world:
Top Comments of 2011 by Thumbs Up
Top Users of 2011 By Total Comments

A few notes about the data: 1. I'm no scientist, I did my best putting this together and I apologize now if I've screwed anything up. 2. All data was pulled in the past 24 hours, so some of the numbers may have changed slightly. 3. I'm not a scientist. Plus, I need to send a huge thank you to Casey Henry who helped me gather quite a bit of this data. Thank you Casey!

Top Comments of 2011 by Thumbs Up

Yay! Now we get to take a look at some of the people making "waves" in the community. This list shows the top 10 comments based on the number of thumbs up it received. Some of them are cooky and fun, while others are direct and to-the-point. Take a peek:

1. SandroM | January 19th, 2011
32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011

2. Jonathon Colman | September 24th, 2011
Crawl Outage – An Update and What We're Doing

3. randfish | September 2nd, 2011
Yes, You Really Can Build Links With Twitter – Whiteboard Friday

4. russvirante | September 26th, 2011
Crawl Outage – An Update and What We're Doing

5. iulian lita | January 18th, 2011
32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011

6. Liza Shulyayeva | July 12th, 2011
The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded

7. Dan Deceuster | September 15th, 2011
5 Reasons Why Copying Links is Bad for You

8. Frederik Hyldig | August 26th, 2011
Article Marketing: Mostly A Scam – Whiteboard Friday

9. gfiorelli1 | July 12th, 2011
The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded

10. randfish | July 6th, 2011
Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Search Rankings

Top Users of 2011 By Total Comments

So who commented the most you ask? Well if you're around the blog much you probably already know that Gianluca is the king of comments. I wanted to also note that our friend GoodnewsCowboy (who I mentioned above) was the top commenter last year. This year he fell to the 15th spot, and that's only with having comments through March 16th.

One note about the top users, all Associates and staff have been removed from this list (There were five that would have made the list: Rand, Dr. Pete, Cyrus, myself & iPullRank). So who are our chatty Kathy's?

1. gfiorelli1
mozPoints: 5578 | Rank: 3

2. James Norquay
mozPoints: 1692 | Rank: 16

3. Jenni Brown
mozPoints: 583 | Rank: 71

4. Moosa Hemani
mozPoints: 535 | Rank: 82

5. algogmbh_petra
mozPoints: 1179 | Rank: 26

6. Dubs
mozPoints: 284 | Rank: 162

7. webpagefxseo
mozPoints: 210 | Rank: 269

8. joshuahedlund
mozPoints: 330 | Rank: 136

9. SEOTakeaways
mozPoints: 1088 | Rank: 31

10. Stephen
mozPoints: 1724 | Rank: 15

Are you as enamored as I am with this post? I sure hope so! It was a ton of fun to put together (even though you may have heard me grumbling on twitter about it). I always love taking a look back at the past year's posts and realizing how much has really happened in a year! This year the obvious themes were the convergence of search and social, plus the Panda update. I hope you'll bookmark this post and read through the ones you may have missed throughout the year. What was your favorite post this year?

Spectacularly awesome image of unicorns, kitttens and rainbows from Sarcastic Monday.

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Be the CEO of More Than Just Your Job

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:45 +0000

Posted by randfish

Almost two years ago, Brad Feld put up an excellent blog post called "Be the CEO of Your Job" based on an interview with Mark Pincus of Zynga by the NYTimes. I loved the concept and have tried to apply it even since before I had a name for the attitude of independence that great companies tend to grant their team. From Brad's article:

Pause and ponder the idea. Assuming you are in an entrepreneurial organization, are you being the CEO of your job? Is this culturally (and functionally) acceptable? Do you get rewarded for taking risks and succeeding (or failing) like your CEO does? If not, would you be more effective if you did?

Now, if you are the CEO of an entrepreneurial organization, do you encourage everyone in the company to be CEO of their job? Is this culturally (and functionally) acceptable? Do they get rewarded for taking risks and succeeding (or failing) like you do? If not, would they be more effective if they did?

At the Mozplex, "CEO of Your Job" has come up in a few exec meetings and several hiring discussions, too. When it does, it's always as a positive quality we're seeking, e.g. "How can we empower so-and-so to be CEO of their job?" meaning "How do we remove restrictions (imagined or real) so that so-and-so can work on this independently, execute and take pride in that accomplishment?"

But in the last few weeks, I realized that there's a nuance to the logic behind being "CEO of your job" that can cause strife and frustration if it's not well-understood by the entire team. Here's an illustration that (hopefully) says the thousand words I'd rather not type:

Owning your job is awesome. Empowering people to make decisions on their own and giving them flexibility is, too. But a danger arises when multiple people or teams are being CEOs of their job to the exclusion of the larger organization. This can happen at two-person startups or huge enterprises equally. Heck, I'm guilty of it myself! I get passionate about a particular aspect of the business at Moz (for example, this blog), and overinvest my own time in it, along with those of folks I manage or influence (which is quite a good number at this point). That pulls resources off other mission-critical projects and, potentially, hurts the company's ability to accomplish all those things that desperately need doing.

Mike King recently dropped by Seattle for our mini-Mozcation/charity bake sale (he gave a killer presentation called "What Being an Indie Rapper Taught Me About SEO"). On our walk to dinner after the event, I mentioned to him that it embarrassed me to say that, in the past few years, I've knowingly prioritized projects over SEO, social media or other inbound marketing efforts during our roadmap meetings at Moz. I know…. I complained for years about how the companies I advised as a consultant didn't put SEO first, and then, when I have the power to change things at my own organization, I put other projects first. I'm a hypocrite!

But, I'm also responsible for the success of the whole business, and sometimes that means stepping away from being CEO of just your job to seeing the bigger picture and knowing when your projects deserve to be on the backburner or even when something you're working on needs to be scrapped entirely in favor of a new direction or wholly new task. Autonomy and freedom to kick ass at your work is a great power, but also a great responsibility. If you put your job CEO-dom ahead of the broader goals, things can get messy.

p.s. Hopefully, this post can also help in-house, agency and consultant marketers who get frustrated with executives for not pushing through their agendas with the speed or passion we'd put behind it. Sometimes, especially if resource allocation is a roadblock, it might actually be the right decision (rarely, though).

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How I Got The Attention of One of the Top SEO Bloggers With Diet Coke

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:45 +0000

Posted by Sparkplug Digital

We've all heard stories about companies who do remarkable things for their customers that results in people talking about them. These examples include the Nordstrom's employee who accepted a return for tires, Zappos providing surprise overnight shipping, or Gary Vaynerchuk sending a Mark Sanchez jersey to a customer, even though he sells wine. Delighting customers with unexpected acts of kindness doesn't have a directly measurable ROI, but often times it leads to loyal customers and evangelists who spread a story.

I recently learned that doing remarkable and unexpected things can also get the attention of the linkerati and lead to social media mentions and even a link on one of the most popular internet marketing blogs. And all it took was Twitter and Diet Coke.

It was 9am on a Tuesday and I was getting settled into work when I decided to check Twitter. I noticed the following Tweet from one of my favorite internet marketing bloggers:

"Hmmm." I thought. "Wouldn't it be funny if someone actually delivered some Diet Coke to Ian". After a few moments of wondering how something like that would be received, I decided to do it and find out. I have been a fan of Ian Lurie's Conversation Marketing blog for years and thought it would be fun and unexpected.

I drove to the grocery store, picked up two 12 packs of Diet Coke, and went to the Portent Interactive office which happened to be 15 minutes away from my location. I walked into their entrance and was suddenly in front of several desks of Portent employees. I walked up to the first desk and told an employee that I noticed on Twitter that they were out of Diet Coke. Fortunately they pretty quickly realized it was for Ian and accepted the boxes.

I drove off laughing because I thought this was probably one of the most random things I have ever done. Within minutes I saw Ian Lurie's Tweet.

When I got back to my desk I read an email from Ian stating that I had definitely earned a link and it was one of the most brilliant displays of social media marketing he had ever seen. Later that night Ian published a post titled How Social Media Works on Conversation Marketing. I had just earned a link to my company's website from one of the most popular marketing blogs which has a domain authority of 70 and links from 1,674 domains according to SEOMoz.

Soon people I admire in the SEO community like Dr. Pete from User Effect were Tweeting about it and even Rand Fishkin noticed.

Wow!

I never expected all of this to happen simply from helping someone on Twitter, but it makes perfect sense. I must have subconsciously channeled years of reading books like Seth Godin's Purple Cow about the importance of being remarkable. It really does work, in both off-line and online marketing if executed well. Here are some of my top takeaways from the experience.

Help Others Without Expectation of Reciprocation

When you help others with no expectation of receiving something back in return, good things tend to happen. People are naturally compelled to reciprocate when they have been helped, like telling their friends why they should do business with you or linking to your site. Even if you don't get a link at least you will be happier. According to a studies, people get a stronger boost in happiness from helping others rather than helping themselves.

Keep An Eye Out for Opportunities to Be Helpful in Social Media

If someone talks about a problem they are having in social media, look for ways that you can help. People frequently talk about things they need help with or problems they are having. If you are proactive and go out of your way to help them, it will almost always be appreciated. I use Tweetdeck to organize people into lists to focus on Tweets from the most relevant people.

Do Something Totally Unexpected

One secret to delighting customers is to do something nice for them that they don't expect. This makes it remarkable and worth talking about. This requires some creativity but there are several good examples for inspiration like the Southwest rapping flight attendant or Kimpton Hotels' response to a customer's request for a bed full of puppies and bathtub full of Reese's Pieces.

Keep your eyes open for opportunities to do remarkable and generous things for your customers, community, and linkerati and you might give them a story worth sharing.

Update December 23, 2011: Diet Coke noticed the story and responded…

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Introducing Branded Keyword Rules and Metrics!

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:44 +0000

Posted by Karen Semyan

Looking at your site’s aggregate organic search traffic is a bit like docking a boat without a depth sounder: Sure, you can gauge where you need to go, but you’d be wise to have more details before you head in.

On that same tack, we should have more detail about our overall search traffic before we use it to make decisions. First and foremost, this bucket of attention can be divided into two groups that we need to watch differently: branded and non-branded traffic.

Why segment your branded traffic?

By segmenting your branded and non-branded traffic, you get a clear picture of two important indicators of success: how visitors interact with your brand, and how they find you with generic, non-branded keywords. This information can help you can take action to target the keywords you care about. This split is also a useful metric to educate your organization or client about your brand pervasiveness and overall visibility.

That’s why we’re excited to roll out a new feature today: Branded Keywords. Now you can group your brand-related keywords together and see related branded data in-line with your reports.

What branded and non-branded traffic tells you

Keywords related to your brand tend to show up at the end of the conversion funnel, when visitors are already aware and interested. They’re more specific and unique, often based on company and domain names, key products, and variations/misspellings of those names and products. They aren’t subject to the fluctuations caused by search algorithms in the same way that non-branded keywords are. This makes them useful as indicators of long-term strength and popularity. For that reason, most sites should see a decent portion of traffic coming from brand-related keywords.

With new brand rules, you’ll be able to track that branded traffic clearly, and uncover any problems with branded keywords that aren’t ranking as well as they should be.

Things get really interesting when you remove branded numbers from your search traffic numbers and focus on your non-branded traffic. Now you have an clearer picture of the generic keywords that currently work hardest for you, which ones you should be targeting and are not, and which content is most effective.

A quick cruise through the feature

You can add brand rules for existing campaigns under Overview > Manage Brand Rules. Specify brand-related terms, and we'll filter all keywords that contain those words.

You can also add brand rules for new campaigns during setup. Once campaign setup is complete, your rules will be applied to any additional keywords you add.

Add or remove individual keywords once rules are set up. At any time, you can label individual keywords as branded or exclude one from the “branded” filter under Overview > Manage Keywords.

If your campaign is hooked to Google Analytics, you’ll see your historical traffic data split into branded and non-branded metrics.

You can get better insight into how people arrive at your site with in-depth metrics on top ten search sources, landing pages, and nonpaid keywords, including PPV, bounce rate, time on site, and more.

See traffic data for brand-related campaign keywords when you filter branded keywords in your ranking report.

More options for managing your keywords include improved list filters, the ability to view all keywords in the list, and a new label filter for adding keywords.

And there’s more coming in the new year! You’ll see .PDF and .CSV reports added for traffic data. We’ll also start showing you your top keywords that send you traffic, so you can have the option to start tracking them.

Please let us know what you think or if you find something you don't expect to see. You can comment to this post or email help@seomoz.org. You can also go to the feature request forum to share a feature suggestion and see what other people are requesting. As always, we love to hear your feedback!

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The Five Marketing Lessons That Took Me a Long Time to Learn

Internet Success Hub — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:03:43 +0000

Posted by neilpatel

Because I grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs I learned early that working for yourself was a great way to make money and improve your lifestyle. However, even though I had this early drive to build businesses, I didn’t always know the right way to go about building or marketing them. In fact, through trial and error I eventually discovered what it takes to build and market a successful business, and the following five lessons are what I think to be the most important.

Being the category leader is not the only way to be successful

Everyone seems to think that if you’re not number one then you won’t have a successful business. I know I fell into this trap early in my career. Whether I was working as a marketing consultant or SEO, I tried to be number one, but it didn’t take me long to discover that being the best and being the category leader is not the same thing.

In some cases, you are number one when you dominate in revenue, number of users or market position. In other words, it’s pretty clear you are number one. For example, according to StatCounter, when it comes to browser, it’s pretty obvious who rules:

But if you are in a less-developed market, number one is often perception, which you can control with marketing. Listen, a company with a product that’s inferior to competition, yet gets a lot of media buzz, will seem like the category leader.

The clothing company American Apparel is a great example. Constantly in the media, whether for good things or bad things, American Apparel seemed unstoppable. In the case of AA, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing one of their ads or hearing about them in the news. What did they do to make that happen?

Controversial policies – American Apparel doesn’t outsource and often includes employees posing for their soft-porn ads, both great topics for the media to report on.
Adopt a social cause and make noise about it – American Apparel is behind two social causes, Legalize LA and Legalize Gay, both causes that bring them attention.
Break the mold for good – The majority of employees at AA are immigrants who are paid more than twice the minimum wage and offered low-cost, full-family healthcare. (It’s unfortunate that 1,500 were illegal, but the CEO claims they used fake papers.)
Defend your values tooth and nail. The CEO of American Apparel is unapologetic about his unorthodox polices, values and views, which adds further fuel to the fire.

Of course some argue that the AA CEO is a sleaze ball who undermines all of his good. Others argue that his behavior is part of the brand’s DNA.

Are they market leaders? Not when it comes to market capitalization. That title belongs to Burberry Group at $552.2 billion. But you wouldn’t know it if you watched the news. In 2008, the Guardian named American Apparel label of the year and in 2009 Time magazine named the CEO one of its finalist for most influential people in the world.

My point is American Apparel went from a small clothing manufacturer in 2003 to a successful business in less than a decade because they were constantly in the press. You can usually compete with the big dogs if you figure out how to get a lot of press and buzz.

Focus on the opportunity, not the market leader

Another myth about market leaders has to do with market growth or saturation. For example, early this November comScore came out with data on US smart phone market. Here’s the data as a graph provided by Asymco:

What should jump out at you immediately is the all the blue on the top of the graph. That stands for all the opportunity out there for getting smart phones into the hands of people who don’t use smart phones. In other words, it doesn’t matter who the market leader is. The game is far from over for newcomers.

Good marketing means you look at what your competitor is doing, especially if he is the market leader, but you also look around them…you look for the opportunity that others are ignoring and, if it is there, taking advantage of it without having to take on the big guys.

Thinking like a customer is essential

It’s important to remember, however, that just because you are getting so much attention doesn’t mean you will be successful. Marketing rule number one is to solve your customer’s problems.

You’ve probably heard this many times before, but it bears repeating…you must make a product that meets an obvious need. Over time I’ve developed a method when it comes to business and product development. It’s called the SIMPLE method:

Simple – A successful product will take the guesswork out of how it satisfies a customer’s problems. Febreeze, for example, is simple…spray and kill odors. You get it immediately.
Interesting – Furthermore, a successfully marketing product puts distance between it and other commodities by explaining what makes it different. All products are a commodity. The iPhone…it’s a commodity, namely a smart phone. But not just any smart phone. It’s got apps, Face Time and now Siri.
Meaningful – But just because you figured out a problem to solve doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. The problem has to be meaningful. Look at Square, for example. It allows small businesses to easily collect payments via credit cards. Most of these small businesses will tell you they were losing money because they couldn’t take credit cards.
Productive – Like being simple, a product that customers will like helps them do something they currently do…but faster, easier or even cheaper. In other words, the product doesn’t complicate the customer’s life, but offers a convenience.
Long-lasting – A successful product will have longevity. It will provide a meaningful solution to a customer’s problem that will be more than just a fad. And it will go through multiple generations.
Entertaining – This last point is important because it explains the popularity of sites like Facebook or video games, which everybody can argue are not productive ways to spend your time. However, they provide excitement and enjoyment, which is meaningful to you.

I wish I’d thought of this method before I even started in business, but maybe I can help you avoid the mistakes I made and get successful in less time than I did by sharing it with you.

Free advertising can be your best promotional tool.

If you don’t have a lot of cash and you are trying to market your company online, don’t worry, as companies have been able to succeed without spending much money on marketing. This fact becomes apparent when you see that social media advertising spend will only be $4.4 billion or 7% of online ad spend by 2016. The reason is that to set up a social profile doesn’t cost anything and ongoing costs are low.

When I was trying to grow one of my first businesses, Advice Monkey, I paid over $5,000 to three different companies to market it. Unfortunately I got zero results, so I decided I was going to learn how to do it myself. Here is a list of six marketing ideas I used that didn’t require a huge budget:

Blog – By now it should be obvious that blogging is a great idea for generating traffic and attention. But I still run into entrepreneurs who dismiss it for one reason or another.
SEO – A few companies that have leveraged SEO fairly well are About.com, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon, and Zappos. And an example of a smaller company that has done this is Bargaineering, which was acquired by Bankrate for 2.8 million.
Guest poster – An easy way to get your company out there is to write guest blog posts on other blogs. From TechCrunch to Huffington Post, there are thousands of popular blogs on the Internet. And the one thing all of these blogs want is more content.
Speak at conferences – You don’t have to spend a lot of money travelling to regional conferences, but occasionally splurge and got to a national conference. You’ll get more exposure.
Talk shit – People tend to pay attention when someone talks trash. For example, I once wrote a blog post on Like.com and how they were messing up with their marketing efforts. Shortly after that the CEO called and offered me consulting work.
Do interviews – I cannot tell you how many times I simply emailed someone and asked if they would like to interview me. Blogs and media sources are always looking for content…and interviews are an easy way to get it.

Check out this article if you want fifteen other big marketing ideas for your small budget.

Social media can absolutely drive sales

I pretty much jumped head first into social media when sites like Blogger, Twitter and Facebook came on the scene. However, it took me quite a while to figure out how to use them correctly so I could drive traffic and sales to my website.

Did you that for every hour we spend on online, we spend about fifteen minutes of that hour on social media sites? This is according to Neilson:

And did you know that about half of that time we are looking at products and services? The lesson is that if you want to build a sales relationship online, social media is your best bet.

A good example of monetizing social media is Joie De Vivre, a California company that operates luxury hotels. Every Tuesday the company tweets exclusive deals to their nearly 13,000 followers who have only a few hours to act on deeply discounted deals. Joie De Vivre typically books over 1,000 room nights with these types of deals, rooms that might remain empty.

Even large companies like Virgin use social media effectively. Richard Branson says that their approach to social media is with a healthy sense of fun and attractive offers. For example, the fourth highest sales day for Virgin America came when they tweeted, “$5 donated to KIPP Schools for every flight booked today.”

Conclusion

Some of these lessons may seem obvious, others not so. I know it took me a several years to figure them all out, but once I did, building successful business got easier and easier. This is not to say that if you follow these lessons above you will be guaranteed a successful business. You will improve your chances, however.

What not-so-obvious marketing lessons have you learned during your years in business?

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

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Google On Targeting Parts Of Your Site To Different Locations

Internet Success Hub — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:06:17 +0000

Google recently put out a new webmaster help video with Matt Cutts discussing how to target parts of a site to different locations. The exact question Matt addresses in the video is: “Webmaster tools allows site owners to specify a …

Internet Success Hub » SEO

SEO Monitoring Tools and Tips

#1 Traffic drops

#2 Uptime monitoring

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

#4 Bonus – why stop there?

Being Nice Isn’t a Marketing Tactic. Or Is It?

Nice is nice

Nice is currency

Irrelevant niceness is spam

Nice proves you listen

Nice is intrinsically rewarding

Rules for genuine niceness

Historical Link Analysis is Here!

Subdomain Link Metrics

Historical Data Charts

Linkscape Index Updates

Let Us Know What You Think

8 Things You Can Give Away to Earn Links + Mentions – Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

The Best of 2011 – Posts & People Who Rocked Our World

Top Posts of 2011 By Thumbs Up

Top Posts of 2011 By Unique Visits

Top Posts of 2011 by Linking Root Domains

Top Posts of 2011 by Tweets

Top Posts of 2011 by Total Number of Comments

Top Comments of 2011 by Thumbs Up

Top Users of 2011 By Total Comments

Be the CEO of More Than Just Your Job

How I Got The Attention of One of the Top SEO Bloggers With Diet Coke

Introducing Branded Keyword Rules and Metrics!

Why segment your branded traffic?

What branded and non-branded traffic tells you

A quick cruise through the feature

The Five Marketing Lessons That Took Me a Long Time to Learn

Being the category leader is not the only way to be successful

Focus on the opportunity, not the market leader

Thinking like a customer is essential

Free advertising can be your best promotional tool.

Social media can absolutely drive sales

Conclusion

Google On Targeting Parts Of Your Site To Different Locations