SEO WORLD NEWS

Posted by randfish

I love SearchEngineJournal’s Annual Awards. I think it’s terrific that even a small community like search marketing can have its own mini-version of the Oscars each year It’s fun, it builds friendly competition and it inspires those of us who compete to work harder and earn our keep.

However, this year I noticed some particular problems that plague many web surveys and figured it would be worthwhile to point them out. The following are some important guidelines to keep in mind while designing web-based surveys and contests.

Use a Definitive System to Establish Nominations

Some complaints at the SEJ awards centered around the nomination process, which consisted of comments posted to a blog entry. This can be avoided a number of ways, so long as a systemic, established process is worked out. For example, when Jane puts together the Web 2.0 Awards, she accepts 3-500 nominations, then runs through a few dozen lists of "Web 2.0" sites and IDs those that have an established presence, a certain level of popularity and fit the criteria.

My suggestion for SEJ might be to attempt to find all blogs that fulfill certain category-specific criteria, whether that be topical focus, subscriber size, PageRank, monthly visits, etc. SEJ could, for example set the bar for "best link building blog" to be a blog that:

• Produced at least 3 posts in each of the 12 months of 2007
• At least 30% of all blog posts were on the specific subject of link building
• Has in excess of 100 blog subscribers (according to Google or Bloglines subscriber numbers)
• Has no fewer than 5,000 external links according to Yahoo! Site Explorer (or a homepage PageRank of 4/10)

These aren’t perfect criteria (just examples), but they at least create standards that would give the nomination process a more fair and even distribution. Applying this same type of systemic control to nominations for any awards or survey will produce better results in the end (and certainly end much of the complaining that plagues this type of content on the web).

Don’t Ask Partisan Fans to Rate on a Sliding Scale

This was almost certainly the SEJ Awards’ biggest mistake. In any kind of survey environment that asks for popularity ratings and offers an incentive for inaccuracy (favoring one blog or site over all others), the use of a sliding scale voting system is going to produce badly skewed results.

Here’s an example of how SEJ’s Awards were laid out:

In the above sample (which I’ve re-created from memory as the survey itself is no longer accessible), I’ve illustrated how the survey was laid out. Although participants could leave any line blank (if, for example, they had never read that blog), this wasn’t clear in the initial instructions and did end up causing some confusion.

As you might imagine, this system creates the antithesis of a positive rating system, because of how partisan voters will contribute. If, for example, I wrote a post on SEOmoz asking our readers to vote for us at the awards, you might expect that rabid SEOmoz fans would see how the survey is constructed, rate SEOmoz a "5" and give all the others a "1" to help boost our chances of winning while simultaneously damaging everyone else (I’ve illustrated this using TropicalSEO as an example).

In the blog post on the subject of the "best SEO blog", for example, you’ll see that 55 voters gave SEOmoz a score of "1," 47 gave that score to SEOBook and 27 gave a "1" to SEO By the Sea. I have a hard time believing that this many people truly felt that these sites were of such low quality (particularly SEOBook, which is consistently excellent). The more likely scenario is the one I’ve described above, where partisan voters wanted to help the blogs they cared about through any means possible.

As a survey designer you cannot throw up your hands and simply say "Well, the Internet’s full of @ssholes." You have to become smarter than the partisan voters and create a system that finds the signal amongst the politics. A good move for this particular survey would have been to use a ranking order - forcing users to rank the blog listed in order from most to least favorite. With a system like this, little room is left to negatively influence the results:

In the example above, the options should ideally be randomized for each different visitor. Participants then fill in the red text areas themselves, ordering the sites from 1-8, which prevents the high-low partisan voting problem presented above.

Craft Clear, Concise, Unimpeachably Exact Questions

This is probably the hardest thing to do when creating a survey (as SEOmoz certainly learned during our SEO Quiz process). Nearly every question is going to have some room for interpretation, but by taking care and using an unhealthy degree of paranoia about potential interpretation problems, you can prevent squabbles like those taking place at Sphinn and SEJ.

For that specific example, rather than saying "Who is the Most Giving Search Blogger," I might seek to involve the criteria Loren noted into the question itself, perhaps crafting something like "Which of the Following Bloggers Provided the Most Overall Value in Posts through Research, Influence, Coverage and Openness?"

Questions, in general, should also be goal-oriented, so if the goal is to discover which blogger is most popular, the question should be framed in that way. If the goal is to find out which blogger voters think provides the best content quality overall, then a different approach (and a different question) is needed.

Don’t Declare a Winner with Tiny Margins

The number of survey participants will dictate your margin of error, and in a small survey (with less than a thousand total voters), it’s a given that a substantive margin of error will exist. Thus, unless you’re considering the survey participants to truly be the entire universe of judges on the subject (which some contests, like the AP News College Sports Polls or the Oscars in fact, do), I would be hesitant to declare a singular winner unless you have stats showing a victory by well beyond the margin of error.

For example, In the SEJournal awards, I was given the award for "most giving blogger". While I certainly appreciate the sentiment, when I look at the voting and see that 2 other bloggers had 4 and 5 fewer votes than myself, I’d probably suggest a shared title between the top three candidates (Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz & myself).

Be Wary of Referral Sources & Biasing

Online survey software needs to be savvy, needs to track referrals and needs to map them to entries. While I strongly suspect that the voting at the SEJournal awards was actually fairly balanced, when you’re building a web-based survey, being able to pull out data showing the skews based on referral source is incredibly valuable. If I were running the SEJournal awards, I think one of the most interesting numbers to see would be the votes of non-partisan referrers (e.g. those voters whose referral source to the blog post or voting page did not include any of the mentioned websites). Comparing that data to the final results might show some fairly serious skewing that one could systematically remove (by not counting votes in categories where the referring site was nominated, for example). After all, in a perfect world, the awards shouldn’t be a measure of who can get the highest numbers of their readers to vote for them, but an actual measure of what the average indutry insider thinks is best.

Now a sharp rebuke of myself. Posting something like this after the survey’s already complete is easy and it’s even somewhat reprehensible. After all, if I really knew all this ahead of time, shouldn’t I have alerted Loren and the SEJournal crew when the survey first launched? As is clear from this post, he responds to and accepts criticism quite well! Shame on me for my late timing. I do apologize for that. Nonetheless, I hope it’s still valuable and interesting and will help everyone who’s working in the realm of survey design think carefully about the process.

ADDENDUM: SEOmoz is (no surprise) launching its own survey of search marketing industry demographics (not an awards or contest) next week. Hopefully, we can take some of our own advice to heart! I’ve personally been working with a professional survey design company over the last month learning tons of interesting things about the process (and please realize that what I’m sharing here is only the tip of iceberg when it comes to survey design). In fact, I think the following resources might provide even greater insight for survey crafters:

• Questionairre Design & Survey Sampling - Professor Hossein Arsham from the Univ. of Baltimore offers insight into survey crafting and interpretation techniques.
• Writing Good Survey Questions: Examples - from the Berman Blog, some great advice on crafting good survey questions to minimize biases and errors.
• Violin Duel a Draw for Antique Stradivarius - although it’s not a web survey, note the great care taken to produce solid results, testing blind and visible, with trained musicians and amateurs alike. Yet, even with all the evidence, no firm conclusion was drawn due to the proximity of the scores.

BTW - No insult or fault is intended towards Loren Baker, who’s generous donation of time organizing and promoting the contest is fantastic (as is his sharing of the data reports, without which, this post would have been impossible to write). I’m merely trying to illustrate missteps that I myself have taken in the past, and hope that it can help to bring awareness for the future.

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Posted by Jane Copland

Initially, I was going to wade through all of the nominations for 2008’s Web 2.0 Awards (last year’s results here) before writing about them. Currently, I’ve only made it through two thirds of the entrants and I can’t take any more, at least for a little while. Over a year ago, people were predicting the imminent death of "web 2.0" companies and yet the companies soldiered on. I do not think that I have become all that much more cynical in the past twelve months, but I now simply cannot see many of these websites lasting for very much longer. Over the past two days, I have looked at literally hundreds of websites that do absolutely nothing.

Not all of the nominations have made me want to put down my coffee mug and smash my face against the keyboard: there have been some absolute gems in there as well. However, my patience has worn incredibly thin after two days of playing with hopelessly badly-designed websites and reading the drivel that currently passes for business plans. Something that should be enjoyable - investigating innovative online startups - has become an exercise in trying not to cringe so hard that I give myself a headache. Where does the money come from to sustain a business based upon badly copying a theme that has been done so many times before?

Of course, I am not talking about Flickr, Upcoming, Yelp, Last.fm or Zoho. I’m not citing any of those smart, well-designed, useful services, or their smart, well-designed, useful competitors. What I’ve been faced with in the last forty-eight hours are their painful copies. The most painful are those that attempt to copy Ning, "allowing users to create their own social networks." I have lost count of how many sites I’ve seen that want us to create our own social network on their hallowed servers. The only conclusion I can draw is that these companies can’t create anything worthwhile, but know enough web development (but only just) to create a platform so that other people can create content for them. While all sites that include user participation stand to profit off the contribution of others, I’ve been simply astounded at how many of these sites provide virtually nothing other than a way for the public to build up the companies’ link profiles and PageRanks.

How they do this is pretty simple. These sites have acquired funding using the hot air that keeps the web 2.0 bubble full and floating. You’ve seen the words they use; most of us were rolling our eyes at terms like "creating synergy" a long time ago. Now, every second sentence looks like a massive cliché. The latest phrase that makes me want to start drinking whiskey at work is "allows users." Every second nomination has been telling me the incredible things it "allows users" to do. One of them allows users to submit menus! Christ, imagine that! Another is very excited about how it "allows users to define the important information they need, while on the go!" I’ve probably used the phrase in the past to describe the functions of a website. I’ll never use it again. To me, it now reeks of the tired and the overused.

I don’t understand how people can create and promote these sites with straight faces. Social news sites - both niche and generic - pile up on top of each other, each "story" sitting dormant with one vote. Social networks boast their "featured profiles", most of which have no picture, no personal information and whose owners will never visit the site again. Every tagging and bookmarking site is astounded by its own ingenuity, as it studiously does the same things as its peers. Scores of websites want to hear your travel stories, see your videos and know which music you like to hear. Visiting some of these domains is like looking at the empty main street of a boring town.

We made jokes about rounded corners over a year ago, but it seems that people still believe that if their site looks like an iPod, it will be an unbridled success.

In addition to the fantastic finds and the abysmal failures, I have come across a few sites that have interested me. What is problematic is that most of the "interesting" sites caught my attention for the wrong reasons. FoxiFly, which promised to let me "see which of my friends are online, chat to them through my browser and see where they are browsing around the web at the moment" managed to put the fear of teh internetz into me by making me think that it already knew who I was, let alone which websites my friends were looking at.

How damn web 2.0 is that? FoxiFly looks like it’s setting up to ask me out! I always new the Internet was creepy, but that’s quite the application. Half a second later, I re-realised how much I dislike having the name that people pick when they stop to think of "the most generic name I can possibly imagine."

I assume that FoxiFly has a following of some sort and that people actually use the service, but the idea that my friends should know which sites I’m looking at doesn’t appeal to me. In regards to their other web-based applications, I already have instant messengers and a telephone. I’m quite sure that I could get in touch with almost everyone I know at any time of the day without this site. FoxiFly promises to let me check multiple email accounts from anywhere on the web… which is exactly the system I already have, using Gmail and Gtalk. As an aside, these sites that promise to let us do things "from anywhere on the web" apparently have not yet discovered that Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus most browsers, now support tabs, whereby we can have our email accounts open while we’re out there in the tubes. I already have very efficient versions of most of its other features as well, such as bookmarking, content aggregation and social browsing.

The site, which is actually pretty great in terms of what I’ve been looking at, promises to let me spy on my friends’ Internet activity, add yet another instant messaging application to list instant messaging applications I’ve been amassing since 1999, check my emails in more than one window and have my friends know when I’m snooping the Livejournal page of a girl I knew when I was 18 and no longer like. So basically, it combines redundancy with epic undesirability. This holds true across the board of so many web 2.0 sites: even if they’re well-developed, the vast majority of their functions are useless.

Given that I am reviewing sites for a set of awards, there was another thing that occurred to me today: when you’re submitting your site for an award, it’s not a good move to piss off the person who reviews submissions. Probably aiming to copy a young Facebook, U of Info bills itself as a "free informational website designed for college students." The site asks you to enter your school in order to gain access. Still wielding a university email address, I begin typing the name of my college. Things go well for about ten characters.

Then they come to a grinding halt.

As it turns out, the site doesn’t work for schools that are in its database, either. Inserting acceptable email addresses brought me to that generic 404 page which handily suggests I may be the owner of the website and have uploaded my site incorrectly.

Two examples of weird, broken or pointless websites. Reduce the quality and multiple that by one-hundred and fifty and you’ll see why I’m having a tough time retaining my composure.

Acknowledging the irony of this next section, I have an announcement to make: The deadline for submitting sites to the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards is this Friday. As I say above, buried within the caffeine-fueled rage, I’ve come across a couple of really awesome websites during the last two days. I implore you all to add to the "best of" list, rather than create for me some more misery. Once I’m done with the nominations list, I’ll be seriously trawling the net for these good sites (as will Danny: I love assigning tasks to the intern). Do let us know which sites you guys think are deserving of recognition!

To end this fun, I present you with a quiz. Below are five descriptions of web 2.0 sites. Four of the options are slight modifications of real websites’ descriptions. The modifications simply cut out factors that would identify the site in question. One of the descriptions, I made up five minutes ago in an attempt to create a nasty web 2.0 cliché. Please don’t cheat. That way, it’s more fun for everyone. See if you can pick which one is mine!

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Posted by inflatemouse

Note from Rebecca: Carlos del Rio is working with us on some conversion and landing page testing, and he agreed to author a few blog posts about the topics. Also check out his previous post in the series, "Can the Long-Tail Hurt Your PPC Campaign?"

Building Traffic

Traffic is all the people that see your site or pass on your brand to another person.

Web Traffic can be built through Search Optimization, both paid and organic. Increasing your volume through the search engines’ results can be a very time consuming process and requires a high level of maintenance. Your results are only as good as your current situation. There are regular changes to the search engines and ad distribution systems, and your many competitors will also be changing to take visibility for themselves.

A search campaign will include a combination of:

• Research to find keywords, link opportunities, and current positions
• Site changes to improve architecture and content
• Link acquisition through content creation, link buying, and link baiting
• Measuring results
• And then repeat the process

It is important to remember that the purpose of search optimization is traffic. Some people become obsessive about rank – that is a mistake. If you build your business on a handful of phrases, you are building a tower on wheels.

Search is a great option if you are already doing well, it will help you grow incrementally and increase your position to weather things like search engine changes.

Web Traffic can also be built through offline marketing like television and print. The Internet is not an island, and we are nearly immune to banners. Kia earlier this year aired a commercial that featured a man turning the pages of a book that was titled Kia.com, and every page of the book said in large letters Kia.com. The same goes for Burger King, who recently aired a commercial that ends with www.whopperfreakout.com. Both Kia and Burger King have successfully leveraged TV into web traffic; BK has even manufactured a query space around Whopper Freakout. And this isn’t BK’s first web venture; do you remember the Subservient Chicken?

If you already have an advertising budget, you should be incorporating your websites.

Going Beyond Traffic

If you’re in a position where you already have traffic, or if you don’t have time to wait, you may find a long distance to your next milestone. Traffic begins to degrade very quickly when not attended. If you focus on what you offer, you will find sustaining and growing easier, because a good offer does not disappear while you build traffic.

Unless your only goal is to capture a phrase for vanity, you should start your SEO changes by asking, “What am I going to do with these people once they get here?”

Building Customers

Customers are people that use your site: download, contact you, buy something, etc.

Where Traffic building is largely focused on distribution and visibility, Customer building is focused on people. Building customer base can be approached from a standpoint of retention or acquisition.

Retention means loyalty, giving each customer a reason to come back. Take, for example, Zappos — they have a 365-day return policy. This keeps the customers coming back time and time again – because there is very low risk in purchase. The service level is so high that many people buy multiple pairs of shoes and return them many times. One of my friends bought five pairs of shoes in one work week and returned all but one pair.  Zappos is so customer-centric that they will even send flowers if your mom dies.

Zappos has such good service that these repeat customers ignore the poor usability and low success rate in finding a shoe that fits. While good customer service can be labor intensive, it is something you have control over and can create word of mouth traffic.

Also, you can grow through customer acquisition. For the Internet we call this conversion optimization. But what exactly optimizes your conversions?

Really anything that you control can improve your conversion of Traffic to Customers:

• The colors you use
• The service that you offer
• The brand feeling you create

To improve your bottom line you need to make a clear path of action and show clearly where visitors should go and what you want them to do. Making sure that the action that is important to your business becomes valuable to your visitor is the key to successful customer acquisition.

The positive of conversion optimization is that it focuses on things that are in your power. Google changing their algorithm can’t take away your message, guarantees, or loyal customers. Changes that are made for your traffic building campaigns run parallel to changes that affect your conversions — so it makes sense to do them both at the same time.

Kia builds brand, Zappos decreases barrier to entry, and Burger King offers entertainment; all get the same end, more Traffic. But these new thousands of people are no more likely to become customers than the previous thousands.

If you are changing content to optimize for a keyword, you should also be making changes that improve your path to action. When you are building traffic you will quickly find increasingly difficult barriers to scale. Pouring thousands of visitors into a leaky sieve is going to make improvement slow. So, how do you improve quickly?

• Change your return policy
• Change the way you handle abandoned purchases
• Change what you put at the top of your page
• Think about what you want when you are a customer

If you are currently considering SEO, you should also be considering why you need more traffic. If you need more traffic because you aren’t selling well, you are taking the long road. If you need traffic because you need to scale up, you might as well consider how you can reduce friction for your customers at the same time.

By reaching for the low-hanging fruit in Traffic building and Customer acquisition at the same time, you will reap the most benefits from both.

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Posted by MariaSEO

Last month I was working on a new project, and since it wasn’t a start up project, I needed to get familiar with all of the pages and the website’s architecture. On the other hand, it was necessary to select the keywords that were going to be used to optimize each page. In order to do that, I made a diagram that helped me be consistent when matching those keywords with:  internal links, anchor text, meta tags, and body text for every page that was part of the website.

Two posts from Rand helped me understand the importance of being consistent when working on internal links, anchor text, and keywords. One of those was “My Personal Opinion: 90 % of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors," and the other one was “Best Practices for Targeting Generic & Specific Terms & Phrases." If you didn’t read those, I highly recommend them.

Example and Diagram

Suppose you are working on a website that has 3 subpages (more than 3 pages were complicated to diagram on Powerpoint, so I tried to make as simple as possible). I use “KW” for the word “keyword,” and numbers to specify the different keywords.

Suppose the company sells toys (with "toys" being the most generic word for the company’s products), and the company’s website is toysabc.com. Let’s say that we select 4 keywords to focus on (you certainly can work on more than 1 keyword per page, but for this example I use only 1 on each page).

• KW 1= toys (on homepage, in color blue)
• KW 2= dolls (on a subpage, in color pink)
• KW 3= balls (on another subpage, in color green)
• KW 4= games (on another subpage, in color red) 

Once you established the list of keywords to be optimized on each page:

• You can decide the URL you are going to use per each page
• You can optimize the use of those keywords on different pages on the website
• You can write down the different meta tags (meta title, meta description, H1….)
• You can optimize your body text considering those keywords
• If you have an image on the homepage, you can include the keyword on the Alt attribute of that image
• You can include internal links from the homepage to other subpages with the proper anchor text

On the body text of subpages you should include links to other pages (if they are related and relevant), and even more importantly, include the link back to the home page with the proper anchor text.

It is very important to have internal links within the body text on each page, even if they are on the navigation bar. Why? Both for user experience (usability issues) and search engine (indexing issues):

• Based on Jacob Nielsen’s usability studies, people expend considerably more time looking at the content area than looking at other sections such as the header, the right bar, and the left bar (where navigation links usually are).
• Search engines will crawl links within content, giving you the opportunity to improve the chances of all pages being indexed. On the other hand, you have the power of assigning the anchor text that you consider best for each page, which for inbound links is very difficult to achieve because in most cases, you don’t have control on the edited content.

The final diagram helped me be consistent when matching each keyword with:

• URLs and pages
• meta tags (such as title, description, and H1)
• internal links on body copy
• proper anchor text on links pointing to other subpages
• alt attributes for images on different subpages

I hope some of you will find this diagram helpful when deciding the proper anchor text of internal links.

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Posted by randfish

Without doubt, 2007 was our best year ever, and it’s all your fault! Thanks so much to all our members, readers and contributors, and everyone in the Internet Marketing field. Without you, we’d be a sad, surly bunch.

Click for Larger Version

Looking at the people who make up SEOmoz, I’m humbled and amazed at the company we’ve become. I hope that you can all be as lucky as I am to spend time with each of them. My personal thanks goes out to you, team - you’ve made even the hardest days ten times better. Thank you.

p.s. Yes, we’re late in posting a holiday greeting, but we have a good excuse! With so many mozzers out of town in December, we decided to throw a late party this year, cleverly titled (by, who else, Rebecca), the "Because the Holidays Aren’t Over Until We Say They Are, Dammit!" party.

p.p.s. Photo credit to Carlos Del Rio (thanks Carlos!)

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Posted by randfish

Following in Danny’s footsteps over at SELand, I’m offering up SEOmoz’s website stats for 2007. Enjoy! And if you’re interested, here is last year’s data as well - 2006 stats for SEOmoz.

Visits

• January - 202,622 
• February - 309,924
• March - 283,417
• April - 280,284 
• May - 315,785
• June - 254,604 
• July - 263,274
• August - 263,295  
• September - 266,571
• October - 312,147
• November - 285,109
• December - 242,348
• TOTAL - 3,279,380

Page Views

• January - 554,000
• February - 694,760
• March - 670,208
• April - 697,881
• May - 739,674
• June - 656,939
• July - 717,553
• August - 739,397
• September - 789,168
• October - 861,499
• November - 794,620
• December - 674,978
• TOTAL - 8,590,677

Most Popular Pages

1. http://www.seomoz.org/
2. http://www.seomoz.org/blog
3. http://www.seomoz.org/ip2loc
4. http://www.seomoz.org/rank-checker
5. http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/
6. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
7. http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength
8. http://www.seomoz.org/tools
9. http://www.seomoz.org/users/my
10. http://www.seomoz.org/tools/kwtool.php?a=myreports

Most Popular Blog Posts

1. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/css-properties-you-probably-never-use
2. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/put-your-best-foot-forward
3. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-developers-command-line-tricks
4. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-design-tactics
5. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-ne…or-successful-ecommerce-websites
6. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-t…in-a-web-design-the-design-curve
7. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic
8. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/inter…elopers-20-good-questions-to-ask
9. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to…into-your-current-website-design (from YOUmoz!)
10. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-htm…bly-never-use-but-perhaps-should

Top Referring Domains

1. Direct access or bookmark - 1,300,008
2. http://www.google.com - 406,027
3. http://www.seomoz.org - 194,223
4. http://www.stumbleupon.com - 133,044
5. http://digg.com - 96,840
6. http://www.digg.com -63,403
7. http://www.google.co.uk - 46,401
8. http://images.google.com - 28,926
9. http://del.icio.us - 28,035
10. http://search.yahoo.com - 27,359

Search Engines

1. Google - 92.75%
2. Yahoo - 4.42%
3. MSN Search - 0.77%
4. Windows Live - 0.49%
5. AOL Search - 0.40%
6. Ask Jeeves - 0.27%
7. Alexa - 0.14%
8. Dogpile - 0.09%
9. Altavista - 0.08%
10. Cnet - 0.07%

Site Activity

• Avg Page Views Per Session - 2.61
• Avg Length of Visit - 3 minutes, 5 seconds
• Most Active Server Hours - 2-4pm

Demographics

Screen Resolution Breakdown
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Browser Breakdown
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Country Breakdown
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Languages Breakdown
_

Membership & Participation Data

• 59,032 Current Members
• ~1,700 Premium Members
• 794 Q+A Threads in the Knowledge Base
• 2,060 Total Blog Posts
• 380 Total YOUmoz Posts
• 250+ Companies in the Marketplace
• 44 Resumes in the Marketplace
• 76 Jobs posted in the Marketplace

My Personal Takeaways & Observations

• The most popular blog posts stem almost exclusively from being featured on Digg, which is something we rarely shoot for anymore. While we certainly got some value by being regularly on Digg’s front page, our goals have shifted from increasing awareness to serving an already sizable community. We might look into some more bait in 2008, but it’s equally likely we’ll continue to fly under the Digg radar.
• The most popular pages on the site reflect what return visitors are most likely to hit - the homepage, the tools and the important articles.
• For the first time ever, traffic from outside the US outnumbers traffic from inside the US. We’re going to need to spend some serious effort to serve the international SEO community that visits here so often.
• With almost 60,000 members and an average of close to 100 signups each day, I’m not too worried about the flattening visit stats. Instead, I think our biggest priority is going to be making both the free and premium content on the site the best it can be - we’ll worry about marketing after we have a product that truly shines.
• I believe Firefox’s actual market share is still well under 15%, yet it’s almost 60% here at SEOmoz. This makes the 92% of search referrals from Google (and the 15%+ of 1920 wide screen resolutions) no surprise either. We attract a very different kind of Internet crowd than most websites.
• If you compare our data and the SELand data to what Compete, Quantcast or Alexa are reporting, you can see how tragically inaccurate those services are. Sadly, that’s no anomally. Everytime I get access to a client’s visit data, I’m always curious to check the three and have not once found accuracy, even on a relative basis. Third party traffic metrics still have a very, very long way to go.
• I’m really proud of the success we’ve had with the Marketplace and YOUmoz. Both have become invaluable sources of community and opportunity. In 2008, we’re certainly going to be focusing on improving both and adding more functionality.
• Goals for 2008 - to reach 5,000 premium members and have 5 million visits by year’s end.

If anyone has shared their blog stats for 2007, please do link to it in the comments. I’d love to let the community have a look at how lots of different sites and blogs generate traffic.

p.s. Although I hate to beg for votes, if you found SEOmoz valuable this year, we’d love to hear from you in the form of taking the SEJournal blog awards survey (we’re nominated for best SEO Blog, Best Overall Search Marketing Blog, Best Search Conference Coverage in Photos and I’m personally nominated for Most Giving Search Blogger).

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Posted by Jane Copland

It’s the third of January and those of us in the United States are already pretty tired of hearing about November’s Presidential Election. I’m sure the rest of you are, too. The world of social media is already flooded with stories about the U.S.’s political dramas and I can only imagine that if you’re in any other country, today’s offerings at Reddit might not interest you all that much. Currently, seven of the top 10 Reddit stories focus on the U.S. elections. But this really isn’t my point.

We’re tired of it already and it won’t be truly over for another year and two weeks. Yes, it’s a Wikipedia link, but it’s nofollowed. Do you know how hard it is to find an impartial result for searches like "2009 inauguration day?" Hopefully, a year is enough time for politicians across America to get their web campaigns together. No, I am not going to rehash Herndon Hasty’s Search Engine Watch post, SEO for President. Herndon does a great job highlighting how these national campaigns, armed with more money and resources than God, have implemented absolutely no SEO and only rank well due to a large number of inbound links. However, the presidential race is not the only thing Americans will vote on this year: thousands of positions are up for grabs all over the country and thousands of people are campaigning to fill them.

Over the Christmas break, I took a look at the online campaigns of candidates in a Washington State race. The seat itself is a local one which won’t attract any publicity outside of a certain Washington town. However, the race for this seat has been fantastically tight during the last two elections (2000 and 2004). Candidates spent a lot of time, money and effort on their campaigns, as I’m sure similar people in similar positions did all across the U.S. However, right as Election Fever hits America, only one candidate appears to have started an online campaign. The candidate has a surprisingly good Facebook fan page, a Myspace account and a YouTube channel. While this candidate’s old website, which still ranks first for his name, is the most atrocious thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, his new campaign has some social media know-how behind it. It’s not all that fantastic, but his competitors stand to lose a lot in the coming months if they don’t step it up. I’m not linking to these Washington candidates’ properties for personal reasons. Don’t get excited; my reasons are far from interesting.

The most striking thing about this person’s campaign is that this candidate didn’t even make it past the primaries in 2004. For anyone who’s unsure what that means, candidates from the same party compete against each other in order to obtain their party’s nomination. Once they have taken care of everyone from their own party, they get to compete against candidates from other parties. This person lost to a fellow party member. Four years later, he has not only cleaned up his image, but he’s attempting to usurp his competitors online.

This said, the SEO behind this candidate - both in terms of on-page optimisation and overall strategy - is still pretty poor. Presumably, he owns http://www.hisname.com/ (which ranks first for his name and eighth for "(position) (area)"), and yet his website for the 2008 campaign is http://www.votehisname.com/. This new website ranks twentieth for the "(position) (area)" query, which is still about one-hundred positions higher than his competitors, but could be a lot better.

The site is badly optimised, with no H1 or H2 tags, no meta description and images used in place of text (with questionable alternative text). It has a title tag, which is a giant victory over all of his competitors. I am seriously considering revising the title of this post, because these political websites aren’t four years behind the times: they would have been unacceptable in 2000, let alone 2004. In the Search Engine Watch article, Herndon Hasty says, "Holes this big would sink normal sites and create e-commerce job openings by the dozens," and he is correct. The astounding thing about this is that these holes and mistakes are easy to fix.  For local races such as this one, the competition for rankings is remarkably minimal. Often, the candidates aren’t even competing against .gov sites!

Imagine ranking highly for queries such as "(area) (pressing local issue)." At best, the general public still only has a fleeting understanding of how search engines work; immediately, the candidate will earn a certain amount of trust and credibility when his or her site appears for searches like these, even if that trust isn’t deserved. Another thing to keep in mind is that visibility is half the battle in smaller political races: unless people have decided to vote "down party lines", they will often simply vote for the person whose name they have seen in more television commercials, billboards and newspaper articles. Something about being visible seems to translate into being reputable, hence the reason why the person who raises the most money often wins the race.

Controlling relevant SERPs is also an exercise in reputation management if you are running for office. Local politics can be as mean and nasty as it is on the national scene: This year, I am quite certain that people will head to search engines to research political rumours. Again, it won’t take much social media or SEO work to push a controlled message to the top of the search engines, but few are currently taking advantage of the easy public relations opportunity.

The awful job politicians are doing online this year surprises me. The Internet plays a far bigger role in our day-to-day lives than it did in 2004, even though most of us were quite well-attached to our computers back then. Politicians should realise the importance of search engines, social media and Internet marketing. While I wouldn’t expect people outside of the technology world to inherently know these things, I would at least expect them to do a bit of research. With the amount of money these people spend on their campaigns, it would be a shame to lose based upon easily fixed SEO problems.

UPDATE from Scott:  Due to the subject of this post, I thought some of you may be interested to see how the campaign searchscape has changed since I posted about political campaign SEO back in May.  Below you’ll find the chart comparing candidates’ search presence from May ‘07 and a new updated version as of Jan 3, ‘08 (Iowa Caucus Day).  I’ve substituted Democratic candidate, Mike Gravel (who has all but vanished), with upstart Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, to try and keep things relevant.

Candidate Search Comparison May ‘07:

Candidate Search Comparison January ‘08:

As you can see, there’s been a bit of shuffling. People with semi-functional eyes will notice the huge surge in Ron Paul’s Alexa Traffic Rank. For more on what the hell that’s all about, you can check out my article on the Ron Paul Effect.

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Posted by rebecca

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had fun ringing in 2008. In Seattle, we had a lovely non-fireworks display at the Space Needle (looks like someone will be jobless in ‘08), and I brought in the new year by rocking out with my friends to Rock Band and by kicking some tail in Wii tennis…I’m such a nerd.

Anyway, onto this week’s worth of additions to SEOmoz and stories throughout that great big Internet sea.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• CMS developer for Let’s Make It Awesome (nice company name, Bob!) in Boston, MA
• An SEO with many hats and an SEO with a small but smart hat for NVI in Montreal, Quebec
• SEO guru in Hatboro, PA
• SEO contractor in Dayton, Ohio

Featured companies:

• Braveheart Design Inc. (I wonder if their CEO’s name is William Wallace)
• TP1
• TopSpot
• IMASEO
• Ki Media
• Resonate
• SDH Interactive

Featured resumes: none this week. Be sure to add your resumes to our Marketplace, folks!

New events added to the Events Calendar: none this week. Frowny face. There are lots of industry events coming up, so be sure to add them to the Events Calendar to increase visibility and awareness!

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• SEOmoz has been nominated and is competing in the 4th International Blog Cup competition. First round voting is still open, so vote for us so we can advance to Round 2!
  
• The Economist brings us a brief history of the origins of spam, as well as an introspective about technology etiquette (cell phones, email, etc).
  
• The International Herald Tribune talks about how bloggers are starting to earn the big bucks off advertising on their sites. It’s a pretty basic write-up, but interesting to see this topic get a bit of mainstream exposure.
  
• On the other side of the spectrum, The Guardian talks about how "the big switch may turn off jobs," meaning that bigger companies trying to compete with the small employee, virtual location Internet powerhouses (YouTube, Skype, etc) may have to downsize (employees, locations, or both) in order to keep up.
  
• Seth Godin offers wise words about how people talking about you is more effective than talking about yourself. Amen to that, brutha! I know quite a few vanity bloggers to whom I’d love to send that gem of information.
  
• The lovely Danielle Winfield over at 10e20 has a good post about the benefits of participating in forums and some advice on how to create a strong profile presence in forums.
  
• Technology Review has an exceptionally well-written piece from the perspective of a journalist who used to work at Dateline NBC. It chronicles the deterioration of television journalism and is a compelling, frustrating, and often sad read.
  
• Psychology Today has an incredible article about new developments that could explain why we dream. In a nutshell, it’s to practice for combat, which is supremely badass.
  
• This one comes courtesy of our favorite overzealous NBA team owner, Mark Cuban. He wrote a succinct but to the point post on his blog about how your effort is the one thing you can control. Pretty smart stuff there, Mark! Now, if you could only talk to Dirk Nowitzki about his admiration for David Hasselhoff…
  
• And finally, though this is way off-topic, the best show on television has started its fifth and final season. Watch it. Now. (And if you haven’t ever watched the show, shame on you. Go buy or rent them now, lest I judge you forever.)
  

That’s it for this week, folks! Have a great rest of the week, and be sure to check out tomorrow’s Whiteboard Friday video, where Scott unveils a snazzy new format (dual camera angles, a microphone, and a ginormous whiteboard). No green screen yet, but we’ll try to get that up and running by next week’s video…

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Posted by great scott!

Howdy, Gang, and happy 2008 to you all!  Here we are with our first Whiteboard Friday of the New Year and it’s one that many viral marketers out there should pay close attention to.  This week, Rand discusses what it takes to make viral content and linkbait hit home with users in order to gain links to boost your rankings, rather than just landing on the front pages of social media sites.

All too often we can get caught up in the rush of hitting the homepage of big social media sites through our close-knit networks of spies, informants and Digg spammers, only to be less than impressed with the links that come out of these carefully crafted victories. Why? Well, sometimes the content just ain’t link worthy.  We, as marketers, know how to game these social promotion systems with the best of ‘em. But what we also know, though often fail to keep in mind, is that the real value in hitting the homepage with viral content is the link volume we can get. Just remember, everybody stops to look at a crosswalk sign, but they won’t tell their friends about it unless the little dude is break dancing.  You can quote me on that…if you want.  Most awkward analogy ever.

Those of you with an eye to production value may notice things looking a little smoother, spiffier and…umm…soundier (?) this week.  As Rand mentions in the video, we’ve got new mics, lights, cameras, action, and a biggity big-ass new whiteboard!  Hopefully some smoother camera work and better audio will help increase your viewing pleasure.

Note from Rand: I will try to finish a post on how to separate link-worthy content from visit-worthy, forgettable content for next week. Many thanks and kudos to Scott for putting together a significantly improved version of our Whiteboard Studios and upgrading the video and audio quality.

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Posted by Danny Dover

For those of you who don’t know me yet, my name is Danny and I am SEOmoz’s intern. I have spent the last several weeks reading and categorizing all the blog posts written over the years on this site. It has been quite the project and has let me really experience how this company and the SEO industry as a whole have evolved. I, like the other mozzers, am a stat junkie and kept notes on notable trends, stats, and general quality as I read through the posts. Below I have listed what I believe to be the most successful, funny, and best posts ever written on SEOmoz. Enjoy!

Most Successful Posts

I defined the most successful posts as those that most successfully exemplified SEOmoz’s purpose and style. Specifically, I looked for posts that I felt excelled at teaching SEO, interacting with the community, and sharing sought-after information.

7.    In Web 2.0, Fostering Community Creates Value
YOUmoz Post – With the emergence of Web 2.0, we have seen an unprecedented boom in social online communities. Many resources have emerged that enable anyone to build the technical framework for a community but fail to provide a human touch. This post goes the extra mile by teaching the values and human elements required to create a successful online community.

6.    A Simple Explanation for Why MySpace is So Successful
Myspace is the quintessential example of "Why didn’t I think of that?" This post attempts to describe why this social network took off and while other seemingly good communities did not. The discussion that that starts in the comments really supplements the post and provides great additional views.

5.    Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content
This post is a perfect example of creating unique viral content out of publicly available information. By analyzing the percent of power diggers’ stories that went on the homepage, the post uncovered the lack of true democracy that is expressed at social news portals. I believe this really opened many people’s eyes to the politics that affect Digg and similar communities.

4.    The SEO Routine
What does every new SEO want to know? They all want to know how to become
a successful SEO, of course. This post lays it out honestly and with all the important details. It provides accurate information in an understandable and concise manner.

3.    Dispelling The "Get Rich Quick" Myth
YOUmoz Post – Many first time SEOs dream that they can find secret tricks that will instantly make them riches from crafty pages and hidden text. Many people prey on this human desire by selling bad information at high prices. This post attempts to explain why these so-called tricks don’t exist and provides valuable alternatives.

2.    My Personal Opinion - 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors
This is the second most successful post ever written on this blog. It describes SEO to the layman in a nutshell. (The description is in a nutshell, not the layman. (-; ) The quality information is complemented by intelligent comments. This post successfully gives the answers many people are searching for without any BS and free of cost.

1.    Anatomy of a Super Digg
YOUmoz Post - I really love this post and personally believe it is the most successful post ever posted on SEOmoz. It chronicles the journey of creating content and experiencing the rush of watching the content go truly viral. It contains valuable information, detailed stats, and a human voice. It teaches great SEO techniques, appeals to a large community, and shares valuable information in an interesting manner. Next time you need to explain why being an SEO is thrilling and a work of love, find this post.

Funniest Posts

My first indication that SEOmoz was better than its competition was its frequency of funny posts. While choosing the posts, I defined the funniest ones as those that made me laugh the most (duh!) while serving some purpose. Since humor is so subjective, I tried to take other users’ perspectives and opinions into account as much as possible.

I only included blog posts, so I left out much of the site. However, I think Rebecca’s comics are worth mentioning. They are sure to make you giggle like a little girl at least once.

6.    Top Eleven Social Media Startups I’d Give My First Born For
YOUmoz Post - Web 2.0 is known for company names that contain misspellings, acronyms, foreign references, and sometimes just plain dumb words. Combine the popularity of American stupidity and social networks and you’ve got yourself a funny blog post.

5.    One Reason You Shouldn’t Go to the SEOmoz Premium Training Seminar
YOUmoz Post - This article is well written and funny by itself. However, the addition of the pictures is what made it stand out among the rest. Apparently, Kevin from Blue Acorn is an exact replica of Rand. He even has Rand’s strange attraction to canary yellow shirts. No word on Mystery Guest clones yet, although it should be noted that upon seeing the Rand clone, MG instantly decided what she wanted for her birthday.

4.    SEOmoz’s Unusual Search Terms from the Month of November
“Titties, Mud Wrestling, Hot Young Things, Freebasing Coke, Weird Thumb Porn, Scantily Clad Interns Named Danny.” Nothing out of the ordinary. This post really has something for everyone. If you read this without laughing, please go outside and talk to someone.

3.    We Add Words to AdWords… Google Subtracts them.
Compilation of the funniest AdWords ads. This post is great because the humor is appreciated by almost anyone and it is all original content. Bonus points to Matt Cutts for trying to plant the idea of using Google AdWords as a drinking game. His amiable attempt to boost Google’s Ad Revenue should be noted by Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.

2.    Porn Filters Taking the Ogle out of Google
Undisputed winner of funniest title. This post is one of the funniest things I have ever read online. I show it to my friends when they ask what I do at work. I then determine the importance of our friendship on their reaction. A must read.

1.    How to See Paris in Seven Hours
This post is clever, funny, informative, and universally understood. This is one of the rare pieces of content that will make my grandmother, my little sister, and I laugh all for the same reasons. Rebecca’s writing combined with Scott’s facial expressions make this the funniest post ever to make it onto the blog.

Best of the Best

Choosing the best of the best was an agonizing process. The difference between a great post and an excellent post is not always immediately evident. The difference, I found, comes several days later when a post I read would creep back into my mind. These posts are the ones that truly inspired me and changed how I view the industry.

The qualities I used to rank the best of the best are as follows:

    Human Connection – Did I feel like I was listening to the teacher from Charlie Brown ("whaa-whaa-whaa" trombone effect) or a friend sharing a memorable experience?
    Relevance – Does the audience care? Was the post on topic? What was the noise vs signal ratio of the piece?
    Completeness – Did the author answer all of my questions in the article, and more importantly, did the author    continue the conversation in the comments?
    Unique – format, style, and content.

8.    SEOmoz Has a Pen Pal!
This is one of my favorite fan contributions to the site. An entrepreneur at a federal correctional institution sent a handwritten note to our offices asking for SEO advice. Be sure to read both of the handwritten notes that are attached. They will brighten your day.

7.    SEOmoz’s 2006 Financial Statements
Many companies claim to be transparent. They share advice, inside information, and resources. They generally are well respected and become an important resource. This is all fine and dandy until someone asks for financial information. It is generally understood that businesses don’t publicly release valuable financial information for any reason. In the true fashion of mozism, these figures were released first in this post in 2006 and every subsequent year.

6.    Helping to Build the Web: A Day in the Life of a Web Developer
Traditionally, the web developers at SEOmoz have rarely posted on the blog. In the rare instances that they did blog, it was always on a technical topic. This post was different. Jeff, our CTO, detailed the day in the life of a web developer. It was a side of his profession that is rarely seen. In addition to the post, other web developers shared their thoughts in the comments.

5.    Please Stop Spamming Me for Votes
Generally, the posts on here sing of the joy of being an SEO. Although being an SEO can be a fun and prosperous job, it is not without its difficult times. This post uniquely focuses on the latter. It is full of voice and proved to be more of a conversation than a declaration.

4.     Dear Digg.com: I’m Going to Save You a Million Dollars with Three Lines of Code
This is one of the most well written posts on this blog. It has the perfect mix of all the requirements of a successful SEO post. It provides a modest suggestion to Digg.com on how it could fix a simple canonical issue. It is well researched, understandable, and a good read. I really think we should have more posts that have this tone and present information in this way.

3.    Apparently I Work for Google
I think this is Rebecca’s best post. It explains how she deals with the fundamental problem of our industry, explaining our job to our families. This post is funny, full of voice, and a genuine day brightener. A must read for anyone in the industry.

2.    Snippets from 30,000 Feet
I believe that this is the best post Rand has ever written. It is the perfect mix of all the best of the best criteria. This “day in the life” style post is not only humble and thought provoking, but also poetic. It interesting and a good read for people involved in SEO, as well as those who are not. If you have not read this post before, please treat yourself and read it.

1.    Good to Great: Gillian Responds to Rand’s Answers to Hard Questions
I think it is very fitting that the best post ever written on the SEOmoz blog was authored by our least vocal staff member. Gillian, president of SEOmoz, shares her experience of running a successful company while maintaining a healthy relationship with her son/CEO. I think her own words describe the general sentiment of this post better than I can.

“As I see it, the job of the president and/or CEO is to climb the tallest tree on the highest mountain and shout to the team hacking at breakneck speed through the forest below, Wrong mountain! Go that way!”

This blog has improved by leaps and bounds since its inaugural post over three years ago. If the gems listed above are any indication of the things to come, then I warmly look forward to this blog’s bright future.

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