SEO WORLD NEWS

Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

In order to be listed in the search engines, your content - the material available to visitors of your site - must be in HTML text content. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content is virtually invisible to search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

• Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned "alt attribues" in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content
• Images can also be shown to visitors as replacements for text by using CSS styles
• Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be repeated in text on the page
• Video & Audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines

Most sites do not have significant problems with indexable content, but double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like SEO-Browser, a website that lets you see web pages the same way search engine spiders do, you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

For example, below, I have an image of SEOmoz’s homepage:

The visual images of the Seattle skyline and the graphic elements give the page a great look and feel, but let’s see what the search engines can access:

Using the SEO Browser site, we’re able to see that to a search engine, SEOmoz’s homepage is simply a collection of text and links (which is exactly what we’d want to see).

Now let’s check out another favorite site of mine, Orisinal, a clever collection of wonderfully designed, Flash-based games.

The graphics are great, but there’s not a lot of text on the page - it just says "Orisinal games." Perhaps that’s all the page needs to rank for?

Uh oh… Via SEO Browser, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There’s not even text telling us that the page contains the Orisinal Games. The site is entirely built in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games.

If you’re curious about exactly what terms and phrases search engine can see on a webpage, SEOmoz has a nifty tool called "Term Extractor" that will display words & phrases ordered by frequency. However, it’s wise to not only check for text content but to also use a tool like SEO Browser to double-check that the pages you’re building are visible to the engines. It’s very hard to rank if you don’t even appear in the keyword databases

Crawlable Link Structures

On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indices. They also need to have access to a crawlable link structure - one that lets their spiders browse the pathways of a website - in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obsfucating their navigation in ways that search engines cannot access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed in the search engines’ indices. Below, I’ve illustrated how this problem can happen:

In the example above, Google’s colorful spider has reached page "A" and sees links to pages "B" and "E." However, even though C & D might be important pages on the site, the spider has no way to reach them (or even know they exist) because no direct, crawlable links point to those pages. As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not exist - great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing won’t make any difference at all if the spiders can’t reach those pages in the first place.

To start, let’s take a quick look at the anatomy of a standard HTML link:

In the above illustration, the "<a" tag indicates the start of a link. Link tags can contain images, text, or other objects, all of which provide a "click-able" area on the page that users can engage to move to another page. This is the original concept of the Internet - "hyperlinks." The link referral location tells the browser (and the search engines) where the link points to. In my example, the URL http://www.jonwye.com is referenced. Next, the visible portion of the link for visitors, called "anchor text" in the SEO world, describes the page I’m pointing to. In this example, the page pointed to is about custom belts, made by my friend from Washington D.C., Jon Wye, so I’ve used the anchor text "Jon Wye’s Custom Designed Belts." The </a> tag closes the link, so that elements later on in the page will not have the link attribute applied to them.

This is the most basic format of a link - and it is eminently understandable to the search engines. The spiders know that they should add this link to the engine’s link graph of the web, use it to calculate query-independent variables (like Google’s PageRank), and follow it to index the contents of the referenced page.

Now let’s look at some common reasons why pages may not be reachable:

• Links in Submission-Required Forms
  Forms can include something as basic as a drop down menu or as complex as a full-blown survey. In either case, search spiders will not attempt to "submit" forms and thus, any content or links that would be accessible via a form are invisible to the engines.
• Links only accessible through Search
  Although this relates directly to the above warning on forms, it’s such a common problem that it bears mentioning. Spiders will not attempt to perform searches to find content, and thus, it’s estimated that millions of pages are hidden behind completely inaccessible walls, doomed to anonymity until a spidered page links to it.
• Links in Un-Parseable Javascript
  If you use Javascript for links, you may find that search engines either do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded within. Standard HTML links should replace Javascript (or accompany it) on any page where you’d like spiders to crawl.
• Links in Flash, Java, or other Plug-Ins
  The links embedded inside the Orisinal site (from our above example) is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Although dozens of games are listed and linked to on the Orisinal page, no spider can reach them through the site’s link structure, rendering them invisible to the engines (and un-retrievable by searchers performing a query).
• Links pointing to pages blocked by the Meta Robots tag or Robots.txt
  The Meta Robots tag (described in detail here) and the Robots.txt file (full description here) both allow a site owner to restrict spider access to a page. Just be warned that many a webmaster has unintentionally used these directives as an attempt to block access by rogue bots, only to discover that search engines cease their crawl.
• Links on pages with many hundreds or thousands of links
  The search engines all have a rough limit of 100 links per page, before they may stop spidering additional pages linked-to from a page. This limit is somewhat flexible, and particularly important pages may have upwards of 150 or even 200 links followed, but in general practice, it’s wise to limit the number of links on any given page to 100 or risk losing the ability to have additional pages crawled.
• Links in Frames or I-Frames
  Technically, links in both frames and I-Frames are crawlable, but both present structural issues for the engines in terms of organization and following. Unless you’re an advanced user with a good technical understanding of how search engines index and follow links in frames, it’s best to stay away from them as a place to offer links for crawling purposes.

If you avoid these pitfalls, you’ll have clean, spiderable HTML links that will allow the spiders easy access to your content pages. Links can have additional attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" tag.

Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax:

<a href=http://www.seomoz.org rel="nofollow">Lousy Punks!</a>

In this example, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, I’ve told the search engines that I, the site owner, do not want this link to be interpreted as the normal, "editorial vote." Nofollow came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guestbook, and link injection spam (read more about the launch here), but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines:

• Google - nofollow’d links carry no weight or impact and are interpreted as HTML text (as though the link did not exist). Google’s representatives have said that they will not count those links in their link graph of the web at all.
• Yahoo! & MSN/Live - Both of these engines say that nofollow’d links do not impact search results or rankings, but may be used by their crawlers as a way to discover new pages. That is to say that while they "may" follow the links, they will not count them as a method for positively impacting rankings.
• Ask.com  - Ask is unique in its position, claiming that nofollow’d links will not be treated any differently than any other kind of link. It is Ask’s public position that their algorithms (based on local, rather than global popularity) are already immune to most of the problems that nofollow is intended to solve.

Keyword Usage & Targeting

We’ll have to save this for the next in the series…

* Flash and search engines can work together, but it requires the use of some clever code-replacement type technology called sifr (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which can be used to show Flash text to users and HTML to search engines.

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Posted by rebecca

We’re rolling out with some new blog theme days at SEOmoz. As Jane mentioned yesterday, Wednesdays will now feature a social media post, and the rest of the week is as follows:

• Legal Mondays (courtesy of Sarah Bird, Esquire and Polly Pocket Litigator)
• SEM Tuesdays (we’ll do our best to discuss PPC, conversions, landing pages, and the like)
• Social Wednesdays
• Recap Thursdays
• Whiteboard Fridays

This being Thursday, I thought I’d unveil our first official Recap Thursday post (we’ve sporadically done some in the past, but now it’ll be a regular feature) and link out to interesting stories, news, and other tidbits that popped up throughout the week:

• First Frank Watson complained about his less than stellar experience at the Wynn, and now Scott Orth chronicles his bad experience at the Wynn in Las Vegas. You’d think that five stinkin’ diamonds will get you more courtesy, cleaner rooms, and prompt service, not automatic mini-bar charges, ridiculous gym access fees, and subpar cleaning service.
• GSINC has a poll where you can vote for who you think were the top 5 people of search in 2007. You can pick from a list of 40 individuals (including our very own Rand Fishkin), and the person who receives the most votes will have $500 donated to his or her charity of choice.
• Earlier this week on Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox wrote an informative and thorough post about how changes to the way Google handles subdomains impact SEO. She does a great job of explaining the difference between main domains and subdomains, and when to utilize which.
• This blog post compares Facebook to a night club, and building a Facebook application is akin to building a sound system you can never take out of the club. It’s an interesting read about the smartest way to leverage your applications.
• Rand chats with Matt Foster, president of Arteworks SEO, about Google’s paid links policy. Check out the video of their discussion (and also to see Rand’s "listening intently" face).
• It’s like Hot or Not for websites! Subjectively pick which website you like better and see how your rating matches up with everyone else’s. Rand pointed out that "It’s a great way to prove to bosses obsessed with look and feel that those things matter, but only in a qualitative way and not in an ‘what you like is what everyone else will like’ sort of way."
• Via cNet, a study found that 95% of all email sent in 2007 was spam. Rand’s comment: "And what percent of all websites with Adsense on them are spam?"
• More Facebook stuff coming your way: Freezing Hot brings you some nifty Facebook stats (is it me, or does the first graph look like a middle finger?). 18-24 year olds dominate the site, with 25% of all users currently being enrolled in college. Females, liberals, and single people use it more, too.
• Skelliewag tells us why traffic, your subscriber count, and money don’t matter. There goes SEOmoz’s business plan…I guess from here on out we’ll only feature pictures of dogs hugging babies.

As always, discussion of these stories (and of any other stories you’d like to share) is warmly encouraged. Be sure to tune in to next week’s Roundup Thursday post, when we’ll unveil a neat and not-at-all nerdy rating system of what we think are the week’s coolest (and lamest) stories! We’re redefining roundups, baby!

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Posted by great scott!

Well, we’re back from PubCon so here we are with some spankin’ new Whiteboard Friday content for ya. This week, Microsoft Live’s new Webmaster Tools honcho, Nathan Buggia, joins Rand to discuss what’s up at Live, the perils of life in the engine race, how they deal with paid links, and what they’re doing to win market share.

Nathan is to Live what Vanessa Fox was to Google, so you can expect to see quite a bit of him around the search-o-sphere. He’s also making quite an effort to pop up like a whack-a-mole at every conference in the Northern Hemisphere, so keep an eye out for him and give him a warm welcome, he’s bound to be an important engine ambassador and he’s a heckuva nice guy to boot.

For those who haven’t yet tried it - check out Live’s Webmaster Tools here.

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Posted by randfish

One of my favorite people in the search industry is Mike McDonald (but he’s a terrificly humble guy so no one tell him I said so - it’ll go straight to his head). Last week at Pubcon in Vegas, Mike grabbed me for a 6.5 minute interview in the hallways of the Las Vegas Convention Center for what turned out to be a remarkably good video. The WebProNews team not only filmed, but cut and edited the piece with some serious style and panache - just do me a favor and stop watching when there’s 1:00 left - no one needs to see that last bit.

You can also go here for the full-size video - PubCon Las Vegas 2007: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.

Items mentioned in this video include:

• My presentation on paid links from Pubcon (PPT format)
• Our Werewolf / Search Spam party, covered in remarkable detail by DK at PurposeInc
• My blog post on a solution to the paid links debate
• My blog post - complaining about some Google missteps

Thanks to everyone at WebProNews - Tiffany, Mike & Rich - your conference coverage has been fantastic.

BTW - For those who missed it, Mike also did a great interview with Matt Cutts & Vanessa Fox that had some interesting takeaways.

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Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Keywords are fundamental to the search process - they are the building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database (which would get pretty big), the engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in the search results for "dog," it’s extremely wise to make sure the word "dog" is part of the indexable content of your document.

Keywords also dominate our search intent and interaction with the engines. For example, a common search query pattern might go something like this:

When a search is performed, the engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. Other data, such as the order of the words ("running shoes" vs. "shoes running"), spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of those terms provide additional information that the engines can use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them.

For obvious reasons, search engines measure the ways keywords are used on pages to help determine the "relevance" of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to "optimize" a page’s rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text, and meta data.

The Myth of Keyword Density

Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come together, a natural tendency to use the phrase "keyword density" seems to arise. This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth in this guide, I’ll simply reference Dr. Edel Garcia’s seminal work on the topic - The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

The notion of keyword density values predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an IR concept. What is worse, KD plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents, or assign weights to terms. Why then do many optimizers still believe in KD values? The answer is simple: misinformation.

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l = 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then a keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both documents KD = 20/1000 = 0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500. Evidently, a keyword density analyzer does not establish which document is more relevant. A density analysis or KD ratio tells us nothing about:

1. the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)
2. where in a document the terms occur (distribution)
3. the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)
4. the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics, and relevancy.

Dr. Garcia’s background in information retrieval and his mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density can be used to help "optimize" a page for better rankings. However, this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword optimization - without access to a global index of web pages (to calculate term weight) and a representative corpus of the Internet’s collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.

However, keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms (as we’ve discussed in Section I: Retrieval & Rankings), and we can still leverage some effective "best practices" for keyword usage to help make pages that are very close to "optimized." Here at SEOmoz, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics. When we work with our clients, this is the process we recommend:

Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.  More detail on title tags follows later in this section.
Once in the H1 header tag of the page.
At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings. 
At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag, as search engines consider them equivalent (note: at this time we’ve only actually tested Google for the <b> vs. <strong> equivalency).
At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can sometimes bring valuable traffic.
Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines). 
Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex - see this blog post for details).

An optimal page for the phrase "running shoes" would thus look something like:

Keyword usage is NOT an exact science, and it is certainly valuable to engage in testing, tweaking, and experimentation on your own sites and pages. Just keep in mind that user experience should never be sacrificed for the sake of optimization - search engines want the same things as humans, and generally speaking, if your page can earn one or two extra links by providing great content, this will far outweigh any benefit from stuffing an extra keyword repetition. SEOmoz’s Term Targeting tool is designed to help accomplish precisely this feat and provides a grade to indicate how well (or poorly) a particular page is following the above suggestions.

As you perform keyword targeting, remember that search engines have advanced semantic analysis abilities - this means that they can not only detect whether your page has the right keywords on it, but whether that page is actually targeting the proper subject(s). Thus, embedding keywords as we’ve described above with perfect precision on a page that’s actually about laser hair removal is going to be immediately apparent to the search engines. Instead of merely inserting keywords on a page and expecting rankings, make sure that the document itself contains high quality content describing or on the topic of your keyword of choice.

In the next installment, I’ll finish up the basics of search-engine friendly design and cover:

• Titles, URLs, Meta Data, and Semantic Markup
• Information Architecture
• Canonicalization and Duplicate Versions of Content
• Redirection, Hosting, & Server Issues

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Posted by randfish

We’ve been hearing from many of our premium members that while they love the information provided in the guides, Q+A knowledge base, discount store, tools, link directory, and tips, they’re not 100% sure how to utilize it all to help them get more traffic. And, even though we’re just a few weeks away from launching some exceptional new services (and a new interface for the premium content), I figured I’d walk through some of the ways you can leverage all the goodies in premium to help your sites or those of your clients.

NOTE: Apologies in advance to our non-premium readers, I’ll be back on globally valuable free advice tomorrow.

The main tasks that premium content is designed to help with are the following:

• Link Building - How Can I Get More High Quality Links for Better Rankings?
• Keyword Research - How Can I Find Valuable Keywords to Use on My Site?
• On-Page Optimization - How Can I Build the Best Sites and Pages Possible for High Rankings?
• Competitive Analysis - What Are My Competitors Doing That I can Learn From?
• Measuring Success - How Can I Track and Compare My Progress and Efforts to Improve Over Time?
• Branding & Viral/Social Media Marketing - How Can I Leverage Social Sites & the Blogosphere to Reach Influencers On and Offline?
• SEO Consulting - I Have Specific Questions About the SEO Process that Need Answers

I’ll walk through each of these tasks one by one and break down the content and tools inside premium that can help you do a better job with each.

How Can I Get More High Quality Links for Better Rankings?

(#1) The Professional’s Guide to Link Building

At 40+ pages, and with dozens of specific techniques, examples, and direct links (plus lots of nice screenshots), the Professional’s Link Building Guide is a good intro to link building practices as well as a solid refresher for even experienced link builders. I’m embarrassed to say that I actually went through it recently and caught a couple strategies I’d somehow forgotten.

(#2) The Juicy Link Finder Tool

One of my favorite tools, and exceptionally easy to use. You start by plugging in the keywords or phrases you’re trying to optimize for (variations help, too) and the Juicy Link Finder will start its retrieval process:

The tool takes between 2-10 minutes to search depending on the time of day (our server load) and how many results you request (it goes up to 200 at a time).

The results can be sorted by PageRank of the domain, age, or their rank in Google’s results. The link on the right - "find links on this domain"  - then takes you directly to a Google query to help find potential acquisition targets:

Manual link building is definitely a pain, but this tool makes the process considerably less taxing and often helps to ID links that are simply too time consuming for even the most dedicated link ninjas to dig up on their own. A future upgrade (coming soon) will also list the number of results for the link searches on each domain to save even more time.

(#3) Link Building Tips

There are tons of good tips on link building that I’ve accumulated over the last 9 months - in fact, there are loads and loads of awesome tidbits in there.

(#4) Link Building in the Q+A Knowledge Base

To date, members have asked 145 questions specifically on the topic of link building. Some really good ones include - Link Building for a Highly Regulated Site, Press Releases for Link Building, and Linking Between Multiple Domains Owned by the Same Person.

(#5) Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool

The Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool is great for competitive as well as self-analysis, and digging through your competition’s links can yield some terrific results.

Once you’ve entered a URL or domain, give the tool a few minutes to run and you’ll get back a report like this (I’ve truncated pages and pages of data down to a short screenshot):

The tool will scan up to 1000 unique links, so you can get very robust reporting, and digging through the link sources (sorted by domain by default) is a terrific ability. For example, using the above information, I can see that one of SEOAdministrator’s tactics is to get links from sites employing their software back to their domain, a nice potential tactic for SEOmoz. Maybe we should offer discounts on premium in exchange for links (obviously, I’m kidding).

(#6) The Premium Link Directory

Back when I was link building all day for some of our earliest clients (years 2003-2006), I would have given my right arm for a directory of high quality, juice-passing directories. Well, OK, actually, I just started building my own, but now I get to share it!

We’re adding about 3-5 links a week, and expect to ramp that up in 2008 as we add more manpower to the team.

(#7) The Discount Store

The discount store features a good number of link building services, paid directories, and link advertising sources at discounted rates. We only list providers we’ve found valuable, so you can be relatively sure they’ll be, at the least, providing solid ROI.

How Can I Find Valuable Keywords to Use on My Site?

(#8) The Professional’s Guide to Keyword Research

At 75+ pages, Keyword Research is our beefiest guide. Rebecca has painstakingly gone through every major keyword research source, pulled out screenshots, given examples, and generally illustrated the process of keyword research from start to finish.

(#9) The Popular Searches Tool

The Popular Searches Tool is considerably more valuable now than when it launched, due to the 100+ days of archived data. For example, I can not only see what’s hot now:

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But also what was driving traffic back in August:
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(#10) The Term Extractor Tool

If you want to know what keywords your competition is employing on their pages, Term Extractor is an excellent tool to get the job done. For example, I’ve run a term extraction on AllRecipes.com to see what’s going on with their homepage:

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The data here is decent, showing us that things like "holiday menu" and "cooking tips" might be worth investigating as potential keyword data, but the tool can be even stronger on content-based pages that rank well, like B2Evolution’s high ranking page for Web Hosting:
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(#11) The Keyword Difficulty Tool

There is, probably, no better tool that SEOmoz provides. The Keyword Difficulty Tool gives the kind of information that’s critical to every SEO - helping you decide which terms and phrases are worth pursing and which may be out of reach. If you’re seeking to pick low hanging fruit, this is a gold mine of data. For example, if I estimated that the search volume and conversion rate for "christmas gift ideas" and "homemade christmas gifts" were fairly similar, but wanted to know which I’d be better able to rank for, I could just run two reports and get not only comparative scores but serious competitive intelligence about the current players for each.

(#12) The Discount Store

Several great keyword research providers have solid discount offers in the store, including a pair that we at SEOmoz employ.

How Can I Build the Best Sites and Pages Possible for High Rankings?

(#13) The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website

The Guide to Search Friendliness is an easy-to-follow guide and probably the best thing you can distribute to a webdev team, designer, developer, or manager planning to launch or rebuild a site. It walks through nearly every part of the essential process of information architecture, page construction, and markup in solid detail.

(#14) The Crawl Test Tool

Crawl Test is designed to give a solid picture of a site’s success with indexing at the major engines, potential problems with title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and duplicate content. I ran a test on Whole Foods’ website:

In addition to noting that MSN seems to be having indexing trouble (actually, it looks like that’s just our tool having trouble querying Live.com), you can see the duplicate title tags, pages lacking meta descriptions, pages with duplicate meta descriptions, and even a list of the most common terms. The report also shows off its results in a page by page format:

Crawl test reports are great for identifying obvious problems, as well as helping you discover what the link structure of your sites and pages are showing the search engines (and crawlers like Googlebot, which SEOmoz’s own bot mimics in behavior).

(#15) The Geo-Targeting Detection Tool

Sometimes, building the best site requires targeting vertical searches and the Geo-Targeting Tool is perfect for helping with local search results. Here’s a sample query run on one of my favorite local restaurants, Volterra:

Not only does the tool show me great data about the site’s targeting to local search (including the fact that it might be a wise idea to put the address information somewhere on the page), it also shows results for searches at the major engines, so I can see whether Volterra has been included in the local results at Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live Local. There’s also handy links to the submission forms for each of the engines so you can get your business included if it hasn’t already been.

(#16) The Term Target Tool

If you’re not sure how your on-page SEO is performing for a given term, or you want to do some analysis on a competitor’s keyword usage, Term Target is a great tool. Here I’m looking at how LogoWorks has done targeting the phrase "logo design":

Interestingly, while they don’t have the phrase in the first 100 words on the page or in the header tags, they do use it extensively in their internal anchor text - making "logo design" the phrase of the link back to the homepage.

(#17) The Q+A Knowledge Base

Knowledge base has 93 completed threads in the technical issues section and another 85 in On-Page SEO Issues, making it a robust compendium for frequently frustrating optimization and targeting questions.

What Are My Competitors Doing That I Can Learn From?

(#18) The Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool

As we discussed above, the Backlink Anchor Text Tool can give you insight into not only which links your competition has, but the anchor text of those links and, with a little effort, the link building strategies they’ve employed to receive the links.

(#19) The Page Strength Tool

This is probably SEOmoz’s most popular tool, and it’s still a very solid effort (though it’s about to undergo an overhaul). Page Strength is designed to provide a quick overview of a page’s potential ability to rank well and its global importance on the web. Using snippets of 3rd party data and an internal algorithm to score the data, we’re able to provide reports like this one for local Seattle startup, PayScale:

Comparing this data over time is incredibly valuable, so we’ve also enabled that feature for premium members with a historical chart of page strength reports:

(#20) The Keyword Difficulty Tool

Since the Keyword Difficulty Tool provides data on the top 10 ranking websites, using it for competitive intelligence is a must. The comparative opportunity for seeing Page Strength metrics side by side also makes this a perfect foil to competitive web metrics tracking.

How Can I Track and Compare My Progress and Efforts to Improve Over Time?

(#21) The Rank Checker Tool

Rank tracking is a pain, but the Rank Checker Tool makes it easy, particularly if you use it as a browser button (in which case it’s a quick two-clicks to track any page forever. Below, I’ve run a report on SEOmoz’s SEO Services Marketplace and displayed a few of my historical ranks in the archival system:

(#22) The Page Strength Tool

Since the archived data sticks around for as long as you have your account, you can continue to refer back to your historical Page Strength stats and use the tool to monitor your progress. I’ve talked to plenty of in-house SEOs who bring their Page Strength reports printed out with them to every yearly review

(#23) The SEO Toolbox

The SEO Toolbox has a ton of great simple tools for monitoring your sites and pages, and for investigating competitors. Premium members have the added ability to store the data from their old reports, so monitoring progress is made easy:

(#24) Premium Tips on Site Tracking

Since measuring success is a huge part of every SEO’s job and reporting progress is essential to staying employed, I’ve put together a nice big bunch of site tracking related tips.

(#25) The Discount Store

We’ve recently added a few new partnerships here that let our members get access to some very cool tracking data at discounted prices. And, actually, we’re just about to add a very, very cool new partnership that will actually provide some SEOmoz-branded versions of a great analytics package to the offering (including some specialized reports just for SEOs). I’ll probably be announcing that in early January, depending on the dev time.

How Can I Leverage Social Sites & the Blogosphere to Reach Influencers On and Offline?

(#26) Social Media Optimization Strategies Guide

Jane’s Social Media Optimization Strategies Guide, which she just updated again last week, is a social media marketer’s dream come true. Along with a list of goals, she’s put together illustrated walkthroughs of how to acquire links, build profiles, and get value from the 9 major social media portals.

(#27) Premium Guide to Viral Marketing & Linkbait on the Web

Another brilliant contribution from Jane, the Viral Marketing & Linkbait Guide, is 50+ pages of viral how-tos, examples of successful projects, and specific strategies that we’ve employed to get on top of sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and others to draw traffic and links to our sites and those of our clients.

(#28) Knowledge Base Q+A on Social Media

Q+A has dozens of threads on social media and blogosphere best practices, and it’s one of the subjects in which we’ve seen accelerating interest and questions over the past few months.

I Have Specific Questions About the SEO Process That Need Answers

(#29) Go to Premium Q+A and Ask us a Question

It’s easy as pie - just create a question, choose a title, select a category and submit. We answer most questions within 2 business days, and if we can’t find the answer, we’ll recruit someone who can. Since SEOmoz’s staff now includes developers, designers, SEO experts, Social Media marketers, and even an in-house, practicing attorney, there’s virtually no question we can’t tackle. I’d have to say that of all the offerings, this one is probably the most valuable - there’s nothing like getting a second opinion from folks who know their stuff for less than the cost of a new pair of shoes.

Whew… That was a lot of work just covering our own stuff. Hopefully it proves valuable to all of the premium members who are searching for the answer of what to do with access to the behind-the-scenes content.

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Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May it Please the Mozzers,

Best Regards,

Sarah

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Posted by JaneCopland

I know exactly what you should do with your blog because it isn’t mine, I don’t have to implement any of the changes and if my advice is bad, I don’t have to live with the consequences. This said, I’ve been poking around inside my favourite social networking site and I’m sure there is room for improvement when it comes to their blog.

One of the benefits of running a successful blog can be reputation management, and our friends at Facebook have had a little trouble in that department lately. No matter what your opinion on the company’s various public relations problems, you may well have noticed the violent backlash they suffered after launching the News Feed, opening their doors to the public, and after they deployed their most recent advertising platform. They did quite well during the uproar over their News Feed, which publishes a user’s actions to his or her friends. Posting an apology at the top of the offending News Feed and scrambling to implement security features, Feedgate was quickly forgotten. Facebook treated similar public announcements, apologies and explanations in a similar way: a "one box" entry at the top of the homepage.

However, step away from Facebook for a second (it’s hard for me; is it tough for you too?) and think about how websites and companies in our industry deal with reputation management crises. Most of us don’t have to post apologies on our homepages because we have blogs that people actually read. Good and bad news usually finds its way into our blogs posts. Our readers comment on the posts; we reply.

Have a look at that last sentence again: readers comment on the posts. One of the most astounding things about Facebook’s blog is that there are absolutely no comments. Facebook users are usually prolific commenters! We can’t click past a photograph without adding something. Given the chance to interact with the people who create and maintain the very service we’re using, we just stand there like shy five-year-olds?

The first reason why Facebook’s blog gets no attention is blatantly obvious: It’s completely invisible. There was once a link to the blog in the site’s footer, but it is now gone. The About Facebook link has a "Latest from the Facebook Blog" section which, on most monitors, is well below the fold. The link to the blog’s main page is grey and doesn’t look live.

In fact, the blog is so buried that it’s like they’re actually trying to hide it. While nobody arrives at Facebook specifically to read its blog, I’d make it a little more visible. Some of Facebook’s more controversial actions took place after staff had blogged about their imminent implementation; the company could have benefited from hearing users’ feedback before, as opposed to after, the changes were live.

Another reason for the blog’s lack of appeal is its authorship. Since its inception, forty-one Facebook employees have contributed content. I’m sure if you sat down and listed every writer you knew of who’d ever published online, you could come up with more than forty-one people. However, for a single company, forty-one writers is way too many. Readers just can’t connect with that many people, and most successful blogs rely on readers establishing a relationship with writers.

At SEOmoz, our core group of writers includes only four or five people, which is a small enough number for regular readers to remember who we are and what we’ve written in the past. You know a little bit about us and you’re familiar with our writing styles. If charged with remodeling Facebook’s blog, I would find five or six of the company’s best writers from a number of different departments. I’d look for a PR person, a developer, an executive, a product manager (or similar) from the advertising  platform, a privacy specialist and someone who works in TOS or quality control. Secondly, I’d make them blog regularly.

I feel a bit of a fool chastising Facebook for not having people write regularly enough, since their most recent post is from yesterday, December 18. However, the most recent entry prior to this is from thirteen days earlier. I get the feeling that if SEOmoz didn’t post anything for two weeks, very few of you would be checking back daily to see if we’d written anything new. People who blog irregularly usually rely on feed readers to let people know when they’ve composed something new, but with that reliance comes the assumption that readers are web savvy enough to use feed readers. Do Facebook’s members all subscribe to blogs? I seriously doubt it; however, I do believe that they’d read Facebook’s blog if it were more visible.

I would include new blog posts as items in users’ News Feeds. Currently, News Feeds show people which groups their friends have joined, who’s written on whose profile, who’s been commenting on whose photographs, etc. It would be very easy to include brief but regular notifications about new blogs posts. Also, I’d include a link to the blog in the site’s omnipresent navigation:

For maximum exposure with minimum interference, I’d include it at the top of the page, placed somewhere amongst the smaller links. This way, it’s not taking up too much valuable real estate, but it is more likely to be seen, especially by people who are going for the "home" link.

Going back to the subject of feeds for a moment, the blog does provide a subscription link. It’s well hidden at the bottom of the sidebar and there is no explanation of what it is. While the majority of you here at SEOmoz don’t need an explanation of RSS, there would be no harm in providing a little "What is this?" link for Facebook members who may be interested in learning more.

Next, I’d add categories. Blogs that belong to big, diverse companies often turn into scratch-pads for employees to record a manner of entries on many different subjects. However, what happens when I want to read solely about safety on Facebook, or about the changes they’ve made to their search features? Right now, I’d have to sort out which of the forty-one authors deals with my chosen subject and sort through their entries. With categorisation, I’m more likely to find what interests me.

Above the subscription link, there is a neat little section called "New on Facebook" that names some recent features the site has added. Did you know that if, like me, you were born with a different name than you have currently (I didn’t like it, so I changed it. True story.) you can tell Facebook what the name was and your current profile will show up when people search for your old name? And that the old name won’t appear anywhere on your profile? Isn’t that cloaking? Is it sad that I thought of that?

What about brand / fan pages at Facebook: how long did it take for you to notice them? How about the feature whereby you can make any one of your pictures into your profile picture immediately? Yes, they stole that from Bebo, but it’s a great idea.

The area explaining these new features is only available on the blog (I’m not counting an even better-hidden link on the About Facebook page) and the newly released features don’t link to anything.

The "See More New Features" link just doesn’t cut it for me: I want each item to link to detailed explanation of the feature. Perhaps this is just the SEO in me coming out, because I find the idea of not linking to helpful things kind of abhorrent.

As far as participation goes, I would encourage Facebook staff members to begin commenting on others’ posts to get the comments started. I’d also encourage them not to have Facebook listed as their primary network, so that their comments look as though they’re coming from regular members of the site and not from employees. People are notoriously shy when it comes to "serious" comments (as opposed to celebrity gossip blog comments): couple this with the fact that you’re forced to use your real name when commenting at Facebook, and it’s obvious that people will have to be baited into participating.

Then there is the constant debate regarding how much text to display on a blog’s homepage. You’ll notice that at SEOmoz, we display partial posts if you are not signed in and full posts if you are. Facebook is currently showing entire posts on their blog’s homepage. Upon arriving at the blog, there is a good chance that any given Facebook user won’t be completely enthralled by the current post. I’d show partial posts in the hope of presenting a range of content and retaining more readers.

Back to the sidebar. The New on Facebook page’s sidebar includes recent mainstream news stories about Facebook and a link to the company’s job openings. I see no good reason not to include this on the blog as well: the news headlines are especially relevant. Facebook can also carefully select these mainstream news stories for reputation mangement’s sake, linking only to those which paint it in the best possible light. The company’s blog is indexed, and those links it adds to external sites receive some very yummy link juice. The only thing I don’t like about this idea is that it may clutter the sidebar.

I also realise that this is nothing but cute talk without some actual implementation on my part, so I rearranged the blog to fit my recommendations. Please note that I’m no designer and all I did was copy, paste and re-word what is already on the page. However, I really do think that Facebook could use their blog far better than they are already… they could optimise it, so to speak! The horrible little image below links to a far larger version of the same thing which, of course, your browser will also attempt to shrink. On the left is the Facebook blog in its current form; the right-hand image is mine.

 

As I mentioned above, I think my sidebar is too cluttered, but the page is actually a bit longer than that which I’ve worked with here. Also, given more time and more blog posts to work with, I’d invent a far more comprehensive list of categories. At the very least, I believe the blog could be more interesting than it is currently.

As a second installment of "Wasabi Wednesday", which is our very odd name for the day on which we write about Social Media, this has far more to do with blogging than it does SMM. We’ll be back to writing about the top nineteen ways to spam Digg next week, I promise.

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Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May it Please the Mozzers,

Best Regards,

Sarah

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Posted by Adam Green

Intro by Rebecca: Coincidentally, Adam Green submitted this SEM post to YOUmoz last night, and it’s very informative so I decided to move it to the main blog and have it kick off SEM Tuesdays. Enjoy!

There have been a number of updates to Google Adwords and Google Analytics lately, so I thought the SEOmoz community might want a summary of them.  For the most part, I am impressed with the new features and Google should be applauded for listening to their user base and responding with these additions. 

Improvement #1 - AdWords Geographical Targeting with Google Maps

Although geographical targeting is not perfect, this new mapping feature does make it easier for the average user.  Google has introduced a new system where users can see targeted areas using Google Maps.  I like this feature a lot because it allows me to see the surrounding towns and cities which I might want to include in my targeting for a particular local client.  This is especially handy for those who manage clients outside of their geographic area. 

Some new improvements include Google’s creation of "bundles," where you can bundle together specific regions like Central America or Africa.

Where this system falls short, and this is a long standing issue with geo targeting, is the fact that a user sitting in City Example X, may not have an IP address registered to that location.  Thus, when developing campaigns it can be a good idea to develop campaigns with the city keyword as a geographic qualifier and even test the effectiveness of the polygon targeting tool. 

Here is what the map targeting looks like for a client looking to target the Toronto region in Canada:

Improvement #2 - Google Keyword Tool

Google has also improved the functionality of its keyword tool by adding features that allow you to filter results,  choose which statistics columns to display and select match types at the keyword level. They have also combined the ability to see keyword variations and site-related keywords into one tab, allowing you to see all keywords on one page.  This update isn’t a huge breakthrough, but the increased functionality is nice for those of us who use this tool on a regular basis. 

Here is a screen cap of the tool, using the ever popular "blue widgets" example.   

Improvement #3 - Google Analytics Graph Comparison

I really like the increased functionality that Google has included with this update.  Comparing date ranges has always been helpful, especially when demonstrating improvements to clients or patterns of behaviour on a site.  This new update allows you to compare different metrics like average page views and time on site to each other, and display them graphically.  

The metric comparison options change depending on which area of Analytics you are viewing.  If you have an e-commerce site, you can compare conversion rates, transactions, revenue, and more.  

Here is a screen cap of a dashboard view in Google Analytics:

Hats off to Google for implementing these useful additions.  In my opinion, the new comparison feature in Google Analytics will be especially useful.  I would be interested to hear if anyone else likes these updates…or if there are features and functions that are sorely needed and should be implemented by Google.

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