Laying Out An SEO and Traffic Generation Strategy

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

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I’ve only just started writing here at SEO Chat and already I think I’ve created a bit of a problem. I’ve discussed several techniques, but provided no real way of turning those into a single cohesive strategy. Consider this piece the first part of my correcting this issue.

Now let me be clear about something. This article isn’t meant to provide some all-encompassing strategy for traffic generation or search engine rankings. It is instead meant to take the information I’ve already given and roll that information into a strategy. As I do more articles, I’ll continue to expand on this. Right now, however, what I’d like to do is start putting some of the pieces together that I’ve given to you into a single picture.

In the article “Real Link Wheel Secrets To Top Google Rankings” I talked about link wheels and how to build them using white hat techniques to improve your search rankings. Most importantly (to me at least), I talked about how to use them to expand your authority presence and gain traffic from many different sources.

Then, in “10 Steps To Being #1 On Google” I gave several techniques that can improve your chances of obtaining links and getting your content shared. Again, the idea with this article was to give you methods to expand your authority presence in your market and gain more traffic from more sources.

Then recently I wrote “The Google Optimization Truth You Aren’t Being Told,” in which I talked about how search results can vary tremendously from one person to another. I hammered home yet again how important it is to get traffic from as many sources as possible. I talked about (yet again) making sure that your market sees you as an expert in the space.

You’ll notice that’s a recurring theme with me. Once the marketplace sees you as an expert and bona fide authority, you are no longer limited by whatever the search engines deign to send your way. You’re getting a ton of traffic from a lot of sources.

The problem, however, is that it can take quite a long time to build the perception in the marketplace that you’re an authority, unless there is some way to shortcut that process.

Fortunately, the changes at Google actually can help that to happen. In other words, it is now easier than ever to rank well. Done correctly, you can very quickly build the impression that you’re the overwhelming leader of your market.

You can quickly create this huge domination of the search space, then use that to build market authority much faster and easier than waiting around for years for it to happen on its own.

So the question becomes … how do you do that?

Next: It Starts With Google Plus
 

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Google Simplifies Its Privacy Policies

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

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Streamlining and simplifying seem like such good things on paper. Strangely, though, when Google is the one doing the simplifying, and the subject of the process is its privacy policy, most observers get hot under the collar. Why is it so bad when Google does it?

Just in case you didn’t check Google yesterday, the search giant started posting a note under its search box explaining that it will be updating both its privacy policy and its terms of service, with the new terms going into effect on the first of March. If you can’t be bothered to read the entire policy previews to which I’ve linked, no problem; Google also provides a policy overview to help you understand why the company is making these changes and how they’ll affect users of the search giant’s various services.

So why exactly is Google doing this? Well, if you had more than 70 different privacy policies that applied to your tremendous array of products and services, as the search company explains in its blog post, you’d probably feel as if you had too much legalese to deal with, too. And if Google finds all of these different policies complicated – and that’s AFTER they trimmed back on their policies in 2010, by the way – surely their users find the situation a little bewildering as well.

Google retained separate privacy policies for Google Chrome Browser and Chrome OS, Google Books, and Google Wallet, but more than 60 will be covered by just one policy. The company says that this will assist it in its “efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google.” Google notes that this approach “is now fairly standard across the web,” and in line with regulatory calls for shorter, simpler privacy policies.

Basically, the new policy will allow all of the information that Google collects about you to be shared between its services. It’s important to note that Google won’t be collecting any MORE information about its users than it already does; it just won’t be kept in separate silos any longer. Combining information in this way could allow Google to make more intelligent guesses when you use their services.

For instance, if Google notices from your YouTube viewing or sharing that you’re more interested in jaguars (the animal) than Jaguars (the car), when you put the word “jaguar” into its search engine, it will return results relevant to the animal and not the auto. Or if you use Gmail, Google may remember the way your friends spell their names, and make corrections accordingly. As an example of what might eventually be possible in an environment where information gets shared between services, Google notes in its blog entry that “We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day.”

Next: Activists Outraged by Changes
 

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Feed Your Blog`s Readers Well

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

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What do a great cook and a great blogger have in common? A lot more than you might think. So grab a quick snack and keep reading for an explanation you can really sink your teeth into.

Inspiration strikes in strange ways; in this case, I reached the end of Neil Patel’s excellent article covering 13 questions you should ask yourself while writing a blog post. In his discussion of the last question, he compared a blog post to a restaurant meal. Will your reader complain about your blog post because you’ve served them skimpy fare? “Are you feeding people content so they are full when they leave your site…or are they hungry, looking for more?” Patel asked. “If they are still hungry, your readers probably won’t come back.”

So if your readers are devouring your blog content, that makes you a cook. And if a blog post is a complete meal, then writing a blog post is like cooking that meal. As with a meal, your visitors enjoy the finished product, but you know how much work went into it. Creating a good blog post, like cooking a good meal, involves a process that begins even before you turn on your computer or open your cookbook to track down some recipes.

It starts with what you enjoy. No, actually, it starts with what really makes you salivate. Can’t get enough spicy Indian food? Then you probably shouldn’t be cooking potato pancakes – unless you want to give them a very different twist. The best chefs, like the best bloggers, are passionate about what they’re doing. So write about your passion. Or at least find something in what you’re writing that makes you feel passionate.

Now if you’re preparing a meal for a group, you need to take their tastes into consideration. Is someone allergic to garlic? You’ll need to exclude that spice and find ways to make your meal just as flavorful. That’s eminently doable. I’ve talked about many aspects of my life in the literally hundreds of articles I’ve written for SEO Chat, but there are certain things I won’t discuss – because they’re private, or because some of my readers might find them offensive. So cater to your readers’ tastes. You can certainly spice things up a bit, but let’s face it, you wouldn’t serve steak tartare to a table full of vegetarians, right?

Okay, once you get a general idea of what you’re going to serve, you need to look up some recipes. What this means in the context of a blog entry is, you need to do some research. And unlike many cooks, you won’t want to copy a recipe exactly. “Before you sit down and write an article, it’s important to search the web for articles like your idea,” Patel notes. “One of the things that I do is take the headline that I’m thinking about using and drop it into the Google search box. Then I look at what comes up.”

In the context of a blog entry, that might mean that you find some provocative research, an analyst’s opinion relevant to the research, and form your own point of view about it all. There are plenty of ways you can combine different ideas, but you need to add something original to make a blog entry – or a dish – truly yours.

Next: Assemble Your Ingredients
 

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Scientific Results Of 23 Million Visits: Creating Clickable Titles

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

When it comes right down to it, the titles of your content or your posts ARE your “hooks. Titles of blog posts, articles, videos, or any kind of content that are compelling and instill curiosity or a “need to know” will get looked at. Those that don’t, will not. What kinds of titles hook readers? Keep reading for some compelling data on the subject.

People will decide to read your blog post or check out your content based on your title. Therefore, the better your titles, the more likely your content will be read. That begs the question, “what are the kinds of titles most likely to be looked at and read?”

How can you structure a title so that as many people as possible will be interested in seeing what you have?

Now you could check out any of the many various and sundry articles that people have written about the subject. The problem is that those articles in large part represent the writer’s opinion. I wanted to know from a purely factual, scientific basis what kinds of titles would get the largest percentage possible of readers.

What I did was compile data from 23,268,496 total visits to 765 different articles from 2003 up until the very recent present from http://seochat.com/ (a site focused on search engines and web marketing). So keep in mind that the site is mostly visited by people looking to learn something. I used this site because traffic numbers for every single article on their site are published and available.

Now, to make sure that older titles with an ability to have more clicks were not unduly favored, each year was segmented, and only the top 10 results from each year were looked at.

Those 10 from each year were given the same “weight,” whether a number 1 for a year or a number 10, and whether it was from 03 or from 2011.

Further, every title was looked at for elements. Thus a title that was (this is a ridiculous example title to illustrate): “6 secrets to teach how to tell Google to stick it in their rear?” That title would get the code for a Numbered list, “secrets,” How To, and Question.

All of the top 10s were put together onto a spreadsheet, and each item in the legend put across; if it had that item in the title, then it got a 1 in that cell.

In the end, the titles that were the “most clickable” were:

•Titles that either had “How to” or “Tips” absolutely crushed almost everything else.

•Titles that promised some kind of specific and tangible benefit came in second.

•Titles that included “strategies,” “secrets,” “methods,” or “insider,” or “myths” came in third.

•Titles that said they would give a specific amount of information (4 ways to…) came in next.

•Finally, articles that right in the title targeted the information as either for beginners (stating either beginner, or 101, or something like that) or for advanced users — meaning the title was targeted at a specific skill level — came in fifth.

Below those five, it almost isn’t even worth talking about any of the others. And honestly, the first two so overwhelmingly beat the others as to be surprising.

I really did feel (clearly erroneously) that titles that ended up being distantly third and fourth would have been first and second; and when you look at the chart, you’ll see just how much the first two beat the others.

Do you want a title for your content that people will click on? Well if you’re like me, you just might be titling your material wrong. Consider titles that fit the first two categories in the graph.

A=How-to/Tips/explanation
B=Promise of benefit
C=Controversy or avoidance
D= Strategies, tricks, insider, myths, secrets
F= X ways to
H= Reviews
O= Beginners or Advanced
P= Humor
R= News
S= FAQ or Questions Answered

Now keep in mind that SEO Chat is a “how to” sort of site, so of course those kinds of titles did better.  However, titles that promised some kind of tangible benefit, followed by titles that included the words strategies, or methods, tricks, insider, myths, or secrets did very well also.

This starts to give you a pretty good idea of how to structure a highly clickable title.

Using SEO Chat again, the title, “Insider Secrets Explain How To Get #1 Google Rankings”  includes “insider,” “secrets,” “how to,” and promises a specific benefit.

If you would like to see the actual raw data, I have it available on Google Docs.

For more of my work, please check out http://www.mattgoffrey.blogspot.com/.

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7 Secrets to Spreading Your Influence for More Traffic and Sales

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

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When it comes right down to it, the best customers, those that are the easiest to “sell” your products or services to, are those that find you and decide on their own that you’re the best in their field. They have decided, before they even contacted you, that they wanted to do business with you over and above any competition that you might have. People that come to you like that will nearly always be your best customers. The question becomes how to actually accomplish that.

How can you be perceived in your market as the best in your field? How can you get customers to come to you already expecting to write you a nice fat check?

An example to prove my point:

Let’s say you need to visit a surgeon to have something done. It’s important that you get it done, but this isn’t emergency surgery, so you have time to do some research. In your area are two doctors. The first is a little cheaper, and you can’t find anything bad said about him. The second, however, is an internationally recognized expert in the exact type of surgery you need done. He is a bit more expensive, though.

Which one are you going to choose?

Do you see how important being an expert is? People are going to look around on the Internet before doing business with anyone in your field.

If they are given a choice between a recognized expert and someone else, you know they will choose the expert; so why not be that person? Here’s what you need:

1) A commitment to excellence

Now this one really is more than a little obvious.  If you want people to see you as the best, you have to act like you are. You have to be the best at everything you do. If you’re going to do things “half way,” the market will see that, and then you can forget it.

2) A willingness to give your knowledge freely

Experts nearly always end up being seen that way because they share their knowledge. In fact, sharing what you know is really the way to being viewed as an expert. When you add that to your commitment to excellence, so that you’re producing great information of value to your market, this can make some serious things happen pretty fast.

Actually, let me back this up. Just being viewed as an expert really isn’t enough. You have to strive to be a thought leader in your field that helps to spark discussions, and even helps to determine the direction of your industry.

You see, here’s the thing: far too few people in any market actually even attempt to do this. That means it can be pretty easy to make something happen if you just go out and do it. Most people are just hoping they can advertise and sell their stuff.

The problem with that method of doing business is that in most parts of the first world, people are getting so ridiculously advertised to that their brains are beginning to tune it out as little more than noise.

Not only that, but the growth of social media such as Facebook and Google+ means that more than ever people are referencing back to people they know. If you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your field with those folks before they actually want to buy what you sell, it becomes fairly easy for you to be the defacto choice.

The issue is, how do you get that done? How do you build the perception in your market that you are the expert, the thought leader, for your field?

Before I continue and explain how to do that, let me be clear about something: each of these steps are meant to build on each other.  You have to want to produce excellent content relating to your market, and you have to be willing to share it, for any of the rest of this to work.

3) Know your relevant keywords

Many times small business owners know this, but knowing which keywords are important extends to more than your products and such.

What I’m talking about here is understanding those keywords so that you can focus your content around them. You can create titles that use those words. Now you do need to be careful with this somewhat.  You have to remember that people use the search engines. If you “over optimize” only for good rankings, then the people that will visit your site won’t like it. 

Titles to your products/services and your content need to be 60% for the people that will be consuming that content or buying the product/service and 40% for the search engines. Later you will understand why there is a bias toward people.

That doesn’t change the fact that when you’re producing content designed to help you be seen as an expert by your market, it sure can help a lot if you’re cognizant of the search phrases for which you would like your content to rank well.

Next: More Secrets
 

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10 Ways Paid Marketers Can Leverage Inbound Marketing

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it…{big gulp}…today’s marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.

Because it’s true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We’ve covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won’t go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand’s posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.

The real question you may be asking yourself is, “why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?” Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn’t help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.

I thought I’d run through some ways that I’m leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz’s costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I’ve leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;

#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads?  Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.

#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander…coincidence? I think not. 

#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts. 

#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it’s really time consuming. Secondly, it’s not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.

An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It’s immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can’t get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels. 

#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it…none.

In the past, my argument was “it didn’t drive enough free trial signups to show ROI.” What I’ve realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what “conversion” means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn’t it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?

#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities — content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.

#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.

#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today’s marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.

A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand’s logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this “fueling the fire.” While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.

#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it’s a new audience and sometimes it’s my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.

In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these “social votes” I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It’s a really great way for me to collect good data fast.

#1: Strengthen the Brand’s Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I’ve worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money…which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money…not fun.

For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, “Is this the best use of my time and money?” I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.

In Conclusion

Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I’m super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren’t connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be. 

I’d love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this? 
 

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/nqeuPAsfWlw/10-ways-paid-marketers-can-leverage-inbound-marketing

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Using blekko’s SEO Data to Evaluate Web Directories

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

If you haven’t tried it out yet, blekko.com is a unique search engine. Along with allowing you to customize your own search results (or view results customized by one of its editors) it transparently provides a plethora of data showing why it ranks sites in the search results. The best part is, even if you aren’t trying to increase visits from blekko, their SEO data is very useful.

Getting blekko’s SEO data

It’s simple to get the SEO data from blekko. First you need a blekko account. Then all you have to do is type a URL into the search box, hit the spacebar, and add /seo (what they call a “slashtag”) at the end of your search string.

One of blekko’s most distinctive pieces of data is “Host Rank”. This is not so much a ranking of websites but a measure of website authority- like Domain Authority or PageRank. Unlike these other metrics, Host Rank is on a linear scale rather than an exponential scale. Typically a linear scale is a little easier to wrap your brain around. For example, while you might be tempted to think that a website with a PageRank of 4 is only a little bit better than a PR 3 website, we need to remember that this is an exponential scale and the former has a significantly higher authority than the later. In other words the difference between a Host Rank 30 and 40 website is simply 10 points but the difference between websites with Domain Authority 30 and 40 is not 10 points, it is 10 to the power of X points (it is an exponential scale- what’s the exponent? ask Mr. Fishkin). Host Rank also avoids a maximum value on its scale unlike the coveted PR 10 website (or comparatively strong DA 100 website).

There’s much more to blekko besides another number to compare websites. The /seo slashtag also provides a nifty pie chart outlining what countries the links tend to come from. Although there is nothing wrong with a link from India, for example, if a website is based in the United States and the audience is primarily in the United States, the origin of the links can be indicative of some (shall we say) risky SEO techniques.

I also find the “co-hosted with” list at the bottom of the /seo page very interesting. Does this website have dedicated hosting? If not, that’s not necessarily bad thing but if it is co-hosted with some (shall we call them) questionable websites, that might be a neighborhood you wouldn’t want to be associated with.

Blekko’s data gets even more specific. You can also slashtag a URL with /domainlinks to find a list of inbound links (you can also access this from the right sidebar of the /seo page). Now this list of links most closely resembles the defunct Yahoo! SiteExplorer in that it provides a very long list of links that you have to manually filter through to be useful, but it does a good job giving you an indication of the source of this website’s link authority.

I also like to take a look through a websites /sitepages. This gives a list of all the pages on a website, as sorted by Host Rank. This is a great way of seeing how Host Rank (and presumably PageRank or even Domain Authority) flows throughout a website. Of course, the homepage of any website will always have the most authority- but does any authority flow to interior pages on the website?

Let’s get a little more concrete with this data. We can use blekko’s SEO data to evaluate a couple of web directories to see if we should submit our site to them. Starting with SEOmoz’s directory list, let’s take a couple of authoritative directories (as measured by Domain Authority) and a couple of low authority directories.

The Yahoo! Directory (Domain Authority 100): http://blekko.com/ws/dir.yahoo.com+/seo

Anyone with (shall we say) the means to afford $299 a year has probably submitted their website to the Yahoo! Directory. For a while Google’s Webmaster Guidelines even suggested it. Is it worth the cost? What will we get out of this listing? Let’s use blekko’s SEO data and find out.

/seo

• With a Host Rank of 2,054.9 we clearly see this is a very authoritative website (at least in blekko’s mind). Although this number doesn’t mean much in itself, I bet it’s higher than your personal website.
• Most of the links are from the United States (64%). Not to be so Amero-centric here but there’s nothing in the geographical distribution of the links that would make me concerned here. This is an international directory, after all.
• The site is co-hosted with (wait for it) Yahoo!. Even though it’s been a while since I’ve used Yahoo!, that’s a neighborhood I wouldn’t mind being associated with.

/domainlinks

• Websites actually link to the Yahoo! Directory (who knew) and these seem to be authoritative and clean. It seems like a legitimate and natural backlink profile to me.

/sitepages

• Authority seems to flow very quickly into the directory listings and the Host Rank doesn’t seem to drop-off very fast. If your website falls into one of these top ranked categories you’d definitely want to be listed there.
• One of the top-ten pages, according to blekko, is the list of newly submitted websites. FTW!

The Better Business Bureau (Domain Authority 99): http://blekko.com/ws/bbb.org+/seo

Got a brick-and-mortar along with your website? Why not submit it to BBB.org?

/seo

• This site, according to blekko, actually has more authority than the Yahoo! Directory. It has a Host Rank of 2,948.4. This is tempting!
• It makes sense that 86% of the links come from the United States- this is for US-based businesses, that’s how it should be.
• WOW! What a list of sites are co-hosted with the BBB! Well, it’s co-hosted with pearljam.com so it’s gotta be a good neighborhood! (By the way, did you see Pearl Jam 20? Highly recommended)

/domainlinks

• Sites linking to the BBB seem to be very similar to the Yahoo! Directory and they are all from legitimate and authoritative websites. You wish you could have a backlink profile like this site!

/sitepages

• Unfortunately the first business I found was on the 6^th page of blekko’s /sitepages results. Most of the authoritative pages are designed to get you to sign up or are content pages. Getting a listing on this directory won’t pass much authority to your site.
• Clearly the authority of the homepage does not transfer well to listings. The first business listing has a Host Rank 1/100^th of the homepage. Sure, you might get some eyeballs from a BBB.org listing, but I wouldn’t count on it for link building efforts.

Sporge (Domain Authority 33): http://blekko.com/ws/sporge.com+/seo

With a name like that, who wouldn’t want to be in this directory? (I’m not much for branding but I’d recommend a name-change in this case). Still, it might be worth something. Let’s see

/seo

• The Host Rank of this website is 20.2. Now you start to see the value of a linear website ranking scale- the Yahoo! Directory is 100x more authoritative that this directory.
• The geographical distribution of the backlinks is actually fairly similar to the BBB’s website. Nothing unusual here.
• Also similar to the BBB, there is a massive amount of websites co-hosted with the Sporge directory. Most of them seem benign.

/domainlinks

• Most of the links to Sporge.com come from other web directories. Could this site be part of a directory network. Is there any value of submitting to this directory as opposed to any of the others? If I submit to this directory, should I even bother to submit to any of the others linking to it?

/sitepages

• The Host Rank ends very quickly, but there’s not much authority to this website to start with in the first place. At least what little it has is able to get to the directory listings easily.

The Brick Wall (Domain Authority 22): http://blekko.com/ws/thebrickwall.com+/seo

This is the least-authoritative directory, according to SEOmoz’s list. Is it even worth the 10 minutes it would take to submit your website?

/seo

• The Host Rank is a whopping 4.3. This is another good illustration of the value of a linear ranking for websites. If you only looked at the Domain Authority of this website (as compared to Sporge- why do I blush when I say that?) you might think, “hey, that’s not so bad,” but blekko doesn’t think very highly of this directory.
• The links to this site come from four “other countries.” I can’t seem to find that on my globe. This is a little fishy.
• It’s co-hosted with a few other UK-based websites. Nothing seems too bad among these websites.

/domainlinks

• There really isn’t a large number of links to this website. Where is it getting its authority (what little it does have)?
• There it is! Many of the links to this directory are reciprocal.

/sitepages

• This little directory doesn’t have much authority to share, but if it did it seems it would get to the directory listings fairly efficiently.

Now blekko’s search market share is (shall we say) still growing, but the data they provide can help you do SEO in other search engines too. As with any third-party tool, you wouldn’t want to rely on this data exclusively- obviously neither Google nor Bing are using this data to determine how they rank webpages- but this information can still be a big help to any SEO attempting to evaluate websites for potential authority and value.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/UfUTmB18wKU/using-blekkos-seo-data-to-evaluate-web-directories-14678

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6 Reasons You Need to Charge More

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

I’m a reluctant Capitalist. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money (my dad was a country preacher, and my mom was a schoolteacher), and the transition from academia to building a start-up and then running my own consulting firm has been rocky at times. The one thing I still hear almost every week is “You need to charge more,” and I preach the same message to new SEOs even as I try to remember it. This post is a reminder to myself (and to you) of why what you charge matters, and why it’s not just about greed.

Almost every new consultant, freelancer, and even agency makes a critical math error. Pay attention, because this mistake could could haunt your business for years to come. It goes something like this:

I need to make $37,000 to pay the bills, and I’d like to make $50,000. A year is about 2000 work hours (50 weeks x 40 hours), so if I can just charge $25/hour, I’ll easily pay the bills and make my $50K goal.

I sincerely commend you for doing the math – it’s important to know what you need to pay the bills and to figure out what that means on a daily and hourly basis. Here’s the problem – in a 40-hour week, especially starting out, you’re going to spend half that week pounding the pavement (or more). You need to network, build your site/portfolio, blog, make phone calls, write proposals, and on and on. Once clients come in, you’ve got administrative work to do – somebody has to send the invoices, pay the taxes, and buy the toilet paper.

So, at best, only 20 hours of your week will be billable. Now, your $25/hour just netted you $25,000. You not only fell short of your $50K goal – you didn’t even pay your bills.

But wait, it gets worse. That 20-hour billable week assumes that all of your pavement-pounding actually gets instant results. When it does finally pay off, what happens? You get a nice, juicy contract, pour all your time into delivering it, and then realize that you didn’t actually keep selling while you were doing the work. So, after you get that check, you go a month with no work at all while you rebuild your lead pipeline. Ultimately, you’ll be working a 20-hour billable week about every other week, especially for the first year or two. So, you’re averaging 10 hours per week and your $25/hour just netted you a $12,500 bottom line.

This one’s mostly for the freelancers and independent consultants. Revenue does not equal salary. Even being a consultant costs money – it’s not a high-overhead profession, but everything’s coming out of your pocket now. Some things that you didn’t think twice about when you were employed will suddenly seem shockingly expensive. Want to go to an industry tradeshow? With the full-conference pass, airfare, car, hotel, and meals, that’s about $2,000-3,000. Need a copy of Photoshop? You can’t just pop down to IT anymore – Adobe CS5.5 starts at $1,299. Suddenly your old boss doesn’t seem like such a cheapskate.

That doesn’t count the perks you’ve lost. You’ll hear all about the amazing tax breaks of self-employment from your friends who dream of self-employment but don’t actually have any idea what they’re talking about. Sure, you might be able to write off half your phone bill or a corner of your condo as office space, but meanwhile you’re paying both halves of your employment taxes, your own health insurance, and you’ve got no 401K. Even if you hit that $50K revenue goal, it’s probably more like a $40K salary. The $12,500 you barely squeezed out in the realistic scenario above is more like $10K, and that assumes you skip health insurance, which will run you roughly that entire amount.

People are funny – when we discount our prices, we expect the buyer will understand they’ve gotten a bargain. When we pay discount prices, we think we’ve walked away with something of less value. Let’s say you go to a fancy restaurant with a 50% Groupon – a month later, do you think “I should go back to that place, since I got such a great deal last time!” No, you think – “If I go back to that place, I’ll have to pay full price. That sucks!” My wife would rather die than go to Bed, Bath and Beyond without a coupon, and it’s entirely their fault for sending us 11 a day. They’ve set their value, and the message is “We don’t have any.”

What’s worse is that you send a broader message that that discount rate is your value to the market, and you even begin to believe it. Unless there’s an amazing opportunity and you’re 100% clear that this is a one-time deal, don’t even start. The legacy of discount pricing could haunt you forever.

We tend to price future work based on past work. On the surface, that makes perfect sense, but the problem is simple – the cost of 10 hours/week when you have nothing to do is a lot less than the cost of 10 hours/week when you’ve already got 40 hours booked. You only have so many hours in the day, and as you run out, they become more valuable. Think of your time like any marketable resource – with more scarcity comes higher prices.

Your time is like MegaBus. When the bus is empty, you may be able to charge $1 for a seat, but that last seat should fetch a premium price. People naturally want to book every available hour, but there’s an opportunity cost to being left with no time at all. Once the hours start to book, it’s time to raise your prices and protect your most non-renewable resource.

Some people may take offense at this, but experience has taught me over and over (and by “taught” I mean “beat with a bat and left me for dead in the alley”) that the people who fight you over price will never stop fighting you. It’s easy to think that, since you gave them a discount and gave into all their demands, they’ll appreciate you more and manage their own expectations, but that’s never happened to me in almost 15 years of working with clients.

It’s almost never about the money – there are some people who just think vendors are meant to be beaten. If you win, they lose. Unfortunately, that means they’ll never see your relationship as win-win. Learn to recognize those clients during negotiation, and get out while you can.

There’s one exception – if you really want to help an organization and you know money is an issue for them, consider doing the work pro-bono. Scope a one-time project and donate your time. There’s nothing wrong with helping people. Where you go wrong is when you start letting other people define your value.

That’s the Million-dollar question, isn’t it? According to our SEO pricing survey last month, the most common hourly rate is between $76-$200 US. That’s quite a range. I think it comes back to that math in Reason #1. The trick is to do the math realistically. Be realistic about your costs and the number of hours really left in the day after sales and marketing are done (and you need to do sales and marketing every day, even when you’re working on deliverables). Maybe more importantly, decide what you want long-term and be careful about setting your value too low just to land a few clients. Today’s discount “just to pay the bills” could set your price for years to come.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Q5ROkcIIUic/6-reasons-you-need-to-charge-more

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How To Successfully Pitch A Blogger For A Guest Post

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

Article source: http://www.seo.com/blog/pitching-bloggers-for-guest-post/

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Beyond Keyword Research: Why You Should Be Looking At Consumer Behavior

February 9th, 2012 @ // No Comments

Article source: http://www.seo.com/blog/keyword-research-consumer-behavior/

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