internet marketing tips

Picture this scene, an adolescent boy walks into a barber shop and says to the barber, “Don’t touch me, I’m only here because my mom forced me.” Search engine optimizers are sometimes put into the position of the barber. They are knowledgeable and willing to work on their client’s site, but the client doesn’t want any modifications done to the text that is visible on her web pages. This kind of dilemma occurs due to general misconceptions about search engine optimization. Let’s look at these misconceptions.

1. SEO only involves writing meta tags and working on “invisible” code

Many people want to get a high ranking for various keywords or keyword phrases, but if you look at the text on their web pages you can hardly find these vital words. They come to a search engine optimizer and think that he or she will sprinkle these words into the meta tags and it will work like magic. This is a major misunderstanding.

It is true that your main keywords and key phrases should be in your title tag and your description meta tag, and even in the keywords meta tag, but they must also appear on the page itself and they must appear in some strategic places on that page. Some clients say, “But I like the way it looks now.” You may like the way it looks, but the search engines will not recognize that your page is truly about Electronic Widgets unless these words appear in headlines on the page, in the opening paragraph, in the file or domain name in link text and in the body text of your page.

So, by all means if you already have copy that works, that can convert visitors into buyers or otherwise accomplish the purposes of your site, keep it. But you should also be ready to listen to what the optimizer has to say about modifications that will enable search engines to select your site when a potential buyer makes a query for your key words or phrases.

2. Search Engine Optimization is Tricking the Search Engines

Some clients say, “Don’t touch the visible copy but put in the modifications invisibly.” Using invisible text is something that can get you banned from a search engine. The main purpose of search engine optimization is to give your website the best possible chance to come up in good positions when someone makes a query for your keywords or key phrases. The key to doing this is to design web pages and write copy that is intelligible to search engines, without sacrificing the experience and understanding of your end-users, the people who visit your site. So, don’t ask your SEO professional to try to trick the search engines, but work with him or her to present your website in the best possible way. 3. Search Engine Optimization deals mainly with onsite modifications

Even if your website is well designed, has proper meta tags and has keyword-rich text, this alone does not guarantee that your site will rank high in competitive queries. All of these factors, design, meta tags, and copy, are on-site factors. Search engines certainly take them into consideration, but they also value off-site factors such as how many high quality or authoritative websites link to you. This means that hand-in-hand with your on-site optimization you and your promotion team will have to embark on a campaign to get links to your websites coming from websites that are already highly regarded by the search engines and by the public in general.

4. Search Engine Optimization works instantly

Don’t expect to get a flood of traffic right after your site has been optimized. Some search engines work in a fairly rapid manner, but the main search engine at the present moment, Google, is believed to have deliberately put an aging delay into its algorithm. This means that it may take several months before your site makes it into the top results for your particular category, especially if it is a newly created site. During this initial period you will also have to consider using other promotional methods such as pay per click advertising, article marketing, joint ventures, paid advertising in ezines and offline advertising.

5. Search Engine Optimization is Prohibitively Expensive

While it is true that very large organizations, ordering services from the top SEO companies, can end up spending thousands of dollars on their optimization campaigns, search engine optimization can be the most inexpensive and cost-effective option for web site promotion.

If you launch a modest pay per click campaign and pay five cents per click and get 100 clicks per day, then your cost is $5.00 per day or $1825 per year. If you learn how to optimize your pages by yourself you may be able to get natural search engine traffic without paying the pay per click fees. This is in fact what many webmasters do. Or, if you opt for a modest search engine optimization package from a professional you can end up spending less than the pay per click fees.

So the next time you hear one of the myths about search engine optimization don’t accept it blindly.

About the author:

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He is the proprietor of A1-Optimization Ask Questions & Get Answers series. I’ve actually been meaning to put this up earlier, but keep running into other posts I’d like to author.

So, today, feel free to leave any questions in the comments below regarding:

• SEOmoz’s Business
• The Website
• Anything to do with SEO or Internet Marketing in General
• My Background or Personal Life
• Other mozzers

I can’t promise that I’ll tackle every question, and I may try to request clarifications in the comments. My goal would be to close this thread sometime tomorrow night and answer the questions then, for release on Friday.

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Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

How People Interact with Search Engines

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO and search rankings is feeling empathy for your audience. Once you grasp how the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, uses search, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

Search engine usage has evolved over the years, but the primary principles of conducting a search remain largely unchanged. Below, I’ve listed the steps that comprise most search processes:

1. Experience the need for an answer, solution, or piece of information
2. Formulate that need in a string of words and phrases (the query)
3. Execute the query at a search engine
4. Browse through the results for a match
5. Click on a result
6. Scan for a solution, or a link to that solution
7. If unsatisfied, return to the search results and browse for another link OR
8. Perform a new search with refinements to the query

When this process results in the satisfactory completion of a task, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result. Since the inception of web search, the activity  has grown to heights of great popularity, such that in December of 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life Project (PDF Study in Conjunction with ComScore) found that 90% of online men and 91% of online women used search engines. Of these, 42% of the men and 39% of the women reported using search engines every day and more than 85% of both groups say they "found the information they were looking for."

When looking at the broad picture of search engine usage, fascinating data is available from a multitude of sources. I’ve extracted those that are recent, relevant, and valuable, not only for understanding how users search, but in presenting a compelling argument about the power of search (which I suspect many readers of this guide may need to do for their managers):

• An April 2006 study by iProspect & Jupiter Research (PDF) found that:
  • 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, 90% within the first three pages. This is higher than in 2004, when 60% chose results on the first page, and much higher than 2002, when only 48% did.
  • 41% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they seek report changing their search term and/or search engine if they do not find what they’re looking for on the first page of results. 88% report doing so after three pages.
  • 36% of users agreed that "seeing a company listed among the top results on a search engine makes me think that the company is a top one within its field."
• The November 2005 PEW Internet & ComScore Study (PDF) mentioned above revealed:
  • On an average day, 60 million people use search engines
  • Search engine usage rises with both education levels (27% of those without a high school diploma vs. 55% with a college or graduate degree) and income (29% of those earning less than $30,000 vs. 52% of those earning $75,000+)
• An August 2007 Foresee/ACSI Report for eMarketer (Link) remarked:
  • 75% of search engine & portal users were satisfied with their experiences
  • In a breakdown by property, 79% of Yahoo! users, 78% of Google users, and 75% of both MSN & Ask.com users reported being satisfied
• Comscore reported in August of 2007 (Link):
  • The number of search queries performed on the web grew 2% from 2006 to approximately 10 billion searches per month (across all engines)
  • Google owned the lion’s share of searches with 55.2%, Yahoo! had 23.5%, Microsoft had 12.3%, and Ask.com had 4.7% (AOL, which shows Google results, clocked in at 4.4%)
• A Yahoo! study from 2007 (Link, PDF) showed:
  • Online advertising drives in-store sales at a 6:1 ratio to online sales
  • Consumers in the study spent $16 offline (in stores) to every $1 spent online
• Webvisible & Nielsen produced a 2007 report on local search (Link) that noted:
  • 74% of respondents used search engines to find local business information vs. 65% who turned to print yellow pages, 50% who used Internet yellow pages, and 44% who used traditional newspapers
  • 86% surveyed said they have used the Internet to find a local business, a rise from the 70% figure reported last year (2006)
  • 80% reported researching a product or service online, then making that purchase offline from a local business
• A study on data leaked from AOL’s search query logs (Link) reveals:
  • The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
  • The second position receives 11.94%, the third 8.47%, the fourth 6.05%, and all others are under 5%
  • The first ten results received 89.71% of all click-through traffic, the next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%, the third page - 2.42%, and the fifth - 1.07%. All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.

In addition to these statistics, research firm Enquiro conducted heatmap testing with search engine users (Link) that produced fascinating results about what users see and focus on when engaged in search activity. Below is a heatmap showing a test performed on Google. The graphic indicates that users spent the most amount of time where the colors are hottest - in the red, orange, and yellow sections of the page.

SELand’s Stats & Behaviors page.

All of this impressive research data leads us to some important conclusions about web search and marketing through search engines. In particular, we’re able to make the following assumptions with relatively surety:

1. Search is very, very popular. It reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
2. Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility.
3. Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.
4. An incredible amount of offline economic activity is driven by searches on the web.

As marketers, the Internet as a whole and search, specifically, are undoubtedly one of the best and most important ways to reach consumers and build a business, no matter the size, reach, or focus.

 

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I’m feeling a bit spent tonight, so despite the need for some refinement, and the fact that I should really put the search process into a visual flowchart, I’m hitting the deck. Tomorrow when I do this, I’ll try to report some news as well

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Posted by randfish

I’m on a plane from Newark to Seattle. It’s late at night, and the first hour was spent on the ground waiting for low CIGS (low ceilings of clouds & rain) to clear. So, while I still have another 4.5 hours in front of me, I’m just grateful to be in the air.

The last week was a whirlwind – although that’s nothing new. For the last 4 years, the acceleration brought about by my job feels as though it has no end. I’ll find myself getting 6 hours of sleep a night (sometimes less), answering 150 emails a day and barely noticing that I’m in a different city every other week. It’s a good thing. It feels almost comfortable. Or, maybe, more accurately, it feels good to be uncomfortable – to be challenged.

The whirlwind started on Sunday, when Mystery Guest dropped me off at the airport. I have a consistent pattern when it comes to business travel. I’m almost always making presentations, and since I despise presenting material I’ve already used before, I force myself to make new slides, new “decks” (apparently this is what important business people like me call Powerpoint files) for every speech. It’s probably not the most practical thing, but I like to think that I’m not just presenting for the audience, I’m doing it for myself, too. If I get bored with my material, how can I be excited to share it with them?

I board the plane early and read until we’re in the air and “approved” to use laptops. The book is pretty awful, although I don’t know that yet. I’m still in the honeymoon phase of it, when the writer was putting forth a real effort. But, at 20 minutes into the flight, I grab my Dell and start turning the outlines I’ve emailed to Karen into presentations. I can’t grab screenshots from the web, which are an essential, but I can figure out what I need on each slide, and that will save me a lot of time later on. I also have my collection of vector illustrations in Flash, including Googlebot, Yahoo! monster and crudely traced representations of people to combine with arrows and thought bubbles. These I can do on the plane.

In 1997, when I started working on the web professionally (sort of), I fell in love with Flash – the animation, the sound, the unbridled, free-of-tables formatting made me a fan. For almost 4 years, I worked in Flash – building ever more complex animations and designs. Then, one day, I read Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug’s masterpiece on web usability. I haven’t built a Flash website since, and the world is probably better off for it. My artistic ability suffers from a lack of… let’s say talent.

But Flash has served me well – the palette tools and my familiarity with the layers and systems for creating basic designs means that I can now use it as a Photoshop substitute, never having had the patience to learn that program.

Later in the week, as I’m giving my hour-long session on the Essentials of Social Media Marketing, I’ll marvel at how I raced through 113 slides in 50 minutes. The Guy Kawasaki, 10-20-30 philosophy just doesn’t work for me. Luckily, the audience seems to like it, too. Karen hasn’t sent me my feedback scores yet, but based on the in-person chats I’ve had with attendees, it went pretty well. I guessed right that Danny’s new SMX Social conference would draw a savvy crowd, so even though my job was to present an introduction to the material, I raced through it, tried to present it in an entertaining way, and, hopefully, educated the stragglers of the group while I was at it.

After the session is over, I get to watch my co-worker Rebecca give her presentation on Linkbait. When I started speaking at search marketing conferences, I was 25 years old, and one of the youngest people in attendance, nevermind on stage. Rebecca’s in a similar spot, although the crowd at SMX, both on and off the podium has plenty of early-twenties professionals. I think it’s her sarcasm and her fearlessness to reference off-color and pop culture influences that helps her connect with the crowd. She’s young, but she’s capable, and she’s got a few years of experience and a number of noteworthy success stories under her belt. I wish she could be more confident sometimes, but once she settles into the role, she performs well, and I think I’m the only one who notices that her voice is just a little bit off. Besides which, at her age, I was still designing websites in Flash for clients who paid $1,000 for a month of work.

Personally, I feel like I’ve always been too young. At five years old, I felt a little too young to travel across the country by myself on a plane (ironically enough, taking the same route I’m taking now). At 12, I skipped a grade in school and felt too young to be with the older kids. The next year, I’d repeat the grade at a new school to help make up for it. At 18, I lived in Prague for 4 months during my freshman year at UW. I was lonely and confused and awkward, but at least I picked up some Czech and developed a lifelong love for Pilsner Urquell (which thankfully found its way to US supermarket shelves just a couple years later). At 25, standing in front of an audience of 300+ in San Jose, I felt pretty good about my presentation on search algorithms until the first person from the audience came up after the session and asked how old I was.

Rebecca’s wrapped up and I’m at lunch with Michael Gray. I love the way he talks – his cadence and thick Long Island accent are a prefect match for the content of his rants against Google’s latest policy. I hate to run, but I have to meet with a client all afternoon. Thus, it’s onto the 1 train to Chambers street, where, with the help of a brusque policeman, I find the 7 World Trade Center building, get a badge from security, and ride elevator bank D up some 3 dozen stories. I’m meeting with the publishers of Inc & FastCompany to talk about something new they’ve got cooking up, but when I arrive, all I can do is stare at the view.

Far below, cranes and bulldozers are clearing earth, moving steel and preparing the ground for the site of what will be the tallest building in New York. Far off in the distance, my friend Kate points out the Tapanzee bridge. She tells me that as they tear down the floors of the adjacent, asbestos-afflicted building, the view becomes ever more magnificent. There’s undoubtedly sadness here, but there’s also the promise of something new, something incredible, something that can serve as a symbol of renewal and triumph over adversity. I think someone far wiser than me once said that America is both cursed and blessed by its short memory. I can’t think of a more appropriate symbol of that sentiment that what I’m looking at now.

Three hours later, I’m stepping off the 1 train and hiking back to the hotel. After a couple hours on email, I’ll join some friends for dinner, where we’ll bump into Garret Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon. Together, we’re amicably kidnapped and carted in a cheap limousine (they’re about the same price as a cab when you have this many people) to midtown, where we smoke cigars in a bar that almost throws us out for being underdressed (I’m in a suitcoat and jeans).

It’s after midnight when I get back to the hotel, and outside I meet up with Guillaume – my great friend from Montreal. I can tell he’s upset that we haven’t seen much of each other this trip (and probably won’t since he’s going back to Quebec the next day). Guilt is a constant at events like this – and I’m more sensitive to it than most. After all, it was only a couple years ago that I dined by myself most nights at a conference, hung out alone in the bars and hoped that someone I’d recognize would come along and chat. When I’d make a friend, I’d feel that same pang of envy when I’d see them coming back from a late night on the town with a crowd of compatriots. Luckily, Guillaume’s surrounded by people, so I feel a bit better when I beg forgiveness and ride the elevator up to my room.

Sleep is a constant problem for me. Unlike Danny Sullivan, I can’t stay out until 3am, then arrive bright eyed and bushy tailed the next morning at 8. My sleep requirements have always been high, and without 7 hours, I start to look and feel like some sort of SEO zombie, cursed to optimize SERPs and feed on brains. I’m constantly waging a battle against the blog – where I know that if I don’t produce something new and something worth reading every night, I’ll lose readers.

It’s a fact. Looking at our visit and subscription stats, you can see the pattern clear as day. If, on a given Monday-Friday morning, nothing new has come out on SEOmoz, our feed subscribers go down some fractional amount, our daily visit numbers drop 15-25% and we have fewer signups for accounts and fewer premium membership signups. Conversely, when I put something truly excellent on the blog, the positive results are equally visible. Visits are up, links are up, premium signups are up and all is right in the world.

But, the toll is heavy. Most nights I’m home in Seattle, I start formulating the blog post I want to write on my walk home from work. It usually takes me about 20 minutes to traverse the 1.1 miles from my apartment to the office – a saving grace, since I almost never go to the gym or use the elliptical machine I bought last December. From 6-10:30pm, I play husband (even though technically I won’t become one until next summer). Mystery Guest works out, or does laundry or watches TV (when she’s had a really tough day) and I cook. I’m by no means a gourmet, but I’m competent about 70% of the time, and I push myself to try new things, work with good ingredients and generally get better at preparing food. By 11pm, though, it’s back to the computer and onto the blog (once I wrap up another 40 emails). If I’m lucky I’ll spit out something in an hour, and can go to sleep by 12:30am. If I’m stumped, or take on an overly ambitious post, I’ll be up until 2am or later.

This happens tonight in New York. I’ve just finished the post on the Visuals of the Search Results, but it’s 2am and I have to be up at 7:30 tomorrow. Morning comes and sure enough, my eyes are dry & red – probably exacerbated by the cigar I had last night. There’s no time to waste, but time gets wasted anyway as I discover my room’s iron is out of order and have to call down for a new one so I can get my shirt done in time to leave. I wanted to take the subway, but am forced by tardiness to hail a cab. I’m meeting with the NY Jets organization on 57th street to talk about their search strategy. Thankfully, the meeting is great, mostly due to the incredibly friendly and receptive people I’m meeting. After the meeting ends, I whiz back to the conference, just in time to grab a hot dog from a street vendor and make it my talk on Micro Communities.

I’m on the panel with Liana Evans, and in the past, we’ve had our differences. However, a week before the show and after a rather painful blog post, we shared a few emails and a phone call. Talking to Liana, I realize that she’s got some very valid points, and that I owe her a serious apology. She’s more gracious than I could hope for, and by the time we see each other in New York, we break out in smiles and hugs. As much as I love the Internet as a medium, there’s no doubt that the lack of human contact can make for bad situations sometimes. It’s something I’ll have to work on – especially since I’m terrible at not taking things personally.

Micro Communities is a hit. From all the notes I can see the audience taking, I know that there’s a lot of new information. Liana follows up my broad overview with a specific example of how she used social media marketing to micro communities and achieved great success for a client in a very competitive industry. It’s the perfect counterpoint, and the audience is overrun with questions, so much so that Danny has to cut us off with a half dozen hands in the air. After the session ends, Liana and I field individual questions for the full 15 minutes. I’m thrilled when I can refer a gentlemen seeking services to Liana’s company – KeyRelevance – which has been on our Recommended List since its inception.

I want to stay and see the other panels, especially the advice from Jon Hochman on Wikipedia, but I’ve got a prior commitment. I walk down to SoHo – about 20 blocks and buy some presents to bring home to Mystery Guest. After so many trips to New York, I’m a seasoned veteran, and after three short stops, I catch the subway up to the meat-packing district and walk back to the conference, where I’m just in time to hear the last session of the day wrap up.

I spend some time chatting with Andy Greenberg from Forbes, whose demeanor is the complete opposite of every other NY reporter I’ve ever met. He’s a pleasure to talk to – warm, engaging, utterly fascinated by social media & SEO and genuinely curious. He mentions that an article on using Digg to reach Google is almost certainly part of his agenda for the week and sure enough, 2 days later, there it is.

I don’t know that I’ve ever handled public relations and press relations properly. Every time I talk to someone in PR, they always ask about our agency and are shocked to hear that we’ve never engaged one. In deeper conversations, I’ve heard tell that PR folks can help turn a short piece into a long piece (with a photo), turn a piece of advice into a sure mention in a story and even pitch the mainstream media to help attract coverage. It’s something I need to look into, as press is something we’ll need if we want to reach our goals for expansion. We’ve been lucky so far, but it would probably be hypocritical to think that we can manage PR ourselves as well as we could with a talented agency or even a consultant. After all, what is SEO if not public relations for the web?

With the conference over, I hop in a cab with my luggage and head for Museum Mile. In rush hour traffic, it’s a 50 minute trip and I arrive at 92nd and 5th at 6:40, 10 minutes late for the lecture I’m attending with my grandparents. Luckily, it turns out to be the best part of the day, and maybe my favorite part of the trip. Camille Pissarro’s great-grandson is speaking about the famous impressionist painter and his relationship with a contemporary and peer, Paul Cezanne.

I love this. I grew up in Seattle, but would spend at least 2-3 weeks every year in New Jersey with my grandparents, and we’d frequently drive into the city to visit museums and attend plays. My family was never wealthy, but two seniors and a student (especially with my grandmother’s NYTimes subscriber’s card discount) was a perfect way to spend an inexpensive day in New York. Museums are great equalizers – school kids from Harlem and jewelry-clad Upper East Siders co-mingle brazenly, appreciating beauty in their own personal ways. There were certainly ages where I didn’t appreciate it, but even just out of high school, I can recall loving museums, galleries and exhibitions wherever I traveled. Seattle’s own dismal fine arts scene only heightened the experience.

Pissarro was born to Sephardic Jews on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas (where I believe SEOmoz’s own Jane Copland still holds several swimming titles) and emigrated to France at a young age, but retained his Danish citizenship (as St. Thomas was a colony of Denmark). Our lecturer regales us with a passionate, and clearly personal, examination of how the artist’s life influenced his art and its shocking break from the standards of the age. An hour and a half flies by, and I find myself wishing he had more slides to show and more stories to tell. As we leave, my grandfather, SEOmoz’s Si Fishkin, fills me in on the details of the Dreyfus case (which Pissarro’s great grandson mentioned but did not elaborate on), an infamous tale of antisemitism and corruption late in the artist’s life.

The next night, we’ll see Henry VI in a playhouse at Drew University in NJ, and despite the 3 hours of patricide, fratricide and homicide, love every minute.

Thus ends a week in New York. I’m only 100 emails behind and I don’t have to blog tonight. Next week I’ve got 3 phone calls, a couple lunch meetings and a video-over-Skype interview. We’ve got 2 clients who need site review reports, a new contract to get out to the Jets and 3 presentations to build for SMX Stockholm. That, and we’re hiring 3 new positions. To quote Rick Moranis; “No, no, no. Light speed is too slow.”

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Posted by manthy

For the past year I have been using traffic exchanges to try and get visitors to my website, and I have come to a conclusion: while they will provide hits to your website, traffic exchanges do not work for getting quality traffic.

Most of the traffic exchanges I use are auto surfs, meaning that you click an autosurf now button and you start surfing. The idea is for every site you visit, they will send a visitor to your site. Well, you do get a visitor, but I have come to the conclusion that 99% of the people autosurfing are not even at their computer when thyy are surfing; in fact, most people just set the auto surf and go to bed (myself included), so you really aren’t getting quality traffic, just an automated visit.

Also, you get multiple visits from the same people….are they ever going to actually visit your website? I don’t think so. I would say that I have picked up more viruses/trojans than I have customers from traffic exchanges.

In closing, I believe that the only way to get quality traffic to your website is with careful SEO and building your site with the proper keywords, meta tags, etc. I just wish that it didn’t take me a full year to come to that conclusion.

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Posted by randfish

This week, along with the Whiteboard Friday video, I’ve also included a pair of informative and hopefully, entertaining, charts. The video discusses why some companies in more conservative sectors or with more traditional ideas about marketing and PR shy away from social media and blog engagement, despite the many benefits those arenas can bring. It’s a critique we hear not only from clients, but also at conferences and over the web, as SEO firms offering SMM find themselves pitching to un-receptive ears.

 

 

In the video, I reference a study that Malcolm Gladwell covered on recognizing emotion through facial expression. It’s a great read if you’ve got the time (he also covered it in his book, Blink). And below are the two charts - first, one that displays the relationship between tact and courage over various methods of communication:

Edward R. Murrow. Awards for journalistic integrity and quality now carry his name.

UPDATE: Scott left this comment below which I believe provides incredible insight about the value of this material:

I agree in general with what Rand is saying in this video/post and always find the phenomenon quite spectacular as it’s quite the opposite of what would ‘make sense’ in terms of communication (especially business/reputation related communication).

People seem to have the least tact and the highest degree of bravado (attitude?) and confrontation in the least ephemeral media: email and comments/posts.  If you communicate something controversial or offensive in face-to-face or phone conversation (wiretaps not withstanding) any recitation of your statements can be embellished, sure, but they also can’t be proven or easily distributed. Electronic communication, on the other hand, provides an easily disseminable means to  prove your statements as well as a permanent (possibly public) record of what you’ve said and your tact/style/attitude in how you’ve chosen to engage a conflict, question or other interaction.

My point? This video points out something valuable not just for pitching clients. Be mindful of the persona you create through your own social media interactions. People who’ve never met you (but may, including clients) have no other basis on which to judge you and, in lieu of actions, your words can speak very loudly and be difficult to deny or retract.

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Posted by wethead

So - did the title get your attention?

Cool, because the rest will be even better.

I am not really "famous," but maybe a tad bit in my own niche. Also, please note that this is a true story and I am really the one in my videos. I thought this worked so well that I wanted to share with the "Moz family."

What’s this post about?

This is a step by step guide on how I increased my readership and earnings as well as built some nice back links, while providing a great user experience with no money out of pocket.

You will be creating your OWN NICHE TV station

Things you will need

1) Digital camera or video camera (Don’t say you don’t know anyone without one, find someone)
2) A friend to act or hold the camera for you
3) Something to show someone (i.e., stick within your niche; it just works better)
4) A small list of videos or episodes you would like to create (save those ideas while there still fresh)

Side Note: Everyone has a niche, whether it’s cooking, cleaning, sewing , or simply magic tricks or something funny.
Step One
Now what you do is spend a few minutes with your friend and go over what you will be doing on video so you don’t mess up too much You can see my outtakes here. It’s kinda funny, if you ask me. Also notice how adding music to your videos will make them more enjoyable. They actually study and use methods like this for shoppers, although do you ever hear that music while you shop?

Okay - getting back on topic…
Once you decide on what you will be taping, you start the camera and take your footage. Please note it is okay if you mess up: just keep taping. I will show you how to fix that next!

Step Two
Now that you have your footage, you can upload it the way it is if you feel it came out right. If you do need to edit your video, you can do it a few different ways:

• Windows Movie Maker is a program that’s free, and you can do all kinds of good stuff
• It only takes a few minutes to learn Sony Vegas Movie Maker (this program is not free but does have a 30-day trial version that is available for download right on the web)

With the above programs, you can add background noise, fade frames, and all that good stuff you see on videos. It’s really not that hard to do.

Step Three:
Now that you have your videos ready, edited, all the effects are done, and you are 100% satisfied with your videos, it’s now time to get them live and on the web. For this, I recommend YouTube.

Why YouTube? It’s easy, it’s free, it’s simple. They also have a large audience, if you haven’t noticed, and that gives you the potential to receive more video views.

Step Four: 
Add the section to your website. You can see how I did it here. Once you have your videos on YouTube, it’s quite easy to upload them to your site and start getting people to watch them. There are many places from which you can get a lot of free traffic with videos. If you are not sure where, just post here and I can help you, depending on your niche. 

Some Notes and tips:
1) Create a video that is friendly and makes people comfortable. Trying to brand it with an overdose of a corporate structure will just bore your audience. It is simple things like outtakes, a word slip, or even real laughing and talking that make people connect. Talking like a robot will not get you more video views. Remember, we are all human, and like to interact as such.

2) Don’t read this post and say "Wethead, you are wacked." Go out and make some videos. Spend 10 minutes a day and you will notice that after a week you will have a complete video. Maybe you will get excited like I do and work all night, having it done in hours; who knows.

3) I have noticed over the last few weeks while I study my analytics that my videos are being watched, and in turn lowering my overall bounce rate. They also attract lazy people that don’t like to read!

4) Don’t worry about whether people will watch. Think to yourself how many times you watch a video because someone says, "Hey, watch this!" People just love videos.

5) Remember that it will take time to create a perfect on screen appearance. You may feel like it will take forever, but it won’t. The more you get in front of the camera, the better you will become.

6) YouTube is your friend. I stressed that above and I will again. You can gain even more branding power with YouTube, so make sure you use it for your videos!

Conclusion:
So, to bring this long post to a close, just think to yourself: If some random pool guy from upstate New York can get excited and make pool videos, then so can you! Why just limit yourself to boring text? They say a picture is worth a thousand words; what’s a video worth?

Please feel free to comment , or ask me any questions you like, and I hope this will help you get some more traffic and more readers to your site! Lastly, this post was inspired by Whiteboard Friday. One day I started to watch the "Moz Tube" and got hooked, and now look at me: I just spent two hours writing this! Just more proof the video thing works!

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Posted by vingold

Well, the big page rank brouhaha last week caused me to take a good long had look at all of my sites.  Not just their PR (relatively unchanged) but their SERPs, objectives and overall long-term strategy.

I have a lot of varied interests (boating, real estate, SEO, travel, super heroes, video games, etc.) and I’ve always felt it was better to have a lot of individual blogs or niche sites to play around in these areas, as opposed to just one or two "catch all" sites.

As a result, I’ve created way more websites than any one person - or even a small team of people - could properly attend to. For my real estate related lead-generation sites, I’ve always thought it was better to have a lot of small neighborhood sites rather than one or two large regional authority sites.  Then I interlinked all of these smaller sites in a way that would hopefully increase their link weight - but in actuality had very little impact because they were all so small.

All I see when I look out at my 20+ sites is unused bandwidth, half-built pages, and an overall weak linking strategy.  Not a lot to be proud of after 3+ years of even mediocre part-time effort. One thing I did notice is that the sites where I’ve had the greatest success (as measured by inbound links, SERPs and most importantly - conversions) are the ones where I have made a long term commitment to steady posting of good content. I’d like to say "great content", but I’m not a full-time writer and if I tell myself I have to post something of value everyday - the best I can hope for is "good." Or at the very least, average.  Sometimes even that bar was too high for me. Even when I have faltered and these sites have gone unattended to for a period of time, their traffic has still increased.  

Sometimes I get caught up in the immediate results of a post.  I look back at something I did a month ago and wonder why my traffic didn’t go up with that one great post.  How come no one linked to it?  Why is it not even showing up in Google etc. Meanwhile, the smaller sites - even the less interesting ones - grow steadily when content is put out there. I have to remind myself: Traffic will follow content - eventually.

Well, as of this week, I’m repenting and changing my ways, the first step being to admit you have a problem and all that. By the way, one of the final deciding factors in all this was one of Rand’s old posts "what not to blog about" that I found from reading his post today where he patiently answered a lot of our questions. Another factor was when I boasted to my son "I’m ranking for the search term ‘New Orleans Goldsmith!" and his reply was "and does that make you any money?"  Gotta love those 15 year olds.

I’ve already started making some changes - taking down old sites, combining content, grouping content in ways that it will be useful to users, doing 301 redirects, etc. I’m sure in the short-term my SERPs will suffer - and my hosting providers will wonder why I’m breaking up with them - but I know from experience that in the long run I’ll be better served.

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Posted by josey

I just signed up for the early bird registration with Webmaster World to attend my first Pubcon.

It’s in Las Vegas, December 4-7, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It sounds like it will be quite an event. Are you going to be there?

In all honesty it will be the first webmaster/SEO event I have ever attended. However, in the last two years I have listened to Danny Sullivan on Webmaster Radio sigh and rant enough to know a lot about him. I know that he’s from Newport Beach, CA, and he may not have ever finished that tree house for his kids across the pond.

And that just is Danny… there is Daron Babin, the sailor, his wife with the sexy voice, Brandy, infamous wise guy David Naylor, red-suit wearing Mikkel deMib (even though I have never seen it), Jeremy Shoemaker, Nebraska player, Jennifer Sleg, Canadian content guru, Todd Friesen, Maple Leaf gone good, the guys on SEO 101 who always talk too slowly, Greg Boser, the man, the myth, the guerilla. And I can’t forget Monty Keep-Your-Eyes-on-the-Prize Conn.

I guess I really love these people for talking about on and off-page SEO, search marketing, and domaining, because that is what interests me. I learn most from others in the industry, and I think most do.

Here is my dilemma. While at Pubcon I can only attend some sessions. There will be no listening to podcasts while I’m driving. I have to pick and choose.

So, how do I choose? What do you recommend? Who are the presenters that are great in person? Who is not to be missed at Pubcon? What do you do to make your event experience the best? What is your approach to getting the most out of an event like this?

What should I expect? Pointers please!

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Posted by Mel Gray

Howdy!

This is my first post and I aim to make it count, so I’ll spare you a lengthy introduction. My name is Mel and I’m from Texas. I came on board at SEOmoz just shy of two months ago, and it has been nothing short of a life changing experience.

I couldn’t be happier working with a team of folks who don’t just know what they’re doing, but have a damn good time doing it.  In my short tenure here I’ve been given the opportunity to work with a wide variety of very cool technologies alongside some very cool people. One of those technologies is called Ferret.

This varmint not only makes for a delicious roadkill quiche, but is also a heckuva good information retrieval tool.

Some of you premium members may have noticed that we silently rolled out the ability to search the Q&A archives a little over two weeks ago.  This search is powered by the aforementioned rodent, alongside another nifty little tool named Ruby (more on this in future posts). Using Ferret gives our Premium users the ability to quickly and easily search through past Q&A discussions. It even has its own query language, which is very similar to Google’s syntax.

Try it out for yourself - Querying for seo AND keywords will return an entirely different set about both "seo" AND "keywords". Users also have access to other familiar search operands such as NOT and OR.

We’re currently working on a bagillion super secret projects that we’ll be using to not only improve this search feature, but also other areas of the site as well.  And, speaking of other areas of the site… We’ve rolled out a new tool this evening!

It’s called the Term Target Tool!… Before anybody starts up with jokes about the south, hear me out.
Even though the term target tool is still using the same ole button, under the hood it’s a got a brand new engine (we had it parked up in the yard on cinder blocks and everything). We felt that "targeting terms" didn’t really fit the bill as to what the old tool really did.

The old tool was used mainly to "extract" terms, i.e. users would input a a url and get back a list of keywords that appear to be targeted at search engines. This is why we have rebranded it as the Term Extractor Tool (which, non-coincidently, rhymes with tractor). You can access the old tool by clicking on its shiny new button:

Now that I’ve covered the switcharoo we’ve pulled, I think I should take a moment to explain what the new tool does.

Have you ever wondered how your web page would perform if it had to take a midterm? We sure have! Now you can have a report card of how well your page is doing with keyword visibility. No need to feed your page "study pills" to get ahead.  Instead feed the tool your page (along with the keyword you’re targeting) and you’ll get a banana sticker, like the one below!