Posted by TastyPlacementThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
A…
Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets
Universal Search Results in PRO – Part 1: Local Results
Posted by adamf
Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which i…
Testing the Accuracy of Visitor Data from Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick & Quantcast
Posted by randfish
SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclic…
Adding Universal Search Results to PRO – Part 1: Local Results
Posted by adamf
Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which i…
10 Extraordinary Examples of Effective Link Bait
Posted by jrcooperThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Despite…
All About Anchor Text – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Welcome to our first Whiteboard Friday of the new year. It's 2012 and we're going to kick it off by examining the intricacies that revolve around anchor text. Although, this may seem like a very basic topic, we are going to cover some lesser known aspects of anchor text that is sure to satisfy even our more advanced SEOs. Enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Happy New Year. This is the first Whiteboard Friday of 2012, and today we're talking about anchor text, which could seem like a basic topic. But, in fact, there are a lot of intricacies that we should cover. Let's get right to them.
What I have drawn here is a web page, and it says, "I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks. You should check it out." Now, this, this text in blue with the underline, that links somewhere, and that link points to another page. Let's say it's a page over here, a very nice page on Portuguese cooks. It has some pictures on it. I don't know what it's got.
What it's saying to the engines is not only eye this page and this website, I'm voting for this other page over here, and I want to pass over some PageRank and link juice. I want to pass over trust. I want to pass over the domain diversity, whatever the signals, the keyword agnostics signals are, but I also want to say that I particularly like this web page about Portuguese cooks. That's what I think you, search engine, should interpret and take away from it.
Of course, this anchor text with the keyword embedded in it becomes a very strong signal to search engines, and as we all know, this is one of the strongest signals that Google and Bing interpret, Bing maybe even stronger than Google. Because of this, lots of people go down a path of trying to acquire links that say the precise keyword that they want.
Of course, this is a challenge because most natural links on the Web don't generally do this. They will say things like your brand name. They might say something about your site. They might use your personal name, if they're linking to a blog or something. But it's rare, it's uncommon that they might say "Audi 87 engine parts for sale" or "best deals on holiday gifts." These types of anchor texts, the things that people search for, longer phrases, in particular, are very hard to get as natural links, and this is one of the biggest reasons that gray and black hat SEO exist because manipulating the search engines by acquiring lots of links that have these keyword matches pointing to your page can, in fact, do a great job of ranking you up, at least temporarily until the engines catch up and do something bad to you or to the people linking to you.
What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page "do not" provide more value. What I mean by this is if this page said I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks, you should check it out and a bunch of other text, and then it said Portuguese cooks again and linked over to this page, not helpful. It does not add additional value. There is no reason that you should be going, "Oh man, I wish I could get four anchor text match links from this web page." No, that's not going to help you.
Multiple web pages will help you, but if they're from the same domain, that's not nearly as valuable as if they're from different domains. That leads us to the next thing, diversity of anchor text, diversity of the source. The root domain source of the anchor text links provides the strongest benefit, meaning if you can get lots and lots of websites, not just individual web pages but different unique web domains, linking to you saying "Portuguese cooks," chances are good this web page will do very well.
Number three, the fluctuating anchor text. This is something that people talk about all the time. They don't just talk about diversity of the link location across different domains, but they talk about diversity of anchor text itself, meaning, "Oh, I should have one that says Portuguese cooks and one that says Portuguese cooking and one that says cooks from Portugal. I'm going to vary up the anchor text a lot."
I'm a little skeptical about this, not because it's not potentially useful, and it should be a natural thing if you're going out and doing white hat types of link building and inbound marketing. But because the primary reason I think most SEOs do this is so as to not trigger pattern matching problems in the engines, meaning if every website that's linking to me says Portuguese cooks, that's suspicious, highly suspicious. That suspiciousness is the feature that people are trying to prevent.
So, I'm not so sure whether this fluctuation is all that important unless you're doing manipulative types of link building, in which case SEOmoz is not all that helpful for you. So, you're probably not watching this video.
Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, "Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?" And he did. He came out and said, "Yeah, that's how we interpret it".
So, basically, here's what's going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. I don't know why my handwriting is so terrible in 2012. I hope that repairs itself soon. That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks.
It's very frustrating, and something that you should think about when you're doing internal linking and you say, "Oh, yeah, we should optimize this link." If it's already in your menu, if it's already at the top of the page somewhere in a side bar and that's higher up in the HTML code, then that is what the engine is going to count. So, do be aware of that and same goes for anything that you're earning externally. If you've got the optimized anchor text for your website in the footer of the blog post where it talks about the author, Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, an SEO tools company, but I've already link to SEOmoz's home page somewhere in the blog post above, that "SEO tools company," that's not going to help anything. That's going to be discounted by the engines.
Number five, internal anchor text, meaning anchor text that comes from your own site, your own pages, it does help. It helps a tiny bit. You can see a little bit of benefit from that. I wouldn't focus on it too much because tiny is a small amount. That's probably the most obvious statement I've ever made on Whiteboard Friday. But nevertheless, tiny, small amount, therefore don't focus too much energy on this. Link naturally, internally. Link in such a way that people think your site is good, and, yeah, if you can work in your anchor text, great.
External anchor text is where it really helps, meaning websites that are not your own linking to you. That's where you really get value from anchor text, and you do need to worry about this a little bit. There should be some manual efforts, some efforts, whether that's guest posting and blogging, whether that's sponsoring an event, whether that's getting your biography featured or something like that, getting a badge embedded somewhere or a graphic embedded somewhere that links back to you in a certain way, you do need that anchor text link match. So, working on at least a little of that external anchor text is definitely worthwhile.
Number six, if a link uses an image, like this, so check out this awesome site on Portuguese cooks, and then here's a little screen shot of the Portuguese cooks website, and this is linking over. I tried to illustrate that in blue. This does not have any anchor text. It's an image. So what could the anchor text possibly be?
The answer is they use the Alt attribute. The engines use the Alt attribute that becomes the anchor text usually, not always. If there is no Alt attribute, sometimes they'll use something like the surrounding text, and you can sort of see and feel that association. Sometimes, they'll use page titles. Sometimes, they won't use anything, but they'll have weaker signals from those other areas of the page, that kind of thing.
If you are embedding images and you're linking back to yourself or you're getting links from somewhere or you're linking out to someone, you want to help them out, use good Alt attributes that describe the page that you're linking to. This is a great best practice just in general for screen readers and usability reasons. It's also good for search engines.
Then finally, number seven, no surprise, surrounding text can matter as well. Just as in this example where we said, "Hey, Portuguese cooks is mentioned right before the image," the engines may be using surrounding text of an anchor, particularly where the anchor itself doesn't have much value or context.
If something says, "Click here, you'll find some great information about Portuguese cooks," the engines might sort of glance around the page and look at the sentence, parse the paragraph, try and understand, "Hey, what do you think they're talking about here? What seems relevant?" This is one of the reasons why you can see that people who have earned not necessarily great anchor text can rank very well for keywords because it's often talked about. That topic is talked about when their website is talked about, and it becomes a brand association thing. It becomes a contextual association thing. This is a helpful thing to think about if you are earning links and you can't control the anchor text. Maybe, at least, you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link.
All right, everyone. I hope this edition of Whiteboard Friday has been helpful. I look forward to discussing more details about anchor text in the comments and hope to see you again all next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Happy New Year! Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Using Social Media Monitoring as an Inbound Marketing Channel – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Kenny Martin
In this week's special end of the year Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how to attract customers and accelerate our marketing efforts by using social media monitoring. Learning how to effectively build up relationships without spamming will be the key to your success in the social realm. We hope you had a wonderful 2011 and don't forget to leave your comments below.
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This is our special end of year edition. I hope all of you had a great holiday season and are about to have a great New Year's. It's been fantastic spending 2011 with you, and I cannot wait for 2012. It's going to be incredible.
Today I want to talk a little bit about using social media monitoring specifically as an inbound marketing channel, as a way to attract customers and to accelerate your marketing efforts in all sorts of ways. Let me talk briefly about some background on this so you understand where I'm coming from.
Let's imagine that you're Minted.com. They make great holiday cards – Geraldine, my wife, and I use them to do our holiday cards recently – and they do some branded stuff. So they have searches, keywords that come to them that are branded – things like minted, and minted cards, and minted notebooks, and custom photo cards from Minted. We think about those as being keywords in their brand wheelhouse, that are about their brand.
But then they also have lots of unbranded terms, things that they want to try and capture, definitely from an SEO perspective, but other perspectives as well. So these are things like people who want holiday photo cards, who want Christmas cards, Xmas cards, Hanukah cards, custom notebook. They sell notebooks and all sorts of other things. So all those product types of searches, those things that would get you into their funnel, maybe not their brand specifically, but all those sorts of keywords, we often think about them, at least in the world of SEO, as being exclusively from a search engine type in perspective. But there's a social perspective on this too, and that's what I want to cover in this Whiteboard Friday.
So you can image there are channels, right? So there are things like SEO and PPC. People search for these words, and we want to try to come up in the organic results and in the paid search results. But then there are also channels like Q&A and forums, and blog posted content where they're talking about these items. There are questions on a Q&A board. There are questions on a forum. There's a discussion happening. There's a blog post with content that's saying, "Here's the best custom notebooks and why I like each of these vendors," those types of things. Those are conversations they might want to be part of.
Then there are the very specific social mentions. When you think about this, think about doing a search on Twitter, probably the most common way that social mentions are thought about, doing a search on Twitter for either your brand name, for people who are talking about or mentioning the word "minted," and then people who are talking about or mentioning the words "Xmas cards", "Hanukah cards", "Christmas cards", "custom notebooks", "photo cards", "holiday cards." When people do those mentions on social networks, you can see them as a social media manager, as an inbound marketer, as an SEO. You can see where those people are mentioning them, who those people are, and then you have the potential to reach out to them, and that can present some powerful things.
So these social media monitoring tactics are what I want to cover specifically. I've got four here, but there's tons more that you can certainly imagine. It's a powerful and largely untapped channel, but it can be a little bit dangerous. I'll talk about that as well.
So first off, if you're monitoring these types of unbranded terms, this is a great way to identify and connect with influencers. What I mean by identify is also understand them. What I feel like a lot of people do when they get into marketing in a new channel or around a new topic, a new keyword, or a new product is that they don't even understand what the world looks like, what the Web looks like, from that perspective. People who are in this world who are talking about these on blogs and forums, who are tweeting about this stuff, who are experts in this field, who are journalists, who are consumers, you're not in their world yet, but this is a great way to learn who the influencers are and start to build up those relationships.
So a great way to do this, of course, is monitoring these types of things and looking for those actual retweets in the search box inside Twitter or Google+. You can do this with Google+ public mentions as well. But there are tools to do it too. FollowerWonk is one of my favorites. You could also use FindPeople on Plus, which has a database where you can literally search for bios and say, "Hey, who's writing about gifts or Xmas? Who's a blogger? Who's writing about photo cards? Who's writing about customized paper products? Who's writing about holiday gifts? Who is an expert on, for example, kids' stuff or kids' toys?" Or those things that are ancillarilly related. Ancillarilly is not a word, but I'm going to use it anyway.
So there are things around these worlds that might be connections. So this could be, "Oh, I want to find who the writers are for magazines. I want to find who is the media person at the 'Today Show. I want to find who it is that blogs regularly about gifts and lifestyle types of blogs." All those things are things that you can use, services like FollowerWonk or FindPeople on Plus to discover those influencers and learn more about the segment while you're at it. Now this is a very research intensive process, but it means that you will be so much more effective with the content that you produce, with how you market that content and how you target it, and with who you reach out to. If you've built connections, natural connections, I'm talking about Tweeting back and forth, sort of getting them to follow you or earning their trust, sharing good things with them over time, then you can sort of share more promotional stuff, like, "Hey, so and so @Ranfish, I wrote this blog post. I'm emailing you to see if you would maybe want to share it on Twitter. It seems like the kind of thing you usually like to tweet about." And I'll be like, "Oh sure, of course, I actually really like that piece. That was a great piece. I'm going to tweet it." I did that two times this morning from emails. Please don't all email me with things that you need me to tweet. That would get a little overwhelming. But if you have something hyper-relevant, sure.
You can also do things like reaching out directly, but be really careful here. I'm sure you've all seen this on Twitter. So the idea is that you see someone mention the word Xmas cards, and then you reach out to them via Twitter and send them an at reply even though you're not following them and you may not have a pre-existing relationship. Let me show you two ways to do this and why this can be super dangerous.
So here is my sample Twitter friend Mobit, and Mobit has tweeted, "Crap! Forget to get Xmas cards, need to do that tonight." "Hmm, excellent, I'm thinking of my evil ways in which I will market to him." If this is your attitude, you might be going and following this black line and tweeting back to him, at everyone, including Mobit, anyone who says the words "Xmas cards", "Here is a bland spammy marketing message." I see this all the time where I tweet a specific word, and then I'll get a reply and I'll look at it and go, "Oh, they're just trying to sell me something because I mentioned that word." My favorite example of this that's not super spammy, it used to be the case that if you tweeted "honey badger," the honey badger @honeybadger would reply with, "Don't care." Now that was cute and funny. It could get old because you could see thousands of tweets coming from this clearly bot account that was just tweeting, "Don't care."
But those types of messages, that's not going to work very well. Twitter is going to catch you out on it. Remember there is a little flag thing over here that people will click, and they'll flag your message for spam. They'll flag your account for spam. Twitter reviews those pretty quickly. They don't want their service filled up with this, which means that you need to do something that is creative, insightful, personalized, and authentic.
So for example, at Mobit, "If you need help, give me a shout. Also, here's a 20% off coupon." This is going to be an extremely different tweet than what I send to maybe somebody else who does that. If we're talking about Xmas cards and there are 50 mentions an hour of these and I'm sending tweets to all 50 of them, that's still going to look spammy and manipulative. But if there are two or three of them that are very specific and say, "I specifically forgot about Christmas cards. I need my Xmas cards. I need my Hanukah cards," whatever it is, then great. That is something where a customized, personalized message, and especially if you do something like follow them or check out their other tweets and say something relevant to them, recognize what part of the country they're in, "Oh, you're in Alaska. By the way, we still do free shipping to Alaska." "Wow, cool! You know who I am. You care about me. Your message is authentic. It's personalized. It's insightful. I'll receive it graciously and happily." But you have to be careful about this type of outreach. It can be a great way to attract customers, particularly in certain segments. It can be a great way even to share content or share links if you trying to get sort of mentioned or retweeted by someone, or if you're trying to get additional awareness or attention, not even necessarily someone directly, but it can be dangerous.
Number three, this one's a little less dangerous, but you still have to maintain all of those same attributes in mind for the messaging you do, which is reaching out privately. So I'll do this actually on occasion where I'll see a Twitter user or I'll see someone at Google+ and they'll mention something specific and I'll say, "You know what? I look at their bio and I see that they work at . . ." I saw this recently for someone who worked at a social media marketing agency here in Seattle, and I thought, "You know what? I would love to have someone from that agency look at some of the new products that we're building, and therefore maybe I can get them into the office and do a product review with the team. So I'm going to tweet back at them." Then I saw them out at an event, actually, and I got their business card and I emailed them.
So those types of relationship building are a great way to go, particularly if you're doing more of a one-to-one type of business development. This private thing, using DM, going out and digging up their email address from their website, from their LinkedIn profile, connecting on there, getting an introduction to someone, those are all perfectly legitimate ways, and they're a little less exposing you to the sort of dangers of being flagged as a spammer. But you can do this authentically, and you have to do this one authentically as well.
The fourth and final one that I'm going to talk about, which I like a tremendous amount, is finding content that's being referenced, right? So people are tweeting. Let me give you another example. Here's our friend Mobit again, and he says, "Oh, you know there were some great Xmas cards suggestions on LifeHacker today." "Hmm, LifeHacker, you say." I know what to do. I'm going to go over and I'm going to check out the site where these folks are mentioning, and I'm going to see what is that content? Does it mention me? If not, does it mention my competitors? Is it talking about the right stuff? Does it seem like it's in a field where I might potentially be able to contribute guest content, make a direct suggestion, "Hey, by the way, editors at LifeHacker, did you know Minted also offers this? We loved to be mentioned next time you guys do a roundup of customizable photo holiday cards." Cool, right? Maybe they'll pick it up, maybe they won't. If you do a few of those and you build those connections the right way, you can link in to those editors and journalists, those writers.
You can connect via comment marketing. By comment marketing I mean, again, leaving good comments on a consistent basis, finding the blogs you want to follow, doing it in an authentic way. Otherwise you can get into serious trouble. But getting familiar with those channels is a great way to discover opportunities for your content to reach additional audiences. It's also a fantastic way to see which content performs well, which is a question that a lot of people who do any kind of inbound marketing, SEO, social, blogging, whatever you're doing, you're trying to figure out what content's going to perform well. This is a great way to figure that out through social media monitoring. Of course, then you can go back and earn the links, the mentions, the press that you're seeking.
All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you had a fantastic 2011 and that your 2012 is just as good or better. I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Scripting SEO: 5 Panda-Fighting Tricks for Large Sites
Posted by Corey NorthcuttThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
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Tools, Twitter and a Ton of Opportunity
Posted by Corey EulasThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Ofte…
