Best Traffic Tips

Archive for November, 2009

Posted by jennita

Photo courtesy of Michael Dorausch

It has been a couple weeks since PubCon and yes, it’s taken me this long to recuperate! Bare with me here as I reminisce about my favorite tidbits over the 3 days of sessions. PubCon does an amazing job of putting together a schedule that covers a multitude of tracks and topics. Which usually means that I often end up with a case of "session envy." You know, when you’re sitting in a session and you start to see tweets about how great another session is. It doesn’t even mean that the one you’re in is bad, it’s just that you want to be in two places at once.

Many people were live blogging the event and obviously there have been quite a few recaps of PubCon as well. I realize I’m a little late to the game.   But, let’s get to the good stuff! While there were many great speakers and presentations there were a couple that stood out to me. What I was looking for were answers to questions that we often get either through comments on the blog or through Q & A. With that said, these are my favorite take-aways from PubCon 2009.

Day 1 – How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?

This was a great session, full of valuable information. The biggest takeaway for me, came from  Bruce Clay. He took the road of sticking to a very specific topic, image and video content and explained how to get them indexed.

Since these are topics that come up quite a bit in Q & A I was excited to get some specific information on interesting ways to index images and videos. Thanks to Virginia Nussey over at Bruce Clay sending me the actual presentation (woot!).

Case Study – Indexing Images

The first thing Bruce spoke about was a case study they did involving getting images with text indexed. Here are the steps they took:

• Take a newspaper article
• Scan it to create a jpg
• Include that image into a PDF
• Submit that PDF to Google
• Search for info in the article as a PDF and the article is found.

So what happened? Well the PDF was indexed AND the text from the image was also indexed. Take a look at this SERP.

The result above seems to only come up when using some data centers but not all. Also, the search query contains text directly from the article which is an image in the PDF. It shows up in the title and meta description. Pretty sweet eh?

Obviously this isn’t going to work for you in all cases, but it’s an interesting way of getting images indexed and could be useful in a number of scenarios.

Case Study – Indexing Video

Next, Bruce went through another case study where they got a video indexed. Here are the steps they took.

• Take a Video
• Run it through our processor
• Edit the text transcript and save with the image
• When playing the video, search for words
• Jump into the Video

You can see this most clearly at Google audio indexing in the Labs section. Do a search for "economy" then notice how it shows you where in the video the word "economy" is spoken. I can see this being the wave of the future. How awesome would it be to have your videos come up in a search for words that were spoken within the video. Yea, pretty cool.

What I really liked about this presentation was that the information was displayed as a case study. If you read SEOmoz often you know how much we like to test theories out and put them to action. And although indexing images and video in this way may not be new to everyone, it’s new to some people and could be a great way to enhance your sites.

Day 2 – SEO/SEM Tools

This was seriously one of my favorite sessions. The speakers (including Rand) had a ton of great information but the one that really stood out to me was Jim Boykin of We Build Pages. He gave away some really great tips but the one I liked the most had to do with how to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to take:

• Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Enter in the URL of your competitor’s sitemap
• check box for " Include other pages on my site linked from this URL"
• When you get results, Change "Match Type" to "Exact Match"to see actual searches and volume for specific phrases.

Obviously not only does this help with checking out which keywords your competitors are focused on, but it can also help you make sure you’re site is also focusing on the right keywords.

Day 3 – The Search Engine Smackdown

For me the third day was my favorite. I actually wanted to attend every session in the first slot. I ended up watching the first part of the Link Buying session and the second part of the site review with Matt Cutts. I have to admit also that I loved the fact that the PubCon team programmed Matt Cutts doing a site audit at the same time as the Link Buying session… pretty darn ingenious if you ask me! Rand posted information about the site review, so I wont go into detail but it was a great session.

Although I think the best part came after the session when Matt took to shaving Evan Fishkin’s head due to a bet they made while at the SEOmoz Werewolf party earlier in the week. And although that alone was pretty great, I loved the fact that while Matt was shaving Evan’s head, people were asking him questions and he was answering as if it were a regular Q & A. Here’s a short clip of the shaving!

Ok, ok back to the Search Engine Smackdown. I should admit that I debated whether I should head back to the hotel after a long 3 days or go to the final session, and I’m glad I went! These are the topics I found most interesting… and yes they’re all from Matt Cutts.

Google Social Search
Here’s the information straight from the site:

Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called "Results from people in your social circle."

To see even more social content you can click the "Show options" link at the top of the results page and then click on the "Social" link.

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about social search.

I can see myself using this quite a bit. Most of my job is about "social searches" in general,so this one is right up my alley! It was a fun find for me.

Testing for Speed

As Rand mentioned in his post, Google representatives have mentioned several times that page load time is important and Matt himself said at this session that although they haven’t used speed as a ranking factor in the past, that they’re thinking about adding it in the future. He gave some resources on how to check the speed and ways to make it faster.

• http://code.google.com/speed/ - Ways to clean up your site’s speed
• webpagetgest.org – Let’s you input a URL, select test location and other configuration options, then test!
• http://code.google.com/closure/ - a JavaScript compiler

Wrap it up

I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter you know quite well how I feel about Vegas. I really wish there was a good way to clone myself so I could attend multiple sessions at once. With up to 7 tracks going on at the same time, it’s difficult to pick one. In the end PubCon was a hit, and it was great to meet many of our SEOmoz members and see some old friends. See you again next year!

Kate Morris, Dana Lookadoo, Amanda Stewart, Jen Lopez, Kristy Bolsinger, Lyndsay Walker, Joanna Lord, Manda Otto
Thanks to Dana Lookadoo for all the great photos!

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You want to spread the word about your products and services. But you can’t build a business from your friends and neighbors. You need to reach people who don’t know you, and those people must trust you with their email address. How can you instill confidence in people who don’t know you?

• Explicitly tell your subscribers that their email address is safe with you. Prominently display on your web site a statement to the effect that you will not sell, rent, or share your email list, period. Tell them when they opt-in to your list, tell them again in your email messages, tell them as often as you can.

• Demonstrate your expertise. Offer your subscribers a free report to show them that you know what you are talking about. Provide them with helpful hints and guidelines that pertain to your products and services. Talk about the latest developments in your area of expertise. If your customers see you as someone who knows what he is doing and saying, they will learn to trust you.

• Overdeliver on your promises. Give your subscribers what you promise to them, and then some on top of that. Be consistent in the service you provide.

• Provide easy opt-out. Enable your list members to unsubscribe anytime they want. Tell them when they opt-in that they may unsubscribe at any time. Provide a link in every email message you send that allows them to get off of your list with one click of the mouse.

It is a privilege to send email to prospective clients. Once you are granted permission to send email to someone, don’t abuse that privilege. Respect the privacy of your list members, and they will learn to trust you and your products and services. Heck, they might even buy something.

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An interesting email found its way into my inbox today. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company has set up a standard reply to vendor-initiated emails or voicemails which request his time or information in pursuit of sales.

Unable to read, follow-up, or reply to the dozens of emails sent to him every week, the CEO created the standard reply (excerpts posted below) to prevent unsolicited follow-up emails and to try to provide some meaningful answers to the recipient.

Much like how TIVO has created a generation of consumers able to block advertising messages, other tools such as email filters and caller ID have created a generation of CEOs able to block out sales noise. Not wanting to ignore the messages that barraged him daily, the Fortune 500 CEO crafted a response which would spurn almost any vendor’s advances. The email was a little long, so I included just the highlights below:

The CEO Explains the Need for His Email Reply

“Please understand that I get dozens of these types of messages a week.  I simply do not have time to read them, dig into them, follow-up on them, or reply to them.  The most effective solution to this problem is for me to ignore the messages, which is what I usually do.  This, however, is unsatisfactory for you because you never hear back, and possibly unsatisfactory for me if indeed your product would be attractive.  So I have my email system send this reply back to let you know that your message was received.”

He Lists Several Ineffective Outbound Marketing Tactics

 “Similarly, I find the following things difficult to deal with, so please:

-    Do not send endless follow-ups.
-    Do not reach out to many of us on the team.
-    Do not try connect to me on some social networking site.  I get too many of those requests too.
-    Do not subscribe me to your newsletter.  (This will eventually get all email from your company blocked; sorry.)
-    Do not include attachments.
-    Do not embed HTML that contacts your website.”

Some of you might be thinking, “Wait, is connecting to influential individuals on a social network considered be an ineffective Inbound Marketing strategy?” That depends. Trying to connect to someone who has not solicited your friendship/connection can be just as interruptive as cold calling someone. You want to create content that draws influential people to you on social networks. Therefore, I can understand if this particular CEO finds endless friendship requests to be annoying.

Remember, social networking sites have different intimacy levels. On Twitter, someone can follow me, but I don’t necessarily have to follow them back. I assume that this CEO must be talking about a social networking site like LinkedIN or Facebook where adding someone as a friend requires a second step or action from the recipient.

His Advice: Use Inbound Marketing To Get Found Online

“Finally, a small comment.  As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you.  We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.
I apologize that I cannot be more responsive.   I do hope that this message is more helpful than no response at all.  Let me reiterate that this response has nothing to do with you or your company in particular, but is simply the only way I have to deal with the volume of requests other than to ignore them all.
Thank you for your understanding.”

As we draw closer to Thanksgiving, I can’t help but be thankful for the power of Inbound Marketing.  It’s so powerful a CEO of a Fortune 500 company (who is constantly blocking out messages that interrupt his work life) recommends it as the best way to grab his attention.  Online search, blogging and social media have profoundly altered the way business deals are done. Are your methods in touch with this new marketing reality?

Let this email be a friendly reminder to all of us that creating meaningful content such as whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts that “concretely describe solutions to problems” is a much more effective way to get found by your customers than sending an unsolicited sales message via email.

photo by avantard

Free Marketing Webinar: A CEO’s Guide to Internet Marketing – with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan

Learn how a modern CEO uses Inbound Marketing. Download the free webinar learn everything you need to know about how CEOs can measure marketing efforts, hire the right people, and communicate using social media.

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Posted by randfish

The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail - gives some stats:

…the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic

The truth is my research is still greatly understating the true size of the tail because:
• The Hitwise sample contains 10 million U.S. Internet users and a complete data set would uncover much larger portions of the long tail.
• The data set I used filtered out adult searches.
• I only looked at 3-months worth of data (which were some of the slower months for search engines).

To help put this in perspective, I made a few spiffy charts that can help to illustrate these points:

In this first chart, you can see a representation of Hitwise’s data from the four chunks Bill broke down.

In this next representation, I’m showing the classic "long tail" style curve, but color-coded to help show the various areas of keyword demand. Note that you could conceptually say that the 9,000 of the top 10,000 terms should technically fit into the chunky middle. Bill classified them thusly in his post, but I tend to think that at those demand levels, we’re still talking about "head" of the curve figures.

For both of these graphics, there’s a large, high-res version available by clicking the chart. You can find lots, lots more on our Free Charts page

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Today, I received further proof that social media is becoming even more sticky among businesses. The Wall Street Journal reports that major brands like IBM and Harrah’s are “sifting web chat for marketing inspiration” and channeling it back into their advertisements and website content. 

According to the Wall Street Journal article, IBM used web searches and social media tools like YouTube and Twitter to unearth what their customers were saying about their brands.  In the article, Jean-Philippe Maheu, chief digital officer at Ogilvy attributes real-time technology as a major factor to why big brands are monitoring social media conversations more frequently.

Harrah’s Entertainment has also been monitoring conversations happening about their casinos on review sites such as TripAdvisor; the feedback, provided by real travelers, has already been utilized to adjust Harrah’s site images and site copy.  Even though most of the Las Vegas Strip has fallen under economic hardship, Harrah’s has reported an increase in bookings online. The Wall Street Journal reports that after they updated their website with content and iconic images responding to what they heard on social networks, their profits jumped “by a double-digit percent.”

This should be very exciting news for any company currently watching  (and maybe even interacting with)  customers having conversations about their industry and brands online.  However, it should also be a call-to-action if you have yet to implement a daily social media regimen for your business. 

My advice is this: Don’t just focus on the negative things people are saying about you online. Companies tend to implement a social media strategy primarily for PR and crisis management.  Focus on the positive conversations and questions, too, and use them to make your product and website better. Harrah’s was able to really tune into the things that differentiated their brand from every other on the strip. Their listening skills won them more business and leads because they found a way to feed the conversations back into their pages and attract Las Vegas visitors to them.

Customers of HubSpot can use our social media tool to monitor conversations important to their brand and industry in real-time. We filter out the noise and point customers to conversations people are having based on keywords, competitors, and brand names that they’ve identified. 

Even if you’re not a customer of HubSpot, you can still start listening and feeding what you hear back into your content online.

Start Listening Today:  Examine Your Social Media Strategy Using the Following Questions

1. Do I know what words and phrases customers are using to describe my brand online?
2. Do I know what my users are saying about my competitor’s brands? Am I using this information to differentiate myself from my competitors?
3. Do my customers and prospects know where I’m at online? Do they know I’m watching and listening?
4. Do I have a 10-minute a day social media plan in place that helps me monitor my conversations and find out what people are saying about my brands across the web?
5. Do I have a way to compile and save all of the relevant information I’m reading and feed it back into my website?

 Video: How to Use Social Media to Attract More
Customers

Learn how to use social media to attract more customers and monitor the conversation. Download the free video and learn how to generate more business using social media.

 photo by sarajea

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

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Posted by randfish

I’m a big Google fan – my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I’ve even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this.

Here’s what Google themselves has to say on the matter:

You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page URL.

To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Your site on the web, click Links to your site.

Note: Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.

Here’s what Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) had to say in a video on the subject:

The short answer is that historically, we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because web search was the main part and we didn’t have a ton of servers for link colon queries and so, we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample. It’s a relatively small percentage. And I think that that’s a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone’s rankings.

Google themselves is telling us not to pay too much attention to the link command, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping folks. Let the myth busting commence.

Myth #1 – The Google Link Command Returns Accurate Numbers

Nope. Not even close. Google themselves say the numbers aren’t accurate and that they’re showing a small sub-sample. The numbers show this as well. Check your link counts with the Google link command vs. the number inside Google’s Webmaster Tools (when you verify your account, you’ll see them shown). Here’s the stats for SEOmoz, for example:

Google’s link command claims 1,590 links. Let’s see what Webmaster Tools says:

Hmm… 381,403 seems slightly larger than 1,590. In fact, the link command is showing me 0.4% of what Webmaster Tools says exists. Running this analysis on another few domains that we have access to in Webmaster Tools, I saw numbers ranging from 0.1% to 4.4% (meaning there’s not even any consistency between in the percentage of links from the two counts). 

Myth #2 – The Google Link Command Returns Important Links

Tragically, a long time ago (pre-2004), Google did show only important links via the link: command, which created the myth that exists to this day. In fact, the links shown in the link: command have no particular importance or relevance. They are truly a random sample, including links that are nofollowed, links from pages that have had PageRank penalties applied to them as well as links that do pass link juice and value.

Myth #3 – The Google Link Command Returns Links in Some Kind of Order

No one in SEO has been able to show any ordering of any kind in the Google link: command’s results. Important, well-known websites may be listed on page 2 or page 20 of the results, and it is likewise with spam, scrapers and low quality sites that Google’s likely not counting. In Site Explorer and the web results, Yahoo! appears to do some type of ordering, tending to show more important links, pages and sites before less important ones (though not with great consistency). Unfortunately, many SEOs suspect that, should Microsoft’s deal to power Yahoo! with Bing results go through, Yahoo! is unlikely to maintain their own web index (and thus, link, linkdomain and site explorer will be gone).

As exemplified above, Google appears to be very random indeed when showing link: results.

Myth #4 – The Google Link Command Returns a Numerically Representative Count of Links

This is possibly the myth that’s most disturbing of all, primarily because so many operators in the SEO field belive it and track the link: command count as a reliable, useful metric. Nothing could be further from the truth – and here’s some data to help back it up:

I collected the data above spur of the moment, so I won’t try to claim great statistical integrity. However, looking at Google’s link: command results, the best I can say is that Google has some relationship to the others within 1-2 orders of magnitude, though they may be directionally inaccurate much of the time as well. Just look at the NYTimes.com for example – Google claims they have 2/3rds the links that Salon.com has, yet Yahoo! and Linkscape agree that, in fact, NYTimes.com has 6X+ Salon.com’s link total.

These are not numbers you want to hang your hat (or any crucial business decisions) on.

Myth #5 – The Google Link Command Tracks Accurately Over Time

Unfortunately, I don’t have data points I can show, but our observations over time indicate that Google’s link count in Webmaster Tools might rise, along with the Yahoo! and Linkscape link counts, yet the Google link: command will show lower numbers. The reverse is sometimes also the case. Without directional consistency, even when compared against their own counts, it’s very hard to take the Google link: count seriously.

Myth #6 – The Google Link Command is Up to Date

Most SEOs & webmasters have noticed that the Google link: counts update infrequently, inconsistently and most often in correlation with toolbar PageRank updates (another data point I’ll need to takcle in a future post). These updates from Google occur every 2-10 months with little warning about when they’re coming or have happened. If you watch sites like <a href="http://www.seroundtable.com"SERoundtable closely, they’ll report many of these as they occur.

The next time someone tells you their Google link: command numbers as a metric for SEO, competitive analysis or anything else, make sure they read this post. Google’s not nearly as up-front with the information as they should be (honestly, removing the link command would save so much time and effort for poor site owners who get needlessly confused), but hopefully as a community, we can help build more awareness around this issue.

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