A Few Takeaways from the Big Boulder Conference on Social Media Data

Last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Big Boulder conference put on by GNIP in Boulder, Colorado.  Around 200 attendees joined together in the St. Julien Hotel to attend what was billed as the world's first social media data conference. GNIP, a company focused on aggregating and providing social data, assembled a great lineup of speakers, the majority of whom provide or consume social data. I enjoyed the conference and took the opportunity to learn more about social data that is now available to consumers, hear about the creative ways people are using such data, meet some great minds in the social media space, and enjoy the great food, beautiful scenery, sunny weather, and friendly vibes that are hallmarks of Boulder.

The Big Boulder presentations were mostly in a Q&A format with a few panels mixed in. I've pulled together some of the key themes that I observed from the sessions to share in this post. GNIP also posted some detailed summaries of the presentations on their blog. If anyone who attended or presented at the conference sees anything that needs to be added, please let me know!

Major social networks continue to invest in sharing their rich data to third parties, though in a measured way

Folks from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all presented at the conference in some form. All noted that they are continuing to develop their APIs to provide better access to their huge data sets, though there weren't any big announcement of specific new capabilities. 

Twitter confirmed its intention to continue sharing data from their firehose through a limited set of partners in all but a small number of cases where customers have unique needs. Their rationale for limiting access is that the vast quantity of data that comes through the firehose is too expensive for most companies to consume, store, and parse. It makes more sense for them to work through third parties who can help provide only the most relevant data to businesses looking for that data. They were asked whether they would be providing a location-based API, but they have no short-term plans to do so. They say that currently only 4% of Tweets are geocoded.

Facebook provides API access to a lot of valuable data, and states that they want to provide realtime insights to businesses. Howeve, they do not yet offer a firehose like Twitter. When asked about making more data from their social graph available, they noted that the biggest challenges they face are with managing privacy and in balancing syndication with standardization. If the language and methods for measurement are all different between sources, it gets hard for everyone to understand what the data means. Facebook said that they are looking for ideas from the community for new data to offer and some great use cases to show how it would be valuable.

LinkedIn didn't talk much about their API specifically, but presented interesting insights and use cases about how they are using that data to drive their business forward. I'll share a few of these insights  later on.

Beyond traditional social media, we are now seeing other sources of social data become available

A good percentage of the presentations at Big Boulder were from companies that are providing data that is social, but perhaps not from the traditional companies that come to mind when you think of social media data. Some were blog platforms, like Wordpress.com and Tumblr. Others were blog commenting platforms like Disqus, or forum-based like Vanilla Forums and Get Satisfaction. Formspring provides a forum for general discussions around specific questions, and GetGlue is a rich community and check-in service centered on TV, movies, and books. StockTwits was another, which curates stock data from Twitter and provides a layer of social information to inform investors beyond just the traditional data.

I was seriously impressed by the volume and variety of interesting data that is being collected, curated, and shared via APIs. 

One of the biggest challenges with social data tools and platforms is in providing actionable insights

A fascinating panel discussion brought together Zach Hofer-Shall (Forrester Research), Susan Etlinger (Altimeter Group), Nathan Gilliatt (Social Target), and Shawn Rogers (Enterprise Management Associates) to discuss emerging trends in analyzing social data. They discussed the challenges of integrating social data into enterprise organizations. 

The four panelists were in agreement on the majority of topics disucssed. The first is that social media data is most frequently brought into organizations by PR folks, but hardly used to its full extent, as PR is usually not focused on detailed quantitative analysis. It's used more at surface level to catch and engage with positive and negative press and to do "damage control". 

Another barrier discussed is that social data has not yet been integrated with BI teams at enterprises where the focus is mostly web analytics. At the enterprise level, there are challenges not just with siloed organizations, but siloed data. There a lots of different roles that benefit from social data insights and each has a different context. Integrating that data and offering it in ways that provide the most useful insights to those who need it is a challenge that plenty of companies have yet to surmount. 

The panelists also agreed that one of the biggest challenges with getting value out of social media software is not necessarily with analytics to understand how the data relates to a business, but rather in existing software's abilities to provide actionable insights. Though there are some pieces of this out there, the panel saw a lot of opportunity for social analytics software to really step up in this space. 

You can learn all sorts of interesting stuff from the enormous (and growing) public data set out there

There were a few insights that were shared throughout presentations, including:

From Martin Remy at Automatic (which runs Wordpress.com)

• Fashion bloggers are the most "chatty." Baseball, religion, and politics are also high on the chatty list. At the bottom of the list, interestingly, are advertising and social media. Tech falls in the middle
• Turkish speakers are most conversational, followed closely by Hebrew. Japanese and Korean speakers are some of the least chatty. 

From Yael Garten, Data Scientist at LinkedIn

• Yael shared a chart of growing vs. shrinking industries. Unsurprisingly, the newspapers industry shrinking most. The renewable industry was the fastest growing (by a bigger margin than I would have guessed).
• She shared a test of a hypotheses that people would be leaving the banking industry after the financial crisis. This turned out not to be the case. Lots of people left the banks at that time, but mostly ended up moving to different banks rather than finding new fields.
• We also learned that male CEO names tended to be short (or shortened), approachable, 1-sylable names, while female CEOs tended to have more classic names multi-syllable names. Short names were even more popular in sales, with names like Chip or Trey.

Spam in social data is a big focus for social media data sources

Spam in social data has become even more of an issue with people paying for data feeds. For example, if you are paying by the tweet for your Twitter data, you don't want to pay for the spammy tweets.

Given that notion, Twitter is working hard on combatting spam and noted that their spam team has grown to be one of the biggest teams at the company. Twitter combats spam through initial filtering, which would keep it out of the firehose feed, though they can't catch everything that way without risking pulling legitimate content, too. Therefore, some spam gets through the system initially and is pulled after the fact.

Ken Little, Director of Engineering for Tumblr, also talked about spam being a big priority. They try and shut down spammy looking registrations right out of the gate. Tumblr uses a simple 3rd party content analysis to identify some spam and have been are developing an in-house system that identifies spammy accounts based on behavioral analysis. Some people just don't use their accounts in ways consistent with your average human.

Verification of the sources of social content is a big problem yet to be solved, and critical for social media data use in public service

For most businesses, verification of the content and source of social data is important, but not critical. In one panel discussion, however, we learned about some fascinating uses of social data for the public interest that are providing insights, but struggle with the verification of social data sources.

Moeed Ahmad, Head of New Media at Al Jazeera Media Network, talked a fair bit about the challenges and need for data verification, especially for his news organization. Al Jazeera's charter is to provide voices to the voiceless. This proves a challenge in the regions they traditionally report on most, where media is generally state-run. Social media has proven to be a great way to hear directly from the the people and surface amazing stories and viewpoints that might never have been heard otherwise. The challenge with this, as with in any reporting, is to ensure that the information shared is correct and can be verified. To try and manage this, Al Jazeera Media added procedures to the usage of social data in reporting. This change was largely an issue of verifying as much as possible and setting context in the report itself. Conversely, Moeed talked also about using social channels for verification of information. He spoke of a particularly gruesome video that had been sent to Al Jazeera showing what was reported to be a recent atrocity. Unable to verify the video and story, he posted it on Twitter and quickly found out that the video was 3 years old, and was actually from a totally different country than suggested by the person who had submitted it. 

Katie Baucom, Geospatial Analyst at the Geospatial Intelligence Agency, has been working to use social data to aid in disaster response and in assessing the damage done by natural disasters. Her organization is traditionally focused only on satellite imagery, but can receive social data and photos far faster than the satellite images can be processed. Their process seems like an incredibly powerful use of social data, but verification of authenticity and location is critical in their context. They need to ensure that they are providing accurate data to ensure that disaster response is applied first where it is needed most. 

Rumi Chunara, instructor at Harvard Medical School, works on a project called Healthmap, which  seeks to discover and track the spread of infectious diseases in real-time using as many data sources as possible. Her challenge in this is determining fact from rumor in Tweets. To help solve this issue, they've been comparing information from social sources against trusted data from doctors on the ground. Her team is hoping to compare where the differences lie and model how they might be more accurately predictive using the social data. She also noted that Google Trends has been a great tool in finding outbreaks. For instance, when the flu hits an area, the searches for flu symptoms in certain geos increases noticeably.

Light engagements may be the key to building further engagment amongst lurkers

We heard this topic discussed from a good number of people in the blog, forum, and commenting space. One panel focused specifically on how people engage online. A rule of thumb that was generally substantiated was the 90-9-1 rule. 90% of blog or forum readers are passive lurkers, 9% engage lightly, and  1% of the readers create most of the content. Everyone in the panel seemed to agree that making light social engagements, such as likes, or thumbs up, or even smiley faces easy to engage with is the path toward starting to draw in more of that 90%. One of the reasons this is so important, beyond further engaging the readership, is that it further engages the bloggers, who in turn write more content.

If you are looking to build an entrepreneurial community, there are four principles to keep in mind

Brad Feld of Foundry Group led off day 2 of the conference with a quick talk about why Boulder has a thriving startup scene and shared his thoughts about principles to build an entrepreneurial community. His four points for a successful community are: 

1. The community must be lead by entrepreneurs. 
2. The community must take a long-term view. There will be good and bad times for business and entrepreneurship, so you need to take a look at the last 20 years to see the bigger future trends. 
3. Your community must be inclusive of anyone that wants to engage in the startup community in any way. 
4. There must be institutions that engage the entire stack of the startup community. TechStars and Startup Weekend are two great examples of this as they help bring mentorship, investors, and teachers together with entrepreneurs. 

Boulder, Colorado is a pretty cool town

Beyond putting on a great conference and pulling together some fascinating people, GNIP sought to show off their hometown of Boulder, Colorado. They definitely succeeded, starting with the conference hotel. We stayed at the St. Julien Hotel and Spa right off of Pearl Street where we enjoyed the great food and drink in the walkable neighborhood, and were amazed at the throngs of students, profs, techies, families, and aging hippies all hanging out late on a school night. 

To show how outdoorsy Boulder is, GNIP lined up a bunch of 'healthy' events for us to enjoy while there. Unfortunately I missed the morning yoga sessions at 6AM and a hike planned out at 6:30AM as sleep won out. However, Jamie and I made it out for the biking pub crawl after the close of the conference. GNIP sprung for a bunch of bikes from a local rental service that allows you to pickup bikes from standing bike racks and return them to any of their racks around the city when you are done. We all converged on a row of bikes just outside the hotel and cruised around the area, looking cool with our bright red bikes with big baskets on front. After a few pints and biking in 90+ degree heat, we were all feeling fine. A fun and unique way to close out a fun and uniqe conference.

 

Getting Started with Guest Posting - Whiteboard Friday

Hi, I'm Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting. I'm here at SEOmoz to do a Whiteboard Friday today. We're a 25 person online marketing company that does consulting services for various people through the industry. What I actually want to talk about is how you get started with guest posting. There's a lot that goes into it, and there have been some great articles on SEOmoz that really get into the details of some of the aspects of it. But I want to step back and take you from the top down to help you get started.

The first thing I want you to think about is the mindset. The mindset is really important. There's a lot of stuff out there, guest blogging services that offer you all kinds of "sounds almost too good to be true" type options. The reality is, for the most part, they are too good to be true. Done well and done right, this is hard work, but it can bring really good returns. What I'm going to do today, I'm really going to focus on the high-
end approach to guest posting and how you get posts that are really brand building in nature. So let's dig in a little bit further.

The first thing I want you to do is I want you to tap into your team knowledge. Get your key team members together. Get them in a conference room. Get them brainstorming. Where are the places you'd love to be covered in an article? Great place to start, because after all, some of them it might be possible.

Once you have that kind of list in your mind, the next thing to do is to actually go check and see if they take posts. They may or may not have a policy on their site. If they do, that's a great thing to look for and can be very helpful. But sometimes they take guest posts without actually ever having been quite so overt about it. You can basically take this query here, site:targetdomain.com, whatever it is, and then put "guest post" or
"guest contributor" or "guest author." You can try different phases, and see whether or not they've ever taken those kinds of guest contributions in the past. Great place to start. Hopefully that gets you off to a good start.

If that's not enough, you can actually go to next step, which is you can try some industry search terms. You can try things like, let's say you're in the Tupperware business. Tupperware and then guest post and you search on that in Google. That can be very helpful in potentially bringing targets up.

These kinds of queries tend to be very noisy. You can actually do the same thing with Twitter by the way. There is a tool that somebody posted up on SEOmoz recently which is good at this. But it does tend to be very noisy. You'll have to sift through a lot of stuff to find targets that you'll want to deal with, but it still is worthwhile to get started if you have to go that way.

The point of all this is you're looking for initial targets. Where the big win really comes in is when you start finding other prominent people in your industry space who are doing guest posts, because then you can follow their trails and see all the things they're doing. That's really the next step here that I want to lead you to.

Once you've found authors, first of all you'll want to assess their prominence, because there are probably going to be a lot of spammy operators out there in your space that are doing guest posts, and you really don't want to follow their trails and see everywhere they've posted because you're going to get in the same kind of trouble that they're eventually going to be in. But you can see where these authors have guest posted by taking the author name in double quotes, and then put "guest post" or "guest author" or "guest contributor," those various flavors. You can then see all the places where these people have posted in the past. Wonderful way to get a long list of targets and really get your campaign off to a powerful start. To me this is really the big payoff that you're looking for in terms of developing a good target list.

Once you have this good target list, the next thing you want to do is you want to evaluate the target quality. You want to start thinking about: Are these sites where we want to be seen? Certainly if one of your prominent competitors or a prominent pundit in the industry writes on that site, that's a very good sign. Do they have a good readership? Is there a lot of social activity that happens from what they do at the site?

Also the types of links allowed. It used to be when people did guest posts, it was all about those free, in context links with rich anchor text. I am telling you that strategy, which may still work for some people, is really a Titanic looking for an iceberg. So you really want to focus on how you find targets which are actually a little more restrictive. It's actually good if they allow outbound links in the body of the article. But if they're allowing you to stuff anchor text links to yourself in the body of the article, that's actually not good for you. The main thing you should expect when you're working with the right kinds of targets for guest posting is you're going to be getting attribution, byline level links, and that actually is the safest place to be in the long term for guest posting. It's the kind of policies that you're going to find on the most valuable sites anyway.

So those are my thoughts on guest posting for today. I've enjoyed doing this Whiteboard Friday for you. Have a good day.

How to Write Email to Get a Better Response Rate

A successful SEO campaign is the perfect combination of all strategies. Whether you're working with on-page optimization, content development, social media, or link building, all of these factors contain equal value. When it comes to picking the most difficult SEO strategy, I will always give my vote to link building as this part is one of the most difficult, boring ,and time consuming strategies you can implement.

A few days back, I shared a picture of the perfect bedroom for a link builder on Facebook:

Almost perfect, despite the coffee pot missing ;)

Yes, link building can be boring, tough, and time consuming. However, one person on the team can dive into link building and get their hands dirty to get the job done in order to produce effective and action-driven results for the business.

Many people use different tactics when it comes to link building. One of the famous and most effective techniques that almost every ethical SEO uses is to manually outreach to other webmasters and ask for a link. Although the rate of response can be low, implementing a few smart email writing tactics can actually increase the response rate.

In this post, I will discuss a few tactics that I have used in recent campaigns where I had to write good amount of manual email to a variety of influencers and bloggers to ask them for a link favor. I tried out a few different ideas and finally created a format that allowed me to write every email as personalized as possible, while saving a lot of my time.

Here I go!

Use catchy subject titles

The first section of an email everyone reads is the title. It is important to have a catchy title or else your email will soon be sent directly to the trash bin. Do not try to manipulate the reader by creating false title, but instead create a title that is interesting and captivating to act as a perfect lead-in for the valuable content of the email.

Some good examples of titles are:

Length of the email

This is an extremely important factor. Do not write a one-line email that clarifies nothing. You want to make sure your email's content delivers the intended actions and requests in a concise, yet inclusive, manner. Similarly, do not stuff the email with tons of unnecessary information. In either case, the recipient is likely to delete your message right away without even reading it (yeah, I can see you having a déjà-vu here).

A perfect email should have, more or less, two paragraphs that describe the solid reason for writing that email.

Use names

Not rocket science, but always a good reminder! Use the intended recipient's name while asking them for a favor, or do not expect them to reply back. The people you are writing to are busy just like you, and their to-do lists are already filled with tasks to accomplish. You better make your request sounds important, and that starts with using their name. How many times have you ignored emails addressed to 'Hello Webmaster,' or similar? Plenty.

Take a little step forward, do your research, search for their names, and use them! After all, it is all in the name!

Example:

The first paragraph

If you are writing an email of 100 words or more, it is important that your first paragraph should be appealing, smart, and engaging enough to encourage your reader to happily continue their journey through the end of the message. I've tried different formats and ideas for emails, but what stuck best with my campaign was to dedicate the entire first paragraph to the receiver.

This may sound like a lot of work, but checking the social profiles and doing some background on your recipient can tell you an enormous amount about a person. Ultimately, this will let you to talk to him or her more comfortably.

Example:

The second paragraph

Don't drag, just say it!

Now that you've hit the second paragraph, you've made it to the ground floor of your email. If you are going to drag your point out a little longer, then you will probably lose the interest of the recipient. Try to be direct in the second paragraph and let the reader know what you want from him or her. Try to explain your objective in few lines and move towards the end of your note.

Example:

The ending note

Now that you have done your job in describing your objective behind the email, it is time to sum it up nicely in a courteous way.

Why I prefer this format

I've been working on improving my emails for quite some time now, and this pitch and format has worked for me almost every time. Here are a few reasons why I think this email format is sure to get you a better rate of response:

• You are pushing the limit of personalization, so you are leaving less space for the recipient to think about ignoring the email.
• This format is not short enough to look lousy, but not lengthy enough to bore or overwhelm the reader.
• Emails that contain a personal touch from the start of the title through the end of the note are set up for a reply.
• The email contains no dragging content, so there is less of a chance that the reader will get frustrated while reading.
• The first paragraph is powerful and dedicated to receiver, which makes them happy and encourages them to read the email through the end.

Obviously the rate of response is not likely to be 100 percent, but I have found that using this format increases the rate of response for different niches.

If you have any other formatting ideas or suggestions, I would love to hear them! Please share your views in the comment section.

About the Author:

Moosa Hemani is a SEO strategist and writes about SEO and related stuff on different blogs. He recently started an SEO Blog where he shares his opinions about SEO, search engines, social, and inbound.

Which Page is Canonical?

It sounds like an easy question, doesn't it? While we hear a lot about duplicate content since the Panda update(s), I'm amazed at how many people are still confused by a much more fundamental question ' which URL for any given page is the canonical URL? While the idea of a canonical URL is simple enough, finding it for a large, data-driven site isn't always so easy. This post will guide you through the process with some common cases that I see every week.

Before we dive in, let's cover the biggest misunderstanding that people have about 'pages' on their websites. When we think of a page, we often think of a physical file containing code (whether it's static HTML or script, like a PHP file). To a crawler, a page is any unique URL that it finds. One file could theoretically generate thousands of unique URLs, and every one of those is potentially a 'page' in Google's eyes.

It's easy to smile and nod and all agree that we understand, but let's put it to the test. In each of the following scenarios, how many pages does Google see?

(A) 'Static' Site

• www.example.com/
• www.example.com/store
• www.example.com/about
• www.example.com/contact

(B) PHP-based Site

• www.example.com/index.php
• www.example.com/store.php
• www.example.com/about.php
• www.example.com/contact.php

(C) Single-template Site

• www.example.com/index.php?page=home
• www.example.com/index.php?page=store
• www.example.com/index.php?page=about
• www.example.com/index.php?page=contact

The answer is (A) 4, (B) 4, and (C) 4. In Google's eyes, it doesn't matter whether the pages have extensions ('.php'), the home-page is at the root ('/') or at index.php, or even if every page is being driven off of one physical template. There are four unique URLs, and that means there are four pages. If Google can crawl them all, they'll all be indexed (usually).

Let's dive right into a few examples. Please note: these are just examples. I'm not recommending any of the URL structures in this post as ideal ' I'm just trying to help you determine the correct canonical URL for any given situation.

I'll start with an easy one. Many sites still use URL parameters to track visitor sessions or links from affiliates. No matter what the parameter is called or which purpose it's used for, it creates a duplicate for every individual visitor or affiliate. Here are a few examples:

1. www.example.com/store.php?session=1234
2. www.example.com/store.php?affiliate=5678
3. www.example.com/store.php?product=1234&affiliate=5678

In the first two examples, the session and affiliate ID create a copy, in essence, of the main store page. In both of these cases, the proper canonical URL is simply:

• www.example.com/store.php

The last example is a bit trickier. There, we also have a 'product=' parameter that drives the product being displayed. This parameter is essential ' it determines the actual content of the page. So, only the 'affiliate=' parameter should be stripped out, and the canonical URL is:

• www.example.com/store.php?product=1234

This is just one of many cases where the canonical URL is NOT the root template or the URL with no parameters. Canonical URLs aren't always short or pretty ' many canonical URLs will have parameters. Again, I'm not arguing that this structure is ideal. I'm just saying that the canonical URL in this case would have to include the 'product=' parameter.

Unfortunately, the word 'dynamic' gets thrown around a little too freely ' for the purposes of this blog post, I mean any URLs that pass variables to generate unique content. Those variables could look like traditional URL parameters or be embedded as 'folders'.

A good example of the kind of URLs I'm talking about are blog post URLs. Take these four:

1. www.example.com/blog/1234
2. www.example.com/blog.php?id=1234
3. www.example.com/blog.php?id=1234&comments=on
4. www.example.com/blog/20120626

Again, it doesn't matter whether the URLS have parameters or hide those parameters as virtual folders. All of these URLs use a unique value (either an ID or date) to generate a specific blog post. So what's the canonical URL here? Obviously, if you canonicalize to '/blog', you're going to reduce your entire blog to one page. It's a bit of a trick question, because the canonical URL could actually be something like this:

• www.example.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post

This is why we have such a hard time detecting the proper canonical URLs with automated tools ' it really takes a deep knowledge of a site's architecture and the builder's intent. Don't make assumptions based on the URL structure. You have to understand your architecture and crawl paths. If you just start stripping off URL parameters, you could cause an SEO disaster.

It might seem strange to put the home page third, but the truth is that the first two cases were probably easier. Part of the problem is that home pages naturally spin out a lot of variations:

1. www.example.com
2. www.example.com/
3. www.example.com/default.html
4. www.example.com/index.php
5. www.example.com/index.php?page=about

Add in complications like secure pages (https:), and you can end up multiplying all of these variants. While this is technically true of any page, the problem tends to be more common for the home page, since it's usually the most linked-to page (both internally and from external sites) by a large margin.

In most cases, the technically correct home-page URL is:

• http://www.example.com/

'but there are exceptions (such as if you secure your entire site). I don't see the trailing slash ('/') causing a ton of problems on home pages these days, since most browsers and crawlers add it automatically, but I think it's still a best practice to use it.

Another common exception is if your site automatically redirects to another version of the home-page ' ASP is notorious about this, and often lands visitors and bots at 'index.aspx' or a similar page. While that situation isn't ideal, you don't want to cross signals. If the redirect is necessary, then the target of that redirect (i.e. the 'index.aspx' URL) should be your canonical URL.

Finally, be very careful about situation #5 ' in that case, as I discussed in the first section of this post, the 'index.php' code template is actually driving other pages with unique content. Canonicalizing that to the root or to 'index.php' could collapse your site to one page in the Google index. That particular scenario is rare these days, but some CMS systems still use it.

In some ways, product pages are a lot like the blog-post pages in Case #2, except moreso. You can naturally end up with a lot of variations on an e-commerce site, including:

1. www.example.com/store.php?id=1234
2. www.example.com/store/1234
3. www.example.com/store/this-is-a-product
4. www.example.com/store.php?id=1234&currency=us
5. www.example.com/store/1234/red
6. www.example.com/store/1234/large

If you have a URL like #3, then that's going to be your canonical URL for the product in most cases (especially #1-#3). If you don't, then work up the list. In other words, if you have #3, use it; if not, use #2; if not #2, use #1. You have to work with the structure you have.

URLs #4-#6 are a bit trickier. Something like the currency selector in #4 can be very complicated and depends on how those selections are implemented (user selection vs. IP-based geo-location, for example). For Google's purposes, you would typically want them to use the dominant price for the site's audience and canonical to the main product URL (#1-#3, depending on the site architecture). Indexing every price variant, unless you have multiple domains, is just going to make your content look thinner.

With #5 and #6, the URL indicates a product variant, let's say a T-shirt that comes in different colors and sizes. This situation depends a lot on the structure and scope of the content. Technically, your T-shirt in red/large is unique, and yet that page could look 'thin' in Google's eyes. If you have a variant or two for a handful of products, it's no big deal. If every product has 50 possible combinations, then I think you need to seriously consider canonicalization.

Now, the ugliest case of them all ' internal search pages. This is a double-edged sword, since Google isn't a fan of search-within-search (their results landing on your results) in general and these pages tend to spin out of control. Here are some examples:

1. www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234
2. www.example.com/search/this-is-a-topic
3. www.example.com/topic
4. www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2
5. www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2&sort=desc
6. www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2&filter=price

The list, unfortunately, could go on and on. While it's natural to think that the canonical version should be #1-#3 (depending on your URL structure, just like in Case #4), the trouble is pagination. Pages 2 and beyond of your topic search may appear thin, in some cases, but they return unique results and aren't technically duplicates. Google's solutions have changed over time, and their advice can be frustrating, but they currently say to use the rel=prev/next tags. Put simply, these tags tell Google that the pages are part of a series.

In cases like #5-#6, Google recommends you use rel=prev/next for the pagination but then a canonical tag for the '&page=2' version (to collapse the sorts and filters). Implementing this properly is very complicated and well beyond the scope of this post, but the main point is that you should not canonicalize all of your search pages to page 1. Adam Audette has an excellent post on pagination that demonstrates just how tricky this topic is.

Finally, an important reminder ' the most important canonical signal is usually your internal links. If you use the canonical tag to point to one version of a URL, but then every internal link uses a different version, you're sending a mixed signal and using the tag as a band-aid. The canonical URL should actually be canonical in practice ' use it consistently. If you're an outside SEO coming into a new site, make sure you understand the crawl paths first, before you go and add a bunch of tags. Don't create a mess on top of a mess.

Headsmacking Tip #21: Write Better Headlines Than Anyone Else

This tactic is so simple and obvious, it's probably illegal somewhere.

Every day, the web produces millions of pieces of content. Several thousand are almost certainly of interest to folks in your niche - those who might be reading your blog or sharing the content you produce. Creating unique stories requires creativity, research and time that many in the field don't have. But... writing the best piece, or even just a decent piece of content about an interesting topic and giving it a fantastic headline? Well, let's just say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but this one costs just pennies.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Get Informed

• Follow the right accounts of Twitter for your niche (those that share a lot of good stuff)
• Set up some smart Google Alerts (particularly "news" and "blog" alerts)
• Subsrcibe to Google News' subsections if there's an appropriate one
• Use aggregation services like Reddit's subreddits, PopURLs, Topsy, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Metafilter, Alltop, etc.

E.g. The other day I found a research paper from Cambridge (via Reddit) on how negative thinking adversely impacts problem-solving ability.

Step 2: Choose the Best Pieces Each Day/Week

• Find stories that have high overlap with your audience's interests
• Don't exclude things that aren't "on topic!" Your goal isn't to only talk about your exact niche; it's to provide value to those who might be potential customers (big difference, probably deserving of its own blog post and illustration at some point)

E.g. That research paper had been written up in some small press pieces (as seen via this Google News query), but had yet to receive any major writeups, suggesting it's a perfect target.

Step 3: Rewrite the Headline Phenomenally Well

• Get two solid writers in a room and have them brainstorm 10 ideas and angles for the headline
• Have those two folks hash through and come up with the top three
• Share with a wider group and get feedback about which will earn a click
• OR if you have time, you can A/B test by sending an email to a small group with click tracking on each one and see which performs best (make sure to control for or randomize position in the email, as the first link often gets the click)

E.g. "Stay Away from Negative Thoughts to Improve Problem-Solving Ability" could be transformed into headlines like "Scientific research suggests haters really are harming your productivity," or "Is distraction a better problem-solving technique than deep thought?"

Step 4: Cover the Story from Your Angle

• Relate the story back to your audience, but cover it accurately and be sure to cite your sources (linking out to these folks can have positive benefits all its own from trackbacks, traffic driven, future reciprocity, etc)
• Include a graphic or image if at all possible (but stay far, far away from most stock imagery)
• If possible, gather input from folks in your field via social channels or email; a few well-placed quotes can help the reach get wider and creates incentivized sharers

E.g. If I were writing for the marketing world, I might take an angle focusing on what gets marketers stuck in ruts, provide suggestions for distraction and draw on some of my own experiences (like those frequent ideas in the shower moments).

Many folks will presume this only works for news-focused sites or news-focused content. False! You can relate news and events to nearly anything you desire and make it function with the brand and voice you're trying to craft. E.g. "How the Facebook IPO Will Change Commuting Patterns in the Bay Area," "Will Rising Sea Levels Affect Your Favorite Beach Getaway?" "Dental Implants May Be a Thing of the Past Thanks to Gene Therapy," "The Privatization of Space Flight Will Come at a Cost for Floridian Home Owners." I'm not suggesting any of these are particularly excellent, but hopefully you can imagine how to extend the concept of headline-writing into your field.

p.s. If you're looking for some headline advice, I particularly liked this piece on Why Gawker's Writing Better Headlines Than the Rest of the Web and this section on Copyblogger.

The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

You are missing out on extra sales! So, my awesome team at SEOgadget have crafted up a handy infographic for you on how get started in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO, and that's "optimisation" over here in the UK) to get the best ROI from your hard earned traffic. 

We've developed and applied this methodology to help struggling businesses out of financially difficult situations all the way to adding hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue, per day, to become some of our largest clients.

We believe there are two paths to Conversion Rate Optimization. When we see companies fail in CRO, it's because they've adopted random testing, guesswork, 'best practice' changes and most fundamentally, they've chosen to avoid proper testing. We call this the bad path (queue Darth Vader's Death March Theme').

To get good at driving real change, you've got to define a CRO methodology. The real trick to improving your conversion is pretty simple: identify, and target the core barriers to conversion and then, scientifically test the changes. This is the good path (queue The Star Wars Force Theme)  and the path that we advocate for all inbound marketers to follow'

Here's A Spiffy Step-by-Step Infographic

Check out our beautiful step-by-step guide in glorious technicolor. Would you like to see it in even more super-glorious HTML-O-Vision?

Check Out The Full Guide in HTML Here!

Embed this infographic on your site

<a data-cke-saved-href="https://seogadget.co.uk/conversion-rate-optimisation/" href="https://seogadget.co.uk/conversion-rate-optimisation/"><img data-cke-saved-src="http://cdnext.seomoz.org/1340399351_2d1692d14db762fffc739ecb426a5b4f.jpg" src="http://cdnext.seomoz.org/1340399351_2d1692d14db762fffc739ecb426a5b4f.jpg" alt="The SEOGadget guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation - Infographic" title="The SEOGadget guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation - Infographic" width="630" /></a><br/><a data-cke-saved-href="http://seogadget.co.uk/conversion-rate-optimisation/" href="http://seogadget.co.uk/conversion-rate-optimisation/">A CRO infographic by SEOgadget.co.uk</a>, read the <a data-cke-saved-href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seogadget-guide-conversion-rate-optimization" href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seogadget-guide-conversion-rate-optimization">full guide on SEOmoz</a>

So, What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Just think of CRO as detective work. It's a lot like using a fine comb to pick off the weak points in your site's conversion funnel, while building on its strengths. At the heart of conversion rate optimization is the notion of removing barriers to conversion. These are the forces stopping your site from converting visitors into sales.

Barriers to conversion can include usability errors, weak persuasive techniques and often, page relevancy issues. By learning about your customer's objections ' 'barriers to conversion' you're addressing the real reasons why people don't convert. The most important part: CRO is a scientific process of diagnosis, hypothesis and testing. Why bother guessing when there are tools to really help you learn about your customers?

Why doesn't guesswork, work?

Let's say you own a store on the high street. You're keen to increase your sales, so you paint the front door a different colour. That'll improve things, right? Of course not! You're not addressing the real reasons why customers aren't buying your stuff.

The same applies to websites, changing the colour of your buttons will have no effect if people find your website lacking in credibility. Targeting the root cause with security logos and social proof (for example, reviews, accreditations, and association) is a much better solution.

So, here's how we do it at the GadgetPlex:

Step 1 ' Set up Funnels

Setup your funnels and analyse the points where your users enter, until the point they exit. Try to identify the 'missing links' or barriers to conversion. Find out where they abandon and create benchmarks for improvement. Tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture and Kissmetrics are great for creating conversion funnels. If you rely on phone conversions then tracking phone calls is pretty important. Tools such as Adinsight and Mongoose Metrics are pretty comprehensive at phone tracking.

Step 2 ' Analytics

Find out what's actually happening when people land on your site, analyse what they do, what keywords they discovered you for and where they land. Obviously, tools such as Google Analytics are great at telling you this, but think about digging deeper. What browsers are your visitors using? What screen resolutions are most popular?

Usability tools such as ClickTale are also great for funnels and their form analytics reveal where users drop off along your forms. CrazyEgg is another simple and effective tool that we use for click density analysis. Usability testing tools such as Usertesting and Whatusersdo are a great way to see videos of people using your site and where they hit conversion barriers. Ethnio is handy at recruiting your own site visitors to participate in usability tasks.

Competitive data tools such as Hitwise and comScore can be really useful but come at a cost.

Step 3 - Barriers

To identify barriers to conversion, you've got to build up a profile of people's objections and opinions.

Tools such as Kissinsights (Bought out by Catchfree, who are awesome), Pop-Survey, Kampyle are really good for page level surveys and pretty simple to setup. Live chat tools such Olark and LivePerson are useful for dealing with user problems instantly. Other survey tools such as 4Q survey, Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are really useful at discovering what your users are saying.

When it comes to using these tools we've found that all you really need is one question. Allow users to really express themselves by asking them an open-ended question. Acquire their email address (optional) for those that want their feedback to be responded to. Collecting an email address and promising a follow up really improves response rates, which allows you solve any objections early on.

Step 4 ' Go Offline

If we know our target then the objective becomes easier. Study your website and understand your customers.

Speak to sales staff to learn the likely barriers they face when they sell and use the site. Your sales team deal with customers every day and uncover objections and seek to solve them in order to close the deal. The first time we did this we were surprised at just how useful this can be for exposing problems on your site.

Become a secret shopper and create scenarios i.e. rude customer vs. extremely polite vs. technically challenging - test how your staff deal with each scenario.

Finally, try actually phoning your own customer service number and see what happens. Test your customer services aggressively, as they can be the difference between retention and people going to your competitors. A 5% increase in retention can have an uplift of around 25 ' 85% in profitability (Treytl 2002).

Step 5 ' Prospect for Missing Links

It's all about wheeling and dealing, discovering those hidden gems within your company and using them to grow sales.

When you apply for a job and have to send a CV or fill out an application, the employer knows nothing about you other than what is on that piece of paper or application (unless they've checked you out on Facebook). If you don't sell yourself and mention all of your achievements, they won't easily learn about you. The same rule applies for websites.

If you have loads of testimonials and expert reviews but don't shout about it, then how will your potential customers know? Treat your website users like they're the employer and impress them, tell them why they should buy, making the value proposition crystal clear.

Study your website carefully and consider what you're missing. For example, showing expert reviews, customer reviews, testimonials, or even taking the time to build a community (just look at SEOmoz for inspiration).

Prospecting is really about selling your site to your users and using clever mechanisms to grow conversion rate and sales.

Step 6 ' Strengthen Average Order Value (AOV)

There are so many ways to strengthen your AOV, which Fabian covered beautifully in this blog post.

As an AOV strategy, bundles work amazingly and it doesn't even matter if you're not strictly a retailer. Look at Unbounce for inspiration. They offer conversion bundles on their products joined with offerings from other companies which is a clever technique to offer a cost saving and acquire additional sales.

 (Unbounce use 'conversion bundles' as way to boost AOV and get more leads)

SEOmoz have a Pro Perks store (check it out).

Not all competition is competition, strategic partnerships can be a great way to grow and gain maximum exposure especially for start-ups.

Step 7 ' Wireframe the Solutions

As soon as you've got a plan, list and prioritise the main conversion killers and derive solutions on how to fix it and increase conversion.

We use tools such as Balsamiq and Cacoo to wireframe the solutions and then prepare hypotheses for testing. Test scientifically, the most important thing to take away from testing is to learn what works and what doesn't and to keep building structurally to increase conversion rate. No guesswork!

Step 8 - Testing

'One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions' - Admiral Grace Hopper (Wikipedia)

We love this quote because it really captures what testing is all about, forget about guesswork, opinion and egos (think: HIPPO) and instead, test your variations accurately.

We primarily use Google Website Optimiser (which is now becoming content experiments) and Visual Website Optimiser. There's loads of split testing and multivariate software. But remember: it's not the testing tool that increases your conversion it's the ideas you put into it.

What we've learnt is don't test too many things, instead create a clear structured hypothesis. Attach CrazyEgg or ClickTale to your variations to monitor the difference in click density and interaction between your pages. If you're optimising forms then applying ClickTale to your variation pages is really useful.

Try running page level surveys on the variations and original page, ask the same question, and monitor the difference. Always test your variations in multiple browsers. Browsershots are pretty good for this. For mobile testing we use Mobile Moxie's excellent phone emulator, which is really handy at testing across different phone operating systems and platforms.

Step 9 - Review

Review your test, analyse the analytics, click density and form analytics (ClickTale) and compare it to the original page, check the difference.

Tracking AOV and revenue is so important when testing. Structure your follow up tests and build on your success, or failure. Failure doesn't always mean the test was wrong, it means the original is doing something really well, so learn and iterate. Apply your winning test candidates to other pages on the site (we always like to test these usually via a multi-page multivariate test), and then consider applying your learnings to other media channels such as magazines, adverts and brochure ware.

Step 10 ' Rinse & Repeat

Repeat the process and keep building successful tests. Each time you test and find winning variations, you build up a portfolio of increases. Conversion rate optimization is an iterative process, which builds on the success of the previous test.

Follow this methodology and it will be extremely hard not to increase your site conversion. That's how to get more happy customers and more happy customers equals more bang for your buck.

I hope you enjoyed our epic guide! Do check out the full HTML version of our infographic - and, in the meantime I'd love to hear how you're working CRO into the inbound marketing process! I'd like to say a special thanks to Fabian for his hard work on making sure this post happened, follow him on Twitter here!

The Guide to Developing a Content Strategy for "Boring" Industries

There have been multiple articles that have discussed the value and opportunities that content marketing brings to SEO - from organically building external links and ranking for more long tail keywords, to establishing a community and building brand awareness. As the SEO industry slowly moves away from manual linkbuilding and adapts a more long-term and forward-thinking approach (whether it be forced as a result of recent aggressive Google algorithm updates or because as an industry, we're starting to seek a sustainable methodology to establish authority), the challenge is in figuring out how to set up a proper framework that would help our community develop a content strategy for all websites. 

Image courtesy of SEOmoz  

The goal of this post is to show the SEO community how to start thinking about how to develop a cohesive and integrated long-term content strategy (and not just one-off linkbait pieces). It won't be easy and definitely will not result in immediate returns, but if the goal is to build a sustainable and authoritative site in the long-term, the upfront costs can be justified. To show you the steps of how to create a content strategy, I've chosen what might be a seemingly "boring" industry (and an industry I knew very little about prior to writing this post), tires, to demonstrate how a content strategy is possible for all industries and all sites, and how a little research can go a long way. 

Image courtesy of Distilled

Step 1: Asking the Right Questions (Learning About the Industry)

As an industry, we already have a very good idea of how people in general use the Internet. However, if I were to do a content strategy specifically tailored around the tire industry, I would want to understand how the core demographic for tires is utilizing the Internet. 

For example, the type of questions we want to learn about tire shoppers could be:

• How do tire shoppers use the Internet?
• Where do they spend their time online?
• Who is considered an influencer in the tire industry?

We also want to understand what the industry landscape looks like. 

• Who are your business competitors? Who are your online competitors? 
• What currently makes up your biggest market? What markets are out there that you might not have previously targeted? Examples include:
  • Car aficionados 
  • Car manufacturers
  • General consumers 
  • Automobile repair/service shops

And more about your specific tire company.

• What story do you have? What is your company background?
• Why should an individual looking to purchase a tire choose you? What is your unique value proposition? 

As well as, what does your current customer base look like?

• Are they advocates and influencers for your brand?
• Are they one-time/casual shoppers or repeat customers?
• Are they price-focused or are they service-oriented?

All this information helps you as an SEO garner a much deeper understanding about the tire business, which will be fundamentally important in determining the type of content to produce. 

Following the background research on the tire industry, it's also worth speaking directly to individuals who you know are very knowledgeable about the tire industry - their insight can ultimately help you develop different personas to target.  Let's say hypothetically, you own a tire company and through this research realized that street racers was a target demographic you could develop content for. Through the research, you've learned that the majority of street racers are:

• Upper middle class
• Lives in suburbia 
• Ages 16-25
• Male

You want to start locating and having conversations with people who fit this demographic or, at the very least, have access and knowledge about this demographic. This will provide you with the type of insight that will help you develop content street racers would be interested in or will provide you with the opportunity to interact and potentially, influence street racers. 

Step 2: Compiling the Data (Analysis of the Industry)

The second element of the project requires conducting an in-depth competitive analysis on the competitors and seek answers to the following questions:

• What types of backlinks has the site received? What types of relationships have these sites built? 
• Is there one specific competitor who is dominating the industry? If so, spend more effort and time taking a deeper analysis of the site, its content, and its community. (This is especially apparent in the tire industry).  
• What types of content has the site produced that have performed well?
• Are there are any content holes based on a culmination from the market research you've already compiled about the industry and the personas that you want to target? 

It's also worth ensuring that your own site's metrics and analytics tracking is properly set up, which can be used to measure growth, traffic, and conversions.

Tire Industry Example: 

For instance, in the tire industry, it's clear that the dominant player in the industry is Tire Rack. 

The site has received links from high-authority sites like Car and Driver, the Webby Awards, ABC News, and Popular Mechanics. 

What has been Tire Rack's competitive advantage? 

Many of these articles talk about Tire Rack's video driving tests. For example, their Winter/Snow vs. All-Season vs. Summer Tires video has generated over 440,000 views. Their YouTube channel has over 1,000+ subscribers and over 2 million views. 

They also have a back story, an army veteran who opened up shop in 1979 and made customer service/educating consumers his number one priority. The family-owned business now has 3 generations working at the shop. On top of it all, their price points are competitive with all major tire retailers. 

However, it appears that the site targets the general consumer, meaning there is opportunity for other tire sites to develop content around different target personas, such as speed racers or truckers to name a few. 

Step 3: Defining the Target Audiences and Identifying Project Goals

Using all of the above research, determine how you would differentiate your site from your competitors.

• Is it based on your target personas?
• Is it based on the type of content you will produce?
• Is it based on your brand voice? 

Image Courtesy of SEOmoz

At the same time, you also must consider the internal resources that you have access to - what type of content could you more easily create based on the resources you have available? The reality is that often times, dependencies are involved - whether it be departmental approval for different forms of content or budget constraints. These all need to be taken into consideration when compiling a long-term content strategy. 

Finally, define your goals - is it to develop content for your target audience? The integration of different marketing teams to build value?  Develop a deeper understanding of your target audience? Become an authority in a specific space? All of the above?

What is the vision for investing this much effort/budget/time?

Tire Industry Example:

Let's say I wanted to target the street racer demographic. Based on my understanding of the target demographic, street racers would likely be interested in:

Image courtesy of YouTube

• Racing videos - burnouts, drifting, traction tests
• Comparison charts on different racing tires
• Magazines - for tuners and racers 
• Street racing forums

I've included links to the best examples I could find. Clearly videos are a huge hit and have an enormous audience, but there isn't a single channel dominating street racing videos. The street racing forum is relatively active and I honestly could not find good examples of comparison charts on different racing tires or even a single linkworthy site of street racing resources. Clearly, there is an opportunity for a company who might be interested in targeting the street racing demographic to become the online authority of street racing. 

Step 4: Prospecting Influencers / Determining Shareability 

Before investing the time and budget to create a piece of content, first properly outreach and make sure that there is an audience who is willing to share this piece of content. Ideally this would be to sites that have the same audience/personas that you are trying to target. Take a look at social media for potential engagement opportunities (please read and apply Wil Reynold's "Stalking for Links"), search industry news, and reading the content that your competitors are creating. 

Tire Industry Example: 

If I were targeting the street racer demographic, I'd be very involved on the street racer forum, as well as other car forums that are active. Though this is a long-term strategy, ultimately, building relationships with these individuals is worthwhile. 

Image courtesy of Honda-Tech

I'd also build relationships with street racers who have a large following on Twitter for the very same reason. 

Image Courtesy of Followerwonk

Through investing in these relationships, not only will you be able to build relationships with influencers, you'll also gain a big picture understanding of the common questions street racers ask and thus, have insider knowledge of the type of content that will prove to be successful in helping to build your own following. 

Step 5: Creating the Content

Now that we've conducted the market research for our industry, identified target personas, determined the type of content we could create, and initiated relationships with potential prospects that would share our content, the next step is to create the actual content. 

We have to:

• Brainstorm the type of content we want to create and the form we want the piece of content to be in (white paper, video, infographic, data visualization, images)
• Filter the ideas and select which content you want to develop first
• Conduct research on that piece of content 
• Develop the piece of content 
• Outreach the content once the piece is live

Step 6: Analyzing the Results

Once outreach has been conducted on the content piece, we want to take the time to properly evaluate the metrics and draw conclusions. Overtime, you can measure a variety of metrics like:

• Was there an increase in traffic? 
• Was there an increase in conversions? If not, is it because the landing page needs some CRO? Or is it because the target demographic didn't respond as expected to the content? 
• If the target demographic did respond, is there any way to repurpose the content in other forms? (Let's say if wrote a guide, can we use that same type of content and post it into a video or an infographic?)

Based on the results of the content piece, the next steps are to iterate, test, and repeat with the purpose of ultimately building a following and a brand. 

Conclusion

The purpose of this post was to help you develop a long-term content strategy framework for your site. The reality is that there is no "boring" industry and all industries have the ability to build a passionate community because ultimately, the Internet has become a source for all forms of knowledge. The difficulty is in finding these individuals, reaching out to them, and building content that they would read, enjoy, and share. The value of placing emphasis on long-term returns is that at some point, it doesn't matter what the next Google update looks like, if your site saw a change in rankings, or even how many external backlinks you've built. What matters, is that you've built something that has garnered a loyal following, a dedicated community, and something you can be proud of. 

8 Ways to Find Old URLs After a Failed Site Migration - Whiteboard Friday

Greetings and salutations SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King. I'm the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire. I'm also iPullRank on the SEOmoz boards and on Twitter.

So today what we're going to talk about is eight ways to figure out old URLs after a failed site migration. I know you have this problem. You get a new client, they just redesigned, and you have no idea what the old URLs are. They didn't do 301 redirects. They have no idea what the social numbers are anymore, and you have no idea where to start. Well, I'm going to show you how.

Now one of the first tactics you want to use is the Wayback Machine. You just put the site in there, the URL, the domain, what have you, and see what it has in that index. Once you get that, you can easily just pull off those URLs on the site through the links using Scraper for Chrome or whatever tool you want to use. You can actually pull down a code and pull them out using Find and Replace, whatever you want to do. That's just one of the tactics that we're using.

A lot of times people will also not change or update their XML sitemap. So you can just download that XML sitemap and then open it in Excel, and it puts you in these tables. You can just take that first column and copy and paste it into a text file, open it in Screaming Frog, and then crawl and list mode to see if those URLs still exist. Anything that's a 404, that's a URL that you can use, and you can easily map those ultimately to the new URLs on that site.

You also want to use your Backlink profile. When I say that, I don't want you to essentially use one tool, I want you to use as many tools as possible. So definitely start from Open Site Explorer. Also use Majestic, Ahrefs, whatever you want to use, and collect as much link data as possible. Also Webmaster Tools has your links, so use those as well. Then crawl all those links, all the targets of those links and make sure those pages are still in existence. All the 404s, again, you know these are old URLs that you can then redirect to new pages.

Then you also want to check the 404s from Google Webmaster Tools and map those pages to new pages as well. Then you can also use analytics. So pull your historic analytics from before the site redesign and find all those URLs and see which ones are still in existence. Again, go back to Screaming Frog with list mode and make sure that they're 404ing or 200ing. The ones that are 200, you don't have to worry about. The ones that are 404s are the ones that you need to remap.

Then you can also use CMS Change Log. So, for example, when you make a change in WordPress to a URL, there's a record of that, and you can actually pull those URLs out and use those again for mapping.

Then, for those of you that are a little more adventurous, you can go into your log files and see what URLs were driving traffic before it. Same thing as what you would do with the analytics, but just from a server side standpoint rather than just your click path stuff.

And also social media. So people share these URLs. Any shared URL has equity beyond just link equity. So you definitely want to make sure that you're pushing those social shared numbers to the right URLs that you're mapping towards, and I wrote a post on that on Search Engine Watch for how you can do that. But you can use the Facebook recommendations tool. So it's not really a tool. It's a demo for widget that goes on your site. But essentially, you can go through this tool and put in the domain name, and it's going to give you all the shared URLs, all the shared content. The way it comes in the box is it's 300 pixels tall, but if you expand that to a 1,000 pixels, you'll see the top 20 pieces of content that were shared. So real easily identify a popular URL that you can then redirect.

Also you can Topsy the same way. If people have tweeted these URLs, you can just put that domain name in there. It's going to search for them. It's going to give you all the URLs that Topsy has indexed. You can also use Social Mention, any social listening tool you can use the same way. And then also social bookmarks, so things like Digg, Delicious, and such, look and see what people have actually shared and bookmarked for your site.

So that's a quick one. Hope you guys found that useful, and I'd love to know how you guys have found this to be worthwhile. So holler at me in the comments down there, and thanks very much. Peace.

The Complete Guide to Link Building with Local Events

2nd Tier Link Building - Second tier link building is the practice of building backlinks to your backlinks. The purpose is to give the backlink pointing to your site higher page authority, making it a more valuable link.

Initially you should be using the overall events strategy to build links to your own domain. But let's say you host quite a few events, and you've got a process in place with a developed list of websites where you post your events.

Next, time, rather than linking to the primary event page on your website when you relist the event on the list of sites, consider creating the primary event page on another domain (e.g. http://biznik.com/events/seo-search-engine-meetup--24). Make sure this 3rd party site has a followed link to your own domain, like this example:

Then, when you're filling out all of your event listing submissions, use the 3rd party URL instead of your own site. By doing so, you're creating a higher Page Authority on that 3rd party URL, which means a more valuable link back to your site.
 

Watch Out for Long Title Tags - An SEOmoz Case Study

Here is the all-true story of some intriguing events that have transpired at the MozPlex in the last couple of weeks.

It all started when Jamie wanted to look up his fantastic post from last year, "Custom Reporting Using Google Analytics and Google Docs - The Ultimate Analytics Mashup." Not having the URL committed to memory, he did what any of us might do: he Googled it.

Imagine his surprise (and my consternation) when instead of a useful, keyword-rich, call-to-actiony title, he saw this:

For some reason, Google was displaying the text from the unique part of the post URL, rather than the title. A quick survey of Mozzers found that several of us had seen similar results when Googling old blog posts:

But it definitely was NOT happening on all blog posts!

I'm gonna be honest with you guys: I could NOT figure this out. I checked various factors for correlation. Could rel=author be causing this? Was something happening with the way title tags were being generated on the back end of the blog? Nothing seemed to match up.

One factor that I considered, but almost dismissed, was a change in how titles are truncated. The Google Inside Search blog had just released their monthly list of algorithmic tweaks for May, including these 3 that specifically had to do with how titles display:

• "Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We'll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one."
• "Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation. [launch codename "TopOfTheRock", project codename "Snippets"] With this change we've improved the efficiency of title generation systems, leading to significant savings in cpu usage and a more focused set of titles actually shown in search results."
• "Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation. [launch codename "otisredding", project codename "Snippets"] When presenting titles in search results, we want to avoid boilerplate copy that doesn't describe the page accurately, such as "Go Back." This change helps improve titles by avoiding these less useful bits of text."

In short: When your title tag is too long, instead of simply truncating it and adding an ellipsis to the end the way they used to, Google is trying to algorithmically determine a better title for the post.

But surely, I thought, SURELY this wasn't what was happening here. How could a string of words separated by dashes and pulled from the URL be a better title than the actual title? Even a shortened version of the actual title?

My mistake in my initial round of sleuthing was that I ignored Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I tried shortening the title tags and it worked like gangbusters:

What We Learned

Like many blogging platforms, the SEOmoz blog has an option to include a custom title tag. If no custom tag is created, the title tag is generated from the title of the post. We've got some pretty long titles of posts in our library, but many of them had no custom, shorter title - post authors were relying on Google to truncate as needed and focusing more on writing a great headline.

It looks like having a short, search-friendly title tag has increased in importance - without it, Google could replace your title with just about anything, including part of your URL. This doesn't exactly create the user experience we want, and a replaced title tag is a lost opportunity to encourage searchers to click.

How Long Should My Title Tag Be?

There's a great post that just went up on SEOMofo about how long title tags can be and still be displayed in the SERPs. To sum up: the old rule of "70 characters or less" is no longer as hard-and-fast as it used to be. SEOMofo's experiments show that now Google is truncating title tags based not only on number of characters, but also on the pixel width of your title tag. So title tags rich in wide letters like W and A won't be able to fit as many characters in before getting truncated, when compared to title tags rich in narrow letters like i and t.

We'll need to experiment further to figure out exactly where the limit is on title length/width. In the meantime, make sure your pages with long headlines have shorter (still keyword-rich) titles in the title tags, and be aware of your use of wide characters. In my spare time recently, I've been slogging through years of posts and adding shorter titles as needed; I recommend you do the same.

Getting the Maximum Number of Links From Your Infographic

As the head of content creation and SEO over at Designbysoap Ltd, a significant chunk of my weekly activities is spend producing and promoting infographics for our clients. We've had infographics commissioned to be used for a variety of purposes, including public awareness campaigns, personal CV's, teaching aids, brand recognition, and everything in between. The vast majority of them, however, are produced with one key goal in mind: to increase backlinks to a target website.

So with that in mind, here's my in-depth guide to making the most out of your infographic, framed from the point of view of gaining the highest level of distribution (and therefore links) as possible.

It's worth noting that the concept, research, and design phase are extremely important in gaining links from your infographic - all the promotion in the world won't help with an infographic that people simply aren't interested in (or one that features a poor design concept). However, as this post will focus on promoting and pushing your infographic, I'll have to assume that you've got an infographic that's worth promoting. If you're still at the content creation stage, then my previous SEOmoz post might help you create something worthy of being shared.

Encouraging Sharing

You need to ensure that you make your infographic as easy to share as possible, which means ensuring that social media sharing buttons are clearly visible on the post - have a look at the social media buttons at the bottom of this post for a good example.

If you're publishing your infographic on a high profile blog then this probably won't be an issue, but if you're publishing on your own blog, make sure you're making it as easy as possible for your visitors to share the infographic via social media platforms. You should also include a clear call to action at the end of your post, something along the lines of 'if you enjoyed our infographic, please consider sharing it using the buttons below!'

Similarly, you should make reposting the infographic and linking back to you as easy as possible, and the best way to do this is to supply a HTML embed code. An embed code will not only provide people with an easy way of re-publishing your infographic, but it will ensure that they link back to you (via an image link) and allow you to control the anchor text. If you're not too hot with HTML, I'd recommend you take advantage of a simple but very clever tool from SEOGadget; their HTML embed code generator.

This tool will allow you to input your infographic URL, the title, your preferred anchor text and your link URL and then it will generate a HTML code that you can use on your own site.

Even with an embed code, some people will inevitably repost your infographic without providing a credit link back to you (they will just save the image and re-publish on their own site). We'll have a look at one way of dealing with this later on in the post, but just because someone isn't linking back to you doesn't mean you can't ensure you get credit for the content (and improve your brand recognition in the process). You should always add some kind of branding to the infographic to make sure people know where the content came from - now this doesn't mean plastering your logo all over it or relating everything in the infographic to your brand, but you can add a small, unobtrusive logo or standout URL at the footer of your infographic, like we did for the WordPress infographic for the Yoast website:

You can also add a QR code to the footer of your infographic, which is particularly useful if you're going to be using them in the real world, but we'll cover this in a bit more detail later on in the post.

International Links

As you would imagine, the vast majority of links you'll gain will be from English speaking websites, but that doesn't mean you should ignore international links. Getting your infographic translated into other languages can hugely increase the number of inbound links your infographic gains for your website, and it's not particularly difficult to do. This is particularly worthwhile if your infographic includes information that would be interesting or valuable to countries other than the UK or the US, which is probably the case with a huge number of infographics.

Here's an example taken from the Destructoid website; the Guide To The GamersUniverse infographic in English:

And in Chinese:

(Note these are just sections of the infographic, to see the whole infographic follow the link to the Destructoid website above).

If you're lucky enough to have someone on staff who speaks more than one language then great, but generally you'll need to source people who can translate the text in your infographic for you. You could use an online translation tool such as Google Translate, but these translations aren't always accurate, so you're probably better off using a platform like Elance to source a translator.

Once you have your translated infographics, you can start promoting these alongside your English version - you could have links from your original publishing site to versions in different languages (for example click here for Spanish version, click here for Chinese version, etc), as well as targeting internationally based website for further placement of your infographic.

While you're getting your infographic translated, you might also want to consider getting the translator to provide you with text you can use to Tweet out links to the foreign language version of your infographic (in the target language).

Active Link Building

Encouraging people to link to or share your infographic is one thing, but that doesn't mean you can't continue the process of active link-building after your initial infographic publication. In this section we'll have a look at some of the ways you can build links to your infographics, and increase the likelihood of it encouraging further links.

The easiest way to build links via your infographic is to submit it to the numerous infographic distribution portals available, almost all of which will allow a credit link back to the original designer or publisher. To help get you started, here's a quick list of sites that allow infographic submissions (thanks to Paddy Moogan and Doug at Pixel Design Studio for helping me out with a few extra sites for the list):

Visual.ly
Cool Infographics
Infographics Showcase
Amazing Infographics
Daily Infographic
Infographic Journal
Cloud Infographics
Infographic Post
Infographics Archive
Infographics Inspiration
Infographr
Infographics Bin
Infographicas
Video Infographic
OMG Infographics
Love Infographics
Fuck Yeah Infographics
I Heart Infographics
Infographics Online Directory
Infographic Heaven
Infographipedia
Best Infographics
Pure Infographics
Daily Statistic
Brandless Infographic Blog
The Infographics
Chartporn
Infographic Love
Info-graphic

Another great way to build links to your site via the infographic is with guest blogging - many people think that they can't continue to post out an infographic once it's been published, but this simply isn't the case (after all you're relying on other people continuing to post the infographic with a credit link back to you). As the infographic is an image, it doesn't count as duplicate content, so as long as you're writing unique copy to accompany the design with each guest blog, you're still using a perfectly legitimate technique and you don't need to worry about duplicate content. Find a list of sites that are in a relevant niche to your infographic topic, and start sending out some emails requesting placement of the infographic. For each person that accepts your request, write a brand new description / post to go with the infographic and get it published - as long as you're not duplicating that copy, you can repeat this process over and over again, gaining more and more links each time you do so.

If you don't have a network of blogs you can get in touch with, or you simply don't have the time for manual blogger outreach, you could consider using a service like MyBlogGuest, which has a specialised infographic guest blog section (we actually suggested this to them some time ago, so it's nice to see a service that really listens to their market). The MBG infographic section allows you to supply numerous different descriptions for one infographic, each of which will be available for bloggers to publish - if you're unfamiliar with MyBlogGuest and you're interested in link building via guest blogging, infographics, or both, I suggest you check it out via the link above.

It's also worth submitting your site to relevant content aggregation networks - there's not much point including a list here as it depends on your niche, but as an example, an infographic on SEO, link-building, or social media would be well suited to inbound.org.

You can also create a detailed press release around the infographic and submit it to platforms such as PRWeb, which will allow you to link back to the original publication.

Reformatting Your Infographic For Other Channels

Static infographics are phenomenal for building natural links to your website, but by going one step further and reformatting your infographic, you're ensuring you can get the most out of it in terms of inbound links and referred traffic.

One of the best ways to reformat your infographic is to animate it, which allows you to target video distribution platforms in addition to infographic submission sites. If you're lucky enough to have someone on staff who can use Adobe After Effects (or a similar program), then you can do this in-house, or you can hire an agency or freelancer to do this on your behalf (you'll need to supply them with the working file, which will most likely be in Illustrator or Photoshop format). You might even find that your infographic design agency can complete this for you (at Designbysoap Ltd we now offer this as an additional service), in which case it's always best to allow the original designer to animate it.

To show you the sort of thing you can do with the already finished artwork, here's a short animated infographic taken from the piece we designed for BusinessEnergy.com, entitled 'UK Business Energy Costs'.

Original infographic:

Animated Infographic:

Having the infographic as a video will not only increase the likelihood of people linking to you (as you can offer them two different ways of sharing your content), but it allows you to utilise high authority video distribution channels such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Another excellent way of reformatting your infographic to encourage natural links is to make your infographic interactive, although admittedly this is again an additional step forward in terms of the skillset required. An interactive infographic not only helps set your design apart from the scores of other infographics out there, but can dramatically increase engagement and social media sharing.

You should obviously host the infographic on your own website, and utilise either Flash or HTML5 to achieve the desired effect. An excellent example of an interactive infographic is the Future Of Car Sharing, which does a phenomenal job of portraying the information whilst keeping the user engaged and entertained.

Another idea for reformatting your infographics is through a smartphone application - admittedly this could be potentially expensive, but there are companies out there who will turn your content into an app for free, in return for a cut of future profits. Infographics can make a good app too, particularly if you can come at it from the right angle - a good example is the Great War 100 app, which portrays genuinely interesting information about the first World War through infographics, and given we're approaching the 100 year anniversary of the conflict, it stands a good chance of making lots of sales. We actually supplied the infographics for this app, which you can see the advertisement for below:

Another good idea, particularly if you have a long infographic with lots of different stats, is to chop it up into slides and turn it into a slideshow (in either PowerPoint or PDF format) which can then be uploaded to platforms such as SlideShare or Scribd.

If you have released infographics previously (particularly if they're all in a similar industry), then you could also consider turning the infographics into an e-book, which can be sold on platforms such as Amazon, or distributed free of charge via your website. If you are considering placing it on your website as a free download, then consider using a service such as Pay With A Tweet, which will allow you to provide your e-book to visitors in return for a Tweet promoting the content.

Social Media

As well as doing your best to encourage sharing around your infographic, you should also make the effort to promote the content yourself via social media and bookmarking platforms. Obviously you should promote the infographic via your own (and your staff's) Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and StumbledUpon accounts - particularly if you have fairly strong profiles on those platforms.

When you're promoting your infographic via Twitter or Facebook, rather than simply saying 'check out our brand new infographic,' consider taking individual statistics from the infographic (preferably the most attention-grabbing or surprising stats) and posting them out individually. We've found this tactic to be much more effective at encouraging click through rates (particularly from Twitter). In addition, don't forget to include relevant hashtags with your Tweets, as this can help widen your reach beyond your normal friends and followers, giving you a better chance of reTweets and referred traffic.

If you don't have a strong social media presence, then you could consider utilising a social media promotion agency, although this will of course increase your budget for project. With that said, however, the harder the content is pushed via social media the more likely you are to gain links from a varied selection of sources. If you do decide to take on a social media agency to help with promotion, make sure you check their previous campaigns, clients and results, as you'd be surprised at the number of 'agencies' who simply use paid services like Fiverr in order to push social media metrics.

It's also well worth completing some manual outreach in order to try and gain traction via 'influencers' in your industry, as if successful, this can have a dramatic impact on the number of social shares and links. Let's say for example you've produced a high quality and well researched infographic on how social media links affect search engine optimisation - why not try and Tweet people like Rand (SEOMoz), Joost (Yoast), or Richard (SEOGadget) and see if you can get them to share your content. Employing this kind of outreach might not result in any responses (depending on your content and how you get in touch), but it takes very little time or effort and can yield phenomenal results if an influencer does decide to help promote your infographic.

You can also further increase social media engagement by incentivising sharing - let's say you've produced a beautiful infographic that you know will be particularly popular amongst a certain market (gamers, just for example). Print out ten copies of your infographic and say you'll give them away as a competition prize - all people have to do to enter is share the infographic via Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ and the winners will be picked at random from those who've shared the content. We've used this kind of competition-entry format for clients in the past to great effect and it's certainly worth considering for promoting your content or increasing your social media brand traction.

Email Promotion

If your brand sends out regular emails to mailing list subscribers (like SEOmoz do with their monthly Moz-Letter), then be sure to include your infographic in your mailouts - place a small, eye-catching section of your infographic in the email with a link back to the full version on your website. This can not only increase traffic, but encourage both social media sharing and reposting (and therefore links).

Real World Marketing

This is often overlooked by agencies and brands looking to promote their infographic, but it's something that when done right (and combined with a link to an online presence, most notably a QR code) can be fantastic for increasing brand awareness and mobile traffic to a website.

Let's look at an actual example from one of our campaigns from last year. One of our clients is a luxury, five-star guesthouse in the city of Brighton, UK, and as part of their marketing campaign we produced an infographic on tourism in Brighton and Hove. As well as promoting the infographic online, we also printed physical copies of the infographic and placed it in relevant part of the City, including the local tourist office. We placed a simple QR code at the bottom of the infographic that allowed people to visit the website by scanning the code with their smartphone:

Infographic section via The Claremont Hotel Brighton (click the image if you'd like to see the full infographic).

Not only did this result in a dramatic increase in website traffic via mobile devices, but did a great job of improving overall brand awareness in Brighton. As an added benefit, we noticed that people were also talking about the infographic and posting photos of it on their social media profiles, increasing the number of social media links pointing at the Claremont website.

Admittedly, this technique isn't always suitable for infographics, but it's well worth bearing in mind if local customers are your primary focus.

Chasing Down Other Links

Now that you've produced your infographic, reformatted it, pushed it out to as many different platforms as possible, and promoted it via social media channels, it's time to chase down a few extra links by finding website who have reposted the infographic without a credit link.

The easiest ways to do this are with a standard Google search and taking advantage of the drag-and-drop function on the new Google Image search. Start by searching for the title of your infographic (as well as a few variations) and visit every website you find that has posted the content - do the same with the image search function, by dragging your infographic from your desktop into the Google Image Search.

This will give you more publishing sites, allowing you to create a list of sites that have reposted your content. From here you can visit each one and note down the URL and contact information of any site that has published your infographic without linking back to you, then simply email each one with a polite request for a credit link. Sure, some webmasters won't reply to you, but you can gain a few extra links by doing this with every infographic you publish.

So that's it for my infographic link-building post - did I miss anything? Do you have a useful tip for gaining additional links from your infographic design? Let me know in the comment below and I'll do my best to respond to every comment.

Post by John Pring, head of SEO and content creation at Designbysoap Ltd.