Following The Trend: Mozscape Gets Faster and Cleaner

There's a trend emerging with Mozscape, and it's a good one. Updates are getting more regular and indexes are increasing in size (with exception to a few bumps in the road). Today, we're happy to announce a few more awesome features to add to that list!

A few weeks back, Rand announced the Mozscape API beta, and the Moz community came by the dozens to try it out. Thanks to that passionate group of beta testers, we nailed down some bugs and battle-tested the new API.

Now, it's ready for primetime.

Starting today, Mozscape just got a whole lot faster. It now supports 200 requests per second for everyone on paid levels -- that's a 20x increase from the current paid levels! This rate limit increase will allow users to pull Mozscape data as they please, with a lot less wait time in between requests. Even better, you don't need to change a thing on your end to utilize latest update as a paid Mozscape user - just keep calling. No new keys, no new code.

Free Mozscape users, we didn't forget about you! We've got a small rate limit increase coming your way in the coming weeks.

We're also rolling out a fresh update to the Mozscape API documentation. We've heard time and time again that the old documentation caused headaches for folks who have tried to integrate Mozscape data. That's a bummer, so we completely refreshed the structure of our API documentation to remove some of the pain that came with navigating through the docs. This update is also live as of today.

All of these updates tie directly back to the theme of progression with Mozscape. We've got some of our best people on the job, and some 18 million resources behind improving our data (if you know what I mean). Much more to come!

PS. If you've built something awesome with Mozscape, drop me a line or let us know in the comments. We may be sending some love your way soon.

Ten Painless Tactics To Earn Attention On Twitter - Whiteboard Friday

Hey, everyone, welcome to Whiteboard Friday. No, I am not Rand. My name is Dan Shure, and I'm an SEOmoz associate. I'm here in the MozPlex for the MozCon Conference. I'm very excited. I just flew in a little bit earlier today, and I'm going to do the Whiteboard Friday this week.

Today, we're going to talk about the Top Ten Twitter Tactics times three. So I've got three lists here of ten tactics for each category that we're going to go through. Those categories first are attention, that is getting attention onto your profile or who you are, just getting noticed by people that don't follow you. The second is audience, so that is getting people to follow you and then maintaining that audience, and the third is action. So that is getting people to take actions from your tweets, from the people that are following you.

So let's get right into the first one. For attention, the first thing I would say is you want to set up a profile that looks professional, that has personality, and that stands out in a way that you will get noticed. That might be a nice looking photo. That might be a clear user name, not something with a lot of underscores or weird digits in it or things that aren't spaces. You want to have it be something that people will instantly recognize as your name.

Second, you want a contrast what's happening out in Twitter a little bit and kind of stand out. So I'll give you a few examples. One might be, suppose . . . so I'm a tad nervous. I'm not going to stop though. We're doing this in one take. So, to contrast and stand out a little bit. If a lot of people around you are tweeting things that are really long, like using the full 140 characters, if you do a lot of short tweets, you're going to stand out more because you're going to look different than everyone else.

Also, if you do what I like to call - what I've been trying to do - double tweeting, and that is I will tweet once, that's kind of the prep tweet to get people's attention, and then a second tweet to actually do the action, to get people to do the action. Or actually, that second tweet will have the content that I want people to really notice.

Third, indirect mention. So what I mean by this is suppose you're trying to get an influencer to pay attention to you, but you want to use, maybe, a little bit more of a soft sell sort of tactic. What you can do is if you find an article or something of theirs that you really like, you can tweet that but just mention them in it in a way where you're not trying to get a response or being really hard sell about it. It's just a little bit of a soft sell, and I think influencers especially really appreciate that, especially if you talk about their post in your tweet in an original way and grab their attention.

Number four, ask for help. A lot of people say you should help others to get attention, but you can get a lot of attention just by asking for help. Then when you ask people for help, ask people to retweet you. "Hey, I need to find a programmer for this project" or "Hey, does anybody know the answer to blah, blah, blah" and you ask for a retweet. And then people start retweeting that. You can get some attention that way. And the other thing this does is this shows people that you're willing to learn, that you're out there to get help from other people and try to get better at whatever it is that you're doing.

Number five, helping others. So Will Reynolds has talked a lot in the past about using "if this, then that." It's IFTTT.com to set up alerts for certain people or certain keywords. When those tweets happen, you'll get a text message or an email or some type of alert, however, you want it to be set up, and you'll get that and so you can react to that right away. Suppose there's an influencer, for example, that maybe needs help with their computer and you can help with computers. Maybe you're trying to get the attention of somebody that's a food blogger, and they don't know anything about computers. They tweet something, "Hey, I need help with my computer", and then you get a text message from IFTTT, and you can respond to that right away and help that person out.

Number six, listen. Go away from Twitter and do something and then come back and deliver. So here's an example. A few months ago Rand tweeted something, actually about IFTTT. He said, "Hey, somebody in inbound marketing should write about IFTTT. It could be this great new inbound marketing thing." Most people might reply to that, "Oh, yeah, hey, Rand, I'll write about that" or like, "Hey, Rand, do you think this would be a good idea if I do blah, blah, blah?" But what I'm saying here is to listen. He's already said he's looking for that content. It might be interesting. I went and wrote that post without asking permission. I just went and did it. Then the next day, 24 hours later, I came back, I tweeted it, and I said,
"Hey, here's something Rand suggested" and he retweeted it, and that post has done very well. So that's suggestion six.

Seven, consistency. This is kind of like traditional branding in a way where you're trying to get your logo to be recognized by people instantly, like the Starbucks logo or like the Nike logo. You want people to see it and know exactly what it is. This is very much that same mindset. So what I mean by consistency is if you're trying to get an influencer to notice you, you don't want to try to go for that quick sell or that quick reaction or try to jump . . . it's like approaching a girl right away, like too quickly. You want to, over time, maybe respond to questions or maybe ask them a question or mention them. If they see you doing things on a consistent basis and putting out content that's good on a consistent basis, then they're going to notice you. That's going to be a much stronger type of relationship and type of attention that you will have earned by that consistent action.

Number eight, so this is great actually. I don't know how many of you have participated in SEO Chat or I think there's a PPC Chat, but this is a great way to get attention outside of your existing audience in Twitter. I think SEO Chat is on Thursday nights. They might have changed it, but it was Thursday nights, and PPC Chat, I think, is Tuesdays. You can go into any of these and just say, "Hey, what's up? I'm checking it out." Get some people to notice you that are part of that community. The great thing about that is you're walking into a built-in community, something on Twitter that's already happening. You're getting tons of people to notice you right away with that hashtag.

Number nine, a little similar. So we're at MozCon now. I think anybody would be really smart to use the MozCon hashtag while they're here in a way where they can get attention. So I'll give you another example. Last summer I was at the Affiliate Summit, because I won a free ticket, and as an SEO at an Affiliate Summit, there were a lot of affiliate marketers there but not many SEOs. So I used the hashtag for the event and tweeted, "Hey, anybody would like help with SEO, come find me." That was a perfect way to get people's attention because you're in a conference full of affiliates, and you're one of the only SEOs. So you can use hashtags like that very strategically at events, live events.

Finally, number ten, retweets from followers that influencers will see. Let me explain that a little more carefully. So I'll give another example. A year ago when I was first starting out in the public world of SEO, there were a few influencers that I wanted to make sure saw me, like Rand, Will Reynolds, and Tom Critchlow, and people like that. I knew that if a few of the people that were already following me retweeted my content, if let's say Tom Critchlow was following John Doherty, if John retweeted something of mine, Tom would see it. And the more that happened, the more I would be in front of influencers and not just my immediate audience, and that was done intentionally.

Restructuring Your Website and How to Minimize Traffic Loss

In February 2011, a client I was working with ran global usability test in cooperation with Spotless Interactive in London, Hamburg and Oslo. One year later and the feedback from the usability tests are being implemented, which includes improvements to the booking engine, navigation menu, a url rewrite and a new home page.

With a total of 21 websites in 15 languages, launching a new global web structure without losing a significant portion of traffic was always going to be a difficult task. Especially as more than 50% of total visits are from search engines. This blog post will show you two examples of how to launch a new website:

• Website 1 launches and loses 35% of organic traffic
• Website 2 launches and loses 4% organic traffic

By following the process described below, you can feel confident in knowing your new website launch will be smooth.

Minimizing risk and measures we took

With the support of Norwegian inbound marketer Sverre Bech-Sjøthun, we were able to create a step-by-step plan to implement before, during and after the launch.

Before the launch

We started by setting up a project in Basecamp with the web developers and to ensure all stakeholders were aligned.

Having just recently upgraded to the newest version available of the CMS, we found that the steps taken to minimize the traffic loss during the website launch would also be a good time to address to increased crawl errors reported since the upgrade.

By upgrading the CMS for more than twenty websites, the number of crawl increased tenfold to more than 4,500 errors globally.

Example of errors reported for one of the sites

404 page visits increased during the same period

The first step was to approach each site separately and by using Xenu Link Sleuth we are able to reduce the number of broken links. We repeated this process for each of the sites. Across the entire web structure, fixing broken links was a lot of work and requires a dedicated person. Understanding the importance of addressing these issues is the only way it can be prioritized above everyday tasks.

We then started working on the URL mapping:

• Using Open Site Explorer we ran a report for the top 500 linked to pages
• Using Google Webmaster Tools we ran a report for the top 10 Links to Your Site
• Using Microsoft Excel, we mapped out the site and new URL structure

Managing the top 500 linked to pages in a time consuming process but highly important when launching a new website. The process took half a day per website and was the most demanding of all steps taken.

Once the URLs were mapped, we then created an XML sitemap based on the live version of the website.

The step-by-step process for launching the new website included:

• Map URLs and redirects
• Submit XML sitemap
• Fix crawl errors in Webmaster Tools
• Monitor web traffic in Google Analytics

During the Launch

Once the new site went live, the 301 redirects were implemented and the XML sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools. Traffic was monitored in Google Analytics and errors monitored in SEOmoz.

How to launch a new website redesign

The following illustrates how one team gave SEO a high priority and how another team didn't. Here are the results.

Website 1

You will always run into problems that you did not see when launching a new website. The process plan was created and all stakeholders were aligned. However, as a team we did not execute the plan when launching this website and implementing correct redirects and on-site SEO were not prioritized.

The day we went live with website 1 (14th June, 2012):

• No XML sitemap was added to webmaster tools
• Not all 301 redirects were implemented (more than 50% missing)
• 302s pages were sending traffic to a soft 404 page (not a 404 HTTP status)
• Missing meta tags including page titles and meta descriptions causing duplicate content

One issue was that 50% of the redirects were not implemented. The issue being we did not know which 50%. Using SEO automatic bulk URL checker we manually checked each URL and HTTP status code. A second issue was that Google was indexing the test server resulting in duplicate content - more than 276 pages were indexed.

By not implementing the process plan, we lost a lot of organic traffic. In fact, organic brand traffic decreased by 45% compared with the previous week and year on year organic traffic was down by 49%.

Organic traffic is now down -34% comparing the previous month (easy to identify the launch date)

Impressions down -18% comparing the previous month

Website 1 is the client's most visited website within the global web structure. The above charts from Google Analytics have been seen by senior management and addressing these issues has now been prioritized. It's not too late, but there is no doubt that by losing 34% of organic traffic a considerable amount of sales have also been lost.

We are now in the process of updating XML sitemaps, implementing any outstanding redirects and fixing crawl errors on site.

Website 2

For website 2, we had a lot more control and I was allowed to be hands on with the process.

The day we went live with website 2 (26th June, 2012):

• Uploaded the XML sitemap immediately after launch
• Mapped out all URLs of the site, which included a URL rewrite with user-friendly URLs
• 301 redirects were implemented and tested
• Monitored the web traffic for both referrals and organic traffic

Once live, I blogged about the new launch, tweeted the launch to more than 2,000 followers, informed all stakeholders internally and had the news published on the company intranet. The day following the launch, we sent out a newsletter to 1,600 subscribers that included a tip to "check out the newly launched website!". The tip can also be found in my email signature.

Organic traffic is now down -4% comparing the previous month (barely visible)

Impression share trend continues as before

Here is a list of actions taken for the website 2 launch.

Actions summary:

• Create report of top 500 linked to pages from Open Site Explorer
• Map URLs from old site to new site with redirects
• When launching new site, implement redirects
• Submit XML sitemap to webmaster tools
• Test new top 20 linked to pages for correct 301 implementation
• Attract new site links through blogging and social media shares
• Send out newsletter and inform customer base
• Promote launch in company email signature
• Monitor traffic in google analytics
• Monitor and fix crawl errors in webmaster tools
• Submit new XML sitemap (two weeks post launch)

Concluding summary

With the website 1, we only followed the 50% of the plan and we lost 34% of organic traffic. With website 2, we followed the plan exactly as it should have been, we constantly monitored traffic in web analytics and tested both referral links and 301 redirects ' a valuable lesson in having a plan and sticking to it.

If you are about to launch a new website, have your SEO consultant on-site or hire an expert during this process and involve your web developers throughout the launch. Make sure this is prioritized within the organization and not left to those who do not understand the importance of SEO. No one can afford to lose 34% organic traffic.

About Steven: Steven is an online marketer and works in luxury travel. He also blogs at tribes.no.

Lead from Within: 10 Strategies to Become a Successful In-House SEO

Let's start by level-setting expectations right away: this post has very little to do with actual SEO implementation. You won't find any performance tips, analytics hacks, or war stories with technological terrors and the people who engineer them in this post. If that's what you're looking for, there are several other sources you can peruse.

Instead, we're going to focus on how you can become a leader within your organization by building a positive reputation for in-house SEO. In doing so, we'll cover how you can elevate your personal profile by using productive strategies and value-oriented tactics as well as focus on ways to untie your hands so that you can get more great work out the door to your customers. According to this post (scroll way down and see slide #20 in the presentation), about 15% of SEOmoz community members are in-house SEOs along with 28% of PRO users ' that's the niche audience I'm writing for, as well as for folks who are considering a career as an in-house SEO.

So let's get down to the Good Stuff: the art of being a successful in-house SEO and making a difference for your organization and your customers, constituents, and users. As you may know, I recently left the SEO field to focus on information strategy, but with the past 11 years of in-house SEO under my belt, now's the right time to pass on my best in-house SEO secrets.

But beware, this is complicated, challenging stuff: hic sunt dracones!

Photo © John Sloan (creative commons)

#1: Be the best person to work with at the office

Attitude matters. I've known so many SEOs who are cantankerous SOBs who seem to hate their jobs, their colleagues, and their work. When they enter a room, they steal all of the energy away from everyone with their dour attitude, woe-is-me approach, and overall negative vibes.

But you're smart and can do better than that ' don't be that guy or gal! Instead, apply the tenants of inbound marketing to your relationships with co-workers. Nothing's more important for building a positive reputation for yourself and for your SEO work than being a great partner to your team, your colleagues, and your leadership. To be successful in these areas, it's not enough to just drive great results ' you need to drive great relationships and experiences, just like you would for your external customers and users. Your partners should walk away from their encounters with you not thinking about how smart you are, but how smart and empowered they feel after talking with you.

I've achieved great results with this approach by:

• Researching what my colleagues and leadership care about, both at a high level as well as in specific, granular details
• Listening to their concerns about SEO before spamming them with my philosophy and approach
• Tying my strategies and tactics back to the specific goals expressed by leadership, using their exact vocabulary whenever possible
• Always seeking to provide value and new learning with every interaction, especially where other people can see that you're learning from them
• Making SEO as easy as possible by being patient and learning to compromise and iterate over time
• Volunteering to help out wherever there are priorities or crises, even when they fall outside of SEO
• Never standing in the way of anyone else's work even if they stand in the way of yours
• Constantly praising the successes of others before accepting any praise or kudos for my own work

That last point is the most important. The secret to success as an in-house SEO is simply this: don't be a rockstar. Or a guru. Or a ninja. Those titles set up divisions between you and your colleagues and they place you on too high a pedestal from which you can easily be knocked off when you don't hit traffic/sales targets, or when Google introduces a new algo update. Instead, when people introduce you as "Our SEO guru", quickly (but politely) correct them. You should re-frame your role and yourself as being more of a servant leader who provides services to others, even if you're not in management.

Many of the above points are things I learned from studying non-violent protests when I was in college (who knew that Gandhi and the Civil Rights movement in America could provide so many useful tactics for SEO?). But in the name of TAGFEE (more on that below), I also want to share some times when I wasn't such a good partner... and the negative outcomes of those actions.

The following are real, actual mistakes that I made over the span of my career. You should avoid doing these at all costs:

• Publicly comparing a colleague's constant "let's wait and see..." attitude about SEO to (and I can't believe I'm sharing this) the blood banks in the 1980s that refused to test their blood supplies for the HIV virus even though there was clear evidence that they were infected.
  Outcome: no support for SEO, a negative review, and about a year before we started talking again. Clearly not my finest moment ' I still feel really bad about this one because I let my frustration get the better of me, which is always a poor decision.
• Not compromising on a set of rigid SEO standards for the implementation of a new site feature by our development team, even when the stakeholders were willing to include a handful of small SEO fixes.
  Outcome: the feature was built anyway, but without any nods to SEO whatsoever. So I could have had a few optimizations built into the product, but I lost them because they didn't satisfy my vision of "perfect."
• Copying senior leaders on an email of essay-length about why we needed to stop the all the presses to fix an SEO issue with a major release that was about to go out the door.
  Outcome: two entire divisions of pissed-off colleagues. The release went out anyway without the SEO fix and nothing bad happened ' there was no discernible SEO impact whatsoever. I'd obviously made a big deal out of nothing.

Ha, I told you this was TAGFEE, right? What you can learn from the micro-stories above are the values of empathy, partnership, humility, and patience (not to mention assessing a situation before jumping into it). There's also a strong lesson here about disregarding perfection, which I'll speak more to below. But your most powerful tool as an in-house SEO is your ability to admit transparently and authentically that you don't know everything.

PRO-tip: when you get that funny feeling in your chest like you're about to explode in rage at a colleague' go for a walk outside instead. Breathe deeply and then count to five. It does wonders for your body and mind while building resilience for the real priorities at hand. Then go back in and find a way to either "negotiate to yes" or to move forward productively without doing damage to your relationships.

I won't lie to you: being the best person to work with is hard. It's a constant challenge and I must acknowledge that I have not been entirely successful in achieving it. But it's the best way to pursue long-term, sustainable in-house SEO... or anything else in life that matters to you.

Photo © Rudy Lopez/SEOmoz (used with permission from SEOmoz)

#2: Always talk about SEO from the perspective of people, not robots

Face it: besides you, no one cares about robots. And even when people do care about robots, they still have great distrust for them. And can you blame them? Robots aren't like us, they have no emotions, and they're typically depicted in films and books as being our post-apocalyptic enemies (Asimov is just an exception proving the general rule). Only us SEOs and sci-fi geeks love robots more than people.

Think about it ' here's a summary of the attitudes that you're up against with your employer:

• Robots don't have credit cards (yet?) and can't buy anything from us
• Robots don't use our services online or at our local brick-and-mortar branches
• Robots don't donate their time to our volunteer activities or other non-commercial aspects of our mission
• Robots use make requests of our servers, which has the potential to make our site slower and reduce capacity for human customers
• Robots crawl our content and replicate it elsewhere without our consent
• Doing work on behalf of robots takes up human resources that we would have spent on human customers

So robots get a bad rap, even though as SEOs we know that robots are consumers of our content and that they act as way-finding agents for humans who are trying to find our content and products. People use robots every single day as they go about their basic activities, but most folks don't realize that because they conceptualize the robot's activities as being services for people. See what just happened there? Our anthropocentric bias has shone through once again.

I've found that it's quite hard to change people's minds about robots, but it's far easier to hack their understanding of SEO so that they can see how it focuses on human users. This is a lot easier than you might think ' here's a couple ways that you can get started:

• Focus on customer journeys instead of the robot's crawl. For example, go through several SERPs with your partners ' including those where you perform great along with those where you don't ' and talk about the customer experience of researching the results and choosing to click through on one versus the other. This approach helps humanize SEO by focusing on customer behavior rather than the intricacies of information retrieval and indexation. Furthermore, this elevates your role for your colleagues; you're not just a technician any more, you're going to be helpful in decoding customer behaviors and intent. What drives human decision-making here? It's not just rank; it's everything from readability to catchiness to your word choice to your unique value proposition. See Dan Shure's great guide to click-worthy titles to get some good ideas (and note that he never uses the words "robot" or "crawler" even once in this post).
• Focus on wins for customers that also happen to be wins for robots and search crawlers. Web site speed tuning or web performance optimization is a great example of this because it improves the experience for your users by saving their time as well as drives increases in crawling activity. For example, we saw huge wins for customers and crawlers (see slide #60 for results) as we made site speed enhancements. Another great example is reducing true-duplicate and near-duplicate content, which is a poor experience for people that also acts as Panda-bait.

Photo © puntxote (creative commons)

#3: Don't rely on data to tell your story for you

We all know that it's essential to work from data and place data, facts, and figures at the core of our business cases. But what we often forget is that, as SEOs, we're probably the most data-literate people within our organizations. Which is to say that speaking about statistical significance, or basis points versus percentage points, or even VLOOKUPs in Excel can actually frighten off our colleagues and lead to distrust ' especially in an organization where people have historically "cooked the books" or otherwise used data in misleading ways.

So we need to use data to tell the story of our work and ' most importantly ' to show our colleagues and leadership the positive impact that we have on customers. Our key tools here are story-telling and data visualization. As content marketers, we all know the powerful roles that these two tools play in our work to engage customers... so why not leverage them internally with your colleagues? Again we see the value of applying inbound marketing competencies to your work inside an organization.

How can you get started in this? Conrad Saam recently showed us how we can improve our reporting with scattergraphs, which present data in a visual format. My director, Samantha Starmer, talked about the value of storytelling (and how to tell a good business story) on the Slideshare blog. Rand prepped all of the MozCon speakers with a Whiteboard Friday video on the mechanics of creating great presentations.

This isn't just a trick you can use at conferences; it's something that you should do in all of your presentation decks, especially ones that you make inside your company. After seeing deck after deck of bad fonts and bullet points ' not to mention speakers who just read the text on their slides without bringing any additional value to them ' you'll come across looking professional and polished, someone who's both trustworthy and believable. In essence, you'll earn your colleagues' attention, just like a good inbound marketer should.

Photo © Kristina Alexanderson (creative commons)

#4: Help your colleagues meet their goals before asking them to support yours

When I first started doing in-house SEO work, I had no idea how to perform the "Inception" trick of getting partners to do SEO on my behalf as if it was their own idea. So I blindly stumbled along, asking ' and later begging ' for favors. Soon I wasn't getting any support at all because I was pitching SEO as something extra that everyone had to do on top of all of their other responsibilities. Worse still, even when I did get support, I would often destroy the relationship by producing reams upon reams of documentation and insisting that every detail be perfect.

Don't do that ' relying on altruism in a stressful and fast-paced environment is generally a losing proposition. Instead, start with an open, honest, and most of all direct conversation about what really matters to your colleagues. Do this with as many individuals as you can, not just at a team- or group- level. This is where you splurge and buy people coffee, tea, doughnuts, take them out to lunch, bring in pizza, or generally do whatever it takes to set people at ease and get them to open up. You should be just as literate in your colleagues' goals and objectives as you are in the latest Google Panda iteration.

So your goal is to figure out not just what they're doing, but why they do it in the first place. How does it impact users or customers? How is their role incentivized to perform? What metrics do they use to judge their work? What are they reviewed on by their management? And beyond the office, what are they trying to achieve with their lives? Learning these key data points will help you construct a strategy and workflow for SEO that helps them succeed at their goals. And if you can do that, then you'll find that they're much more willing to help you out. That's why I always refer to organic search traffic and sales as being "your impact" or "everyone's impact" rather than "my impact" ' and this goes a long ways toward securing support from others.

Bottom line: you don't look good unless you make your colleagues look great. Seek to elevate them and to serve their needs before your own. Here are some resources to get you started with a values-based approach to relationships:

• The Discipline of Listening
• 18 Tips And Tricks About Reading People
• How to Build Better Business Relationships

Photo © Andreas Metz (creative commons)

#5: Build a professional development plan

It's hard to steer your ship ' let alone your strategy for SEO and inbound marketing at your organization ' without knowing where it's headed. And if you find that you've stopped learning and that your days are filled with nothing but ranking reports, then your ship has clearly run aground.

One way to solve these problems and keep yourself focused is to build a professional development plan for yourself. Elements of a strong plan include:

• A vision and set of goals for what you want to achieve for yourself
• Realistic timelines ' short-term (1 year or less), medium-term (1-2 years), and long-term (2+ years) ' that lead incrementally (and perhaps iteratively, depending on your needs) up to your goals using small steps along the way
• A list of your mentors and other supporters who can help you reach your goals and overcome obstacles
• An outline of "known unknowns," or the areas where you realize you have an experience or knowledge gap that you'll want to fill in
• Resources (events, trainings, schools, books, blogs, networks, etc.) that can help you learn and grow
• Methods for measuring your progress and holding yourself accountable for continually making progress

It was the act of building a professional development that helped me realize that I wanted to go back to school and switch the focus of my career from SEO to information management and strategy. It wasn't until I put this plan together that I realized how much I enjoyed story-telling in business settings, which gave me confidence to start pitching SEO and Internet marketing conferences for speaking opportunities.

Want to find out what you really want?  You can get started with this great guide for EduCause (PDF) that includes worksheets, templates, and journals.

PRO-tip: Use gamification to keep yourself invested in your long-term development. For a while, I was mentally giving myself what I thought of as "experience points" (yeah, I grew up playing D&D ' what of it?) for overcoming particular challenges, whether it be commenting on someone's blog, submitting a pitch for a conference, or getting some optimization out the door to customers. You could take the next step by documenting your own experience points in an Excel, or placing them on a big chart on your wall, or even creating physical representations for them to give yourself a more in-depth awareness of your progress.

Having trouble coming up with a vision for your career or work? Try checking in with a career counselor near you who can help you learn about yourself, your goals at work, and inspire you to construct language around what you want to achieve. You may have the opportunity to undergo tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the Strong Interest Inventory to learn more about your interactions and passions. I've known several people who have taken this approach and they've all enjoyed the experience, considering it money (and time) well spent!

Photo © SheltieBoy (creative commons)

#6: Go Agile

Go back and look at what we've covered so far; none of it has focused on technology, implementation, or code. Rather, we've focused on people instead of systems; listening and understanding needs instead of acting blindly; using data to tell stories and work toward goals; and being a great colleague/servant in order to build strong teams. These are all tenants of Agile Marketing ' which is so clearly the way of the future that it's all I can do to not shout it from the roof-tops. Mark my words: all marketers and especially SEOs will be working this way in the future.

Why? First of all, Agile has an excellent track record of success in the world of software development. Devs have been using this process and methodology for nearly two decades and marketers should learn from their experience in order to solve common problems that we always see in our work, such as:

• Too many unproductive meetings
• Too much documentation and status reporting, not enough action
• An inability to take in new knowledge from the outside world and apply it quickly
• A lack of focus on (and collaboration with) our customers
• Long delays in shipping new campaigns and marketing innovations to customers
• Too much marketing structure and not enough learning from "crossing the streams" of our disciplines

Do these sound like realistic descriptions of the problems you face in doing your job as an in-house SEO? Agile marketing helps us solve these core institutional challenges, allowing us to get closer to our customers while reducing time to market with our campaigns and optimizations.

Get started now by following these steps:

• Review my recent Whiteboard Friday video on Agile Marketing and previous presentations
• Check out this list of links to Agile Marketing tools and blogs
• Attend an Agile Marketing meetup in your hometown (or if there isn't one, then start your own!)

Photo © Jukka Vuokko (creative commons)

#7: Break down the silos to work across channels beyond just SEO

Here's a question to ask yourself: what do you think customers do when they're not conducting searches and clicking on results? It turns out that they're real people (!) who are active in the world, have families they care about, live in communities, pursue their dreams, resist the fears and challenges that get in their way, snack on their favorite junk foods (in case you're wondering, I'm a fan of Frito-Lay® TOSTITOS® Restaurant Style With A Hint Of Lime Flavored Tortilla Chips), and so on.

So why should we treat customers as if they're just a collection of one-and-done organic query strings? Why should we just focus on their last organic click that either leads to a conversion (or doesn't) instead of trying to understand the bigger picture of the customer's journey? Well, of course you shouldn't do those things.

Repeat after me: "MY USERS ARE GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THEIR KEYWORDS." Note: this is a helpful motto to keep in mind as we approach year two of "Keyword (not provided)."

Instead, use multi-channel attribution measurement with a longer attribution period than you might normally employ (say, a 30-day window instead of just same-day or even seven-day attribution) in order to get a better sense of the customer's actions online. Mike Pantoliano from Distilled recently spoke about attribution modeling at MozCon, showing how you can get started quickly just by using Google Analytics. You'll see some really exciting, inspiring phenomena when you do this:

• Organic search probably converts better than your company thinks it does. SEO doesn't just drive new customer acquisitions, but also provides "assists" to most other programs (paid search, e-mail, social, etc.). You probably already have a great ROI for organic search showing how each click costs just a tiny fraction of a penny, but this makes it an even better investment. You can use this data to build a model showing why your company should invest more budget and resources in your program.
• Driving support for other programs and channels... also drives SEO! For example, when we increased our paid search spending on top-of-funnel head terms, we saw a lot of those same people return to our site through branded organic search later on (see slides #10-17). So rather than operate in a winner-take-all, zero-sum game when it comes around to budgeting season at your workplace, partner up with your colleagues to show them how strategic investments in their programs can also have the impacting of building organic search traffic. This gives their investments far more bang for the buck, increasing their ROI while giving them additional reasons to partner with you on your initiatives.
• Your organic search customers are interacting with you off-line. In my case, they're not just using mobile devices and tablets, but they're also going into physical retail stores. But even if you don't have stores or other brick-and-mortar interfaces, you can start to divine off-line intent based on your customers' mobile queries. Not only that, but you can begin to encourage incremental off-line behavior from the online channel by testing new messages in your calls-to-action, landing pages, and <meta> descriptions. If you have physical stores or other real-world places where customers can interact with you, then driving additional people to visit them will help you win the support of SEO from those location managers.

On that last point, it's pretty hard to measure your customers' activity when they jump from the online to the off-line world (and back again). Unless you have lots of expensive hardware, software, and a non-creepy way of tracking your individual customer's behavior, it' difficult to assess these sorts of multi-channel actions with any degree of accuracy.

PRO-Tip: to get at this figure, we assigned a revenue estimate to online actions that signaled off-line intent (see slides #12-15). You can set up Google Analytics goals to measure these events and then multiply by your revenue figure. A more complex model would also factor in off-line conversion, abandonment, and average customer spend to come up with an even better estimate of true customer behavior.

Taking this approach allowed us to establish a series of KPIs that we could measure ourselves on and optimize against as we made enhancements. Is it perfect? No way. But it let us get started on work without losing time to "analysis paralysis". Even Avinash admits that it's going to be awhile until we have truly reliable measures of online/off-line jumps and real-world customer activity. So my advice is to stop waiting and start testing.

Want to learn more about multi-channel attribution and get started in your analysis? Start here:

• Introducing Multi-Channel Funnels: discover untapped opportunities in your conversion path and Google Analytics Help: Multi-Channel Funnels
  (Google Analytics Blog)
• Video: Multi-Channel and Attribution Analysis
  (Justin Cutroni on online-behavior.com; also see this blog post by Justin)
• Multi-Touch Attribution Study Finds Organic Search Greatly Undervalued
  (Miranda Miller on Search Engine Watch, covering a Slingshot SEO e-Book)
• 3 Barriers to Proper Attribution; 1 Solution
  (George Michie at Rimm-Kaufman Group)

Photo © Violet Blue (creative commons)

#8: Stop. Chasing. Perfection.

As I've mentioned above, trying to be perfect in all of your actions tends to lead to more liabilities than benefits and more problems than solutions. A summary of those issues includes:

• An increase in anxiety and fear driven by an inability to live up to impossible standards
• Huge delays in getting optimizations and campaigns out the door to your customers
• More time and energy spent on documentation and reviews and approvals than on building things for customers
• "Analysis Paralysis" that acts as a bottleneck to your team and others within your organization
• Unsustainable increases in extra work that is not required to meet customer goals
• An inability to build big things or ship large projects; conversely, an over-focus on low-value minutiae, artifacts, and maintenance

The secret that SEOs (and pretty much everyone) need to learn is that we can't be perfect. It's not because we're not smart or talented or don't know what we're doing; rather, it's because things change in our industry far too quickly. "Perfect" today equates to "ZOMG! This is totally wrong!" tomorrow. Don't believe me? Look at the inboung.org homepage and count the number of disciplines and tactics that you need to know just to be minimally proficient in search marketing, let alone a completely up-to-date expert. If you waited until you were an expert in everything before doing anything... well, you'd never do anything at all.

So here's the solution, direct from Agile development: instead of trying to release complete products, campaigns, or optimizations, break them down into a series of small iterations that span from a minimum viable product (or "MVP"; in marketing terminology, this would be a minimum viable campaign) up to a final release of finished work. By adopting this principle of ongoing, iterative, continuous delivery, you can avoid the need for perfection and provide awesome features, tools, and content your customers right now instead of making them wait for six months or a year.

As Steve Jobs once said, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." So if we drop our notions of perfection in SEO and inbound marketing while ramping up our ability to make small, quick implementations, we'll deliver what our customers need to be successful in their goals. If you make a mistake or get negative customer feedback, that's OK because you can fix it during your next release cycle, which might be just a week or two away (or sooner ' Etsy.com has multiple releases going out daily) instead of half a year later... or longer!

Furthermore, by adopting a Build-Measure-Learn workflow, we can ensure that each new iteration is better than the last by making use of one of your core talents as an in-house SEO: your mastery of data and analytics. You can leverage those skills to show your partners and leadership the clear impacts of your efforts. Crunching the numbers from each release of your campaigns or optimizations provides the data you need to demystify SEO for your colleagues, which in turn builds trust and more robust support for your efforts.

So don't chase perfection ' chase speed and frequency of releases instead!

Image © SEOmoz (used with permission from SEOmoz)

#9: Hack your organization ' and our industry! ' with TAGFEE

"TAGFEE" stands for Transparent and Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional. You're probably aware that these tenants are the core guiding principles for SEOmoz as a company. About a year ago, I got several Mozzers, associates, and members of the wider community to write about what TAGFEE meant to them and how they're using it in their daily lives. And like I said in that Q&A post, I still believe that TAGFEE is just as much an innovative tool for our work as SEOs as Open Site Explorer, the Keyword Difficulty Tool, or even Excel.

Here's why: think about how much time our industry spends on myth-busting all those falsehoods about SEO. Consider how much distrust there is about what we do, why we do it, and even who we are. Think about how many times you, personally, have had the white-hat/black-hat conversation with your colleagues and peers. Remember every time that someone's sighed or rolled their eyes when you bring up SEO. And don't even get me started on how many times SEO has died.

So you're well-aware of how the public misunderstands our work, but also consider how they perceive our community: blackhat SEO forums were recently mentioned as being the fifth most disturbing online community on the entire Internet, right up there with child pornographers, online hit men, and suicide/self-harm groups. Think that these perceptions don't affect you? Think again: when you want to transition to a leadership role, when you interview for a job at another company, or when you want to make a move to another industry, you'll be challenged with these questions and misunderstandings about the work you've been doing.

I honestly believe that TAGFEE is one of the ways that we can bring our role within an organization ' and, at the macro-level, our industry ' out of the slimy gutter of snake oil. If we want to change the perception of SEOs in our own organization as well as in the public space, then we all need to hold ourselves responsible for acting.

Here's how you can make TAGFEE work for you right now in your in-house SEO job:

• Transparent: be upfront about what you know, don't know, and are still learning. Never be afraid to admit your ignorance and ask for help rather than pretend that you understand something you don't. Cite your sources, show your data, and be clear about how/why you're interpreting it. Actively take the blame when things go wrong and productively document your plans for making them right. Be honest and direct in your interactions with others. Along with positive outcomes, share negative results when they occur instead of trying to hide them or distract attention from them.
• Authentic: like I state above, be the best person to work with at your company. Don't shy away from revealing your loves, hobbies, or personal passions. Likewise, seek to understand your colleagues and partners (and, most of all, your customers!) as whole, complete human beings. Become a brand ambassador for your company as well as for your own personal brand. Don't lie about who you are, what you do, and what you believe even when the world is constantly incentivizing you to do so. Remember that authenticity is much like accountability: it's a warm blanket to wrap yourself in, not a cudgel to use against someone else.
• Generous: help your colleagues meet their goals before asking them to support yours. Seek to understand what people need to be successful in their work and fulfilled in their lives and support their progress toward those goals. Make sure that the first thing you do during a crisis is to ask "How can I help?" rather than say "It's not my fault!" Give before you take, and don't hoard your staff or other resources ' share them where they're needed the most.
• Fun: employ the concept of gamification for your personal tasks and within your teams; an in-house SEO I met at SMX last year told me about how he set up a scoreboard awarding points and trophies for top partners. Always celebrate your successes as well as your learnings from failures. Don't emphasize rigid processes or formal settings ahead of productive activities and relationships. Stop fearing chaos and embrace the need for individuals to express themselves and work in their own ways. Don't just provide expertise on your subject area; be friendly and approachable as well to get others excited about it. Party like it's 1999!
• Empathetic: follow The Golden Rule; when a concept crosses over pretty much every religion ever, it's worth some consideration. You can best accomplish this by actively listen to your colleagues and seek to understand what drives them, what their concerns are, and what challenges they're facing. Place people and relationships far ahead of processes, business goals, and standards. Support your colleagues during both professional and personal crises. And for (Dr.?) Pete's sake, stop gossiping and placing rants or sarcasm above providing utility and value within all of your relationships.
• Exceptional: always seek to do your best and maintain the highest level of quality in your work, but not at the cost of violating the other TAGFEE tenants (e.g., chasing perfection for its own sake as I state above). Looking beyond yourself and your personal work, endeavor to create exceptional teams and relationships as well. Consistently challenge yourself to learn something new and raise the bar. Surpass goals when you can, but not to the point of a breakdown in sustainability, work-life balance, or to the detriment of other people and their efforts.

Next steps: apply these learnings in your personal online brand and other external channels. Blog about them, talk about them at conferences, build stories around them and become an advocate for radical transparency, authenticity, generosity, fun, empathy, and exceptionalism in your everyday life. You'll know that you've got it right when you start to see positive changes in your relationships, your conversations, even your use of language. Not to mention better sleep at night.

Furthermore, if you want to come up with your own code or your own guiding principles, that's great! You can (and should) iterate on SEOmoz's solution to make your own set of personal tenants that help guide your way through your own organization.

Photo © Travis Isaacs (creative commons)

#10: Don't just listen to me ' learn from others, too!

A number of other folks have told great stories with actionable tips for optimizing the in-house SEO experience. Here are a few of my personal favorite resources to help you continue your journey:

• Advice for the Newbie In-House SEO
  (Patricia Skinner on Search Engine Journal)
• The Ultimate Guide to In House SEO
  (Laura Lippay)
• Implementing In-House SEO: What You Need to Succeed
  (Bruce Clay)
• Making The Jump To In-House SEO, The In-House SEO Life Cycle, Flying Solo: The One-Person In-House SEO Team, and Hello, Goodbye: 5 Lessons Learned 5 Weeks Into A New In-House SEO Position
  (Cameron Olthuis, Jessica Bowman, Aaron Bradley, and Conrad Saam, all on Search Engine Land)
• Where Should In-House SEO Reside?, 9 Characteristics of an In-House SEO, and The Value of an In-House SEO
  (all by Bob Tripathi on Search Engine Watch)

---

That's it! I'm looking forward to your comments below ' in particular, I'd love for you to share any other strategies for success as an in-house SEO so that we can all keep learning together and make this post a collection of resources for folks who are new to the in-house SEO discipline.

What are your favorite in-house SEO strategies, tactics, and hacks? Let us know!

Growing Your Audience with Random Affinities

Most of us don't get to choose what we write about. Your new client makes pollen-resistant underwear? Congratulations. You're now an author specializing in allergen-repelling undergarments.

This setup sounds pretty funny until you have to write 15 blog posts per month for PollenProof''s new marketing campaign. The idea well runs dry pretty quick. How do you keep your interest peaked and idea generator fresh? Random affinities to the rescue!

Random affinities

This term is 100% made up by me with a lot of help from some colleagues. I'm not so worried about protecting it ' just beware that if you decide to use it and get laughed out of the room, your only reference is a sweaty, pale marketing guy who spends his spare time training his cats to play fetch.

Two topics have 'random affinity' if they are connected only by a common audience. For example: the fact that I like cycling may mean I'm four times more likely to watch "Adventure Time." There's no subject connection between cycling and "Adventure Time" - Jake and Finn never ride a bicycle. The only connection is the fact that an unusual number of people are interested in both.

A few other (potential) examples:

• Cyclists are more likely to own tablet computers.
• Cyclists worry more about skin cancer and skin protection.
• People who belong to a PTA or PTO are more likely to be aquarium or zoo members.
• People who attend boat shows are more likely to watch extreme sports on TV.

Don't overthink it. Two ideas + no obvious connection except audience = random affinity.

So what?

This is the part where you say: So what, Ian? You writing a new book or something? Why are you wasting my time with all this fake academic marketing crapola?

The answer is this: random affinities are another way to attract and keep your long tail audience. I don't buy a bicycle every month (not for lack of trying). I buy one every few years. You can try to catch my attention at just the right time for a bike purchase. But you've got a better chance of selling to me if you catch and hold my attention throughout my bicycle buying dry spell. You can do that by speaking to the random affinity topics I like. I'm over 30, plus I sunburn under full spectrum lighting, so skin protection is pretty important to me when I ride. I own a tablet computer, as well. And, if you occasionally talk about "Adventure Time," there's no question that I will remember your company when I head for the local bike shop for my next toy.

Use 'em right, and random affinities can increase your likelihood of:

• Building rapport with potential customers
• Helping folks remember you
• Giving you something to write about besides pollen-proof skivvies

Company and sanity savers. They're dang handy.

Finding random affinities

Way back before the Internet, when I lived in a rolled-up newspaper and got paid in fish heads, we found random affinities by a) guessing, or b) interviewing random people and hoping they weren't screwing with us. Times were tough.

With the Internet, tools are abound. You can't click a link without knocking one over. Here are a few of my favorites for finding random affinities:

First, use your brain. This is marketing. After conducting all the math and pretending we can computerize it all, it's still about looking at the product, looking at the audience, and seeing the connections. Don't treat these tools as automatic marketing machines. If you come crying to me because you got fired after you tried to sell granola bars with articles about camel spiders, I'll just laugh. And probably write about you.

Facebook Ads are my #1 source. Sign into Facebook, then select Create An Ad. It doesn't matter what your first ad is about; you're just using it as a tester. Then, scroll down to 'Precise Interests.' Start typing, and pick the interest that makes the most sense. You'll see a list of suggested likes and interests:

Explore to your heart's content. Keep in mind that Facebook might not always help your exploration, so be sure to keep it creative. I once searched for "yurts" and found nothing. That's OK, keep searching! Moving on to the next tool...

Amazon.com is a freaking gold mine. Go search for the top books on your topic. Then scroll down to "Customers who bought this item also bought." It saved me when I was yurt-hunting. Apparently a lot of yurt shoppers also care about composting, ergonomic furniture, getaways, and my favorite, alpacas:

There are some loose semantic connections here, but if you're yurt-impaired like I was, these are great new topics. I'm not sure many people would make the connection between yurts and ergo furniture. And while I might picture alpacas frolicking about my yurt, I wouldn't have considered them potential topics.

Google suggest can sometimes help you connect unexpected subjects that are linked by audience questions. I could write a lot of articles about this one:

Though I have to admit, the question alone pushes yurts down on the list of Future Places Ian Might Live. **Shudder.**

Reddit is fantastic. Take a look at the subreddits for any topic:

I never would've thought of Burning Man. Or Occupy Wall Street, for that matter. These aren't really random affinities, but the search sure helped me come up with more material. And, I can now search Burning Man random affinities to find even more to write about. Evaporative air conditioners, anyone?

If your site, or any other relevant site, or any of the sites dealing with any of the random affinities you found get a decent amount of traffic, the DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you find even more. I searched the Burning Man web site in the Ad Planner and found some pretty useful stuff. First, and article or three about photo sharing and photography might be worth testing:

It's possible yurt fans look for concerts more than the average person, too:

I'll see what I can dig up about musical interests for my audience and test a few articles about best soundtracks for life in a yurt.

If you're not saying what the hell, you're not doing it right

Alpacas? Concerts? Desert events where visitors sunburn their unmentionables? It all seems' random. Right? Exactly. Truth is that the yurts example is a little bit on the fringes of the mainstream consumer audience. Try bigger B2B and B2C topics and you'll get even better, harder-to-find random affinities.

Is it working? Getting buy-in from the boss

Your boss doesn't care about your creative genius. She'll just want to see the money. Or the stuff that'll turn into money. So make sure you look at the data. I wrote a piece about Dungeons and Dragons and marketing, way back when. Affinities don't get much more random. When it comes to short-term traffic, it sure worked:

My success metric is sustained growth, though. Zooming out a bit more, it looks like I got a nice surge that lasted for at least a few weeks:

Visitors even stuck around to read the whole thing:

If I were padding anything except my ego, I'd look at sales and other conversions, too.

Of course, before you can even write, you've got to convince your boss this is a good idea. Be super-clear. Show her the audience overlap. I've found CMOs and similar to be really receptive to random affinity marketing because it fits with traditional best-practices so well. One suggestion before you begin: start with milder stuff. Don't sell yurts with Burning Man photos if you can do ergonomic furniture. Move on to the photos after you've proven the concept.

No autopilot

Again, this strategy can be messy. It's not perfect. But random affinities will give you a whole different way to access your audience and keep your content fresh. There are three keys takeaways to making random affinities work:

1. Don't make this your whole strategy. At most, random affinities can drive 20% of your editorial calendar. You need a few directly-related topics, too.
2. Set expectations. It's a lot easier to sustain your effort if no one expects a miracle. Make sure everyone knows this isn't a miracle marketing solution (like those exist). But also make sure they know that, in the budget spectrum, this stuff's low-cost and low-risk. Worst case scenario is that no one reads it.
3. Above all: If you're still using scripts to spam links on 10,000 blogs or ensuring that your keyword is 3.5% of every page on your site, random affinities are not for you. This is the stuff that blurs the lines between SEO and marketing. Which is why I like it so much. And why it works so damned well.

Guest Blogging - Enough is Enough

If your process chart looks like this, prepare for complete failure.

Guest blogging is not a strategy, and it's not a generic solution that can be applied to every client or every part of your site. Guest posts can be an effective supplemental tactic to a fully-formed strategy, but giving this tactic center stage is a recipe for frustration and inevitable defeat.

On-page factors don't pack the same punch they once did. Search engines have become much better at both compensating for imperfect site optimization and ignoring on-page tricks. Our collective focus began shifting towards off-page factors long ago; it's all about those tender, juicy links.

There are as many ways to get links as there are people and pages, but in the aftermath of Penguin, guest articles are slowly becoming an industry default. I fear that the trend is driven by a lack of creativity, augmented by fear of failure, and then reinforced by poor communication. 

I raised the issue of guest posting to someone who has done a lot of it - Distilled's head of Outreach, Adria Saracino:

 "Guest posting is safe" ... "We're SEOs. We're metric driven. We like being able to see this consistent, targeted movement. Guest posting plays to our tactical strengths. And once we see it working once, we just keep doing it because it's safe. We fall into a routine of guest posting and the blinders slowly form over time, stifling innovation and big wins.

Guest posting in most cases isn't going to bring you direct traffic or conversions, it's not a "branding" play. There is usually no other benefit other than metric movement, and while it's short-sighted, it's also the easiest to defend to the higher-ups. So we become slaves to a redundant process rather than testing innovative ideas. I may even be so bold as to say guest posting is what will mark a slow death to the fast-paced innovation our industry is known for when it comes to link building."

Diminishing Returns at Best

Guest blog posts, all by themselves, do increase rankings. That does not necessarily mean they are worth doing.

It's easy to forget about opportunity cost as an SEO when we have had past success with a given tactic. Far too often, we see results, and continue doing it as long as we possibly can. The value of an activity like guest posting is only worth doing if there's nothing better we could be doing with our time.

Once more, just because something works does not mean we should be doing it ' unless it is the best path to the fastest or most enduring results. Guest posting (by itself) is essentially never the best activity for an SEO, due primarily to the diminishing returns seen in long-term guest blogging campaigns.

Guest blogging's strength is that you can launch immediately, avoiding that lonely feeling of blog posts that no one comments on. However, the guest-blog-only strategy has two fatal weaknesses: 1) there is an obviously fixed ratio of one linking domain per article placed, and 2) you reach rapidly diminishing returns. Furthermore, ideal blogs are a finite resource, and you can either lower your standards or post again on a good blog. Neither option is necessarily bad, but both have diminishing returns.

A pure content strategy can be frustrating simply because it takes so long to get rolling. I'll be honest: I abandoned both a commercial and a philosophy blog in a past life because I got sick of writing posts no one read. But what if I had combined great content with other tactics?

What do I mean by a comprehensive strategy? I'm sure you remember this guy:

From Inbound Marketing is Taking Off by Rand Fishkin

With great content, your guest posts will be more effective. So will your email marketing campaigns, paid search traffic, and referral traffic. We can think of content as a multiplier that adds to almost any other marketing tactic.

The multiplier effect of amazing content happens two ways with guest posting (or any other channel, really). First, bloggers will be more likely to accept posts and talk about/to you if your target site has its own credible content. Second, users from the host blog will share and re-share your content if your site offers something they can be excited about.

Site Owner Fatigue

Link-based diminishing returns aside, the guest blogging bubble weakens further as site owners are continually poked and prodded by requests from acquaintances and strangers to allow them to guest post. Everyone is getting tired of the constant requests, especially when the requests are so damn horrible. I think Geraldine's recent post on her travel blog captures that well:

'Hello! I am interested in writing a high-quality guest post for your site! All I require is two contextual links placed within the post.'

You know that song from the sixties that starts with 'No-no no no no no no-no-no no?' That is now playing in my head. Because no.

Even if you actually read these blogs and really want to contribute something great, other people are making all but the most patient blog owners weary with their piles of requests.

Where are we headed, and what should we do next? SEO is not dying, and linkbuilding is not dead. I'm actually more optimistic than ever about the direction the industry is moving in. We're generally moving towards sustainability and making recommendations that are going to have a far bigger impact than raising the rankings for a couple tracked keywords.

Penalties: Unlikely for Most

It seems highly unlikely that Google will penalize guest posts just because they are guest posts. It's a perfectly legitimate strategy ' at least, when it is legitimate. Just consider that a ton of links from spammy sites publishing poorly-written content is more of a liability than a benefit. I'm not arguing that Google will bring the hammer down on guest blog posts, but risk certainly rises as quality declines.

Communicate and Fix Misconceptions

Some clients and managers are under the impression that it's your job to vanish into the nether, and return bearing all the links they will ever need to rank for their broadest pet phrase. They're probably in the wrong; that's not how SEO works anymore. It's easy to blame the people who have the wrong ideas, but whose fault is it when points of contact have these mistaken expectations?

It's our fault.

We know SEO. Presumably that's what we're taking checks for. We understand the value of content. Regardless of how someone picked up their mistaken assumptions - and this is worth looking into - it's up to us to correct misconceptions. 

We often get cornered into rote guest blogging when expected to solve their problems without interaction or support. Failure to communicate this fact; however, is not sufficient reason enough to head face first into the inevitable plateau of diminishing returns. For more on how to encourage cooperation, read Hannah's post on solving people problems. She doesn't use the phrase "managing expectations" even once, I promise.

Make Content a Pre-Requisite

I am not telling you to publish and wait. Links matter ' that's obvious. You can't sit and wait, hoping that some white knight blogger is going to come along and raise your precious content out of obscurity. 

Think of your site as a retail store selling widgets. You can perform your essential business function - selling widgets - out of an empty warehouse, but we know that the appearance, furnishing, ambiance, and customer service all matter. You probably wouldn't worry about posting billboards and local ads all over town until your retail space made customers comfortable. You want them to tell their friends and come back, so you get your store in order first.

Websites are no different in this regard. To make a potential customer feel comfortable, you need compelling design, good navigation, and good content. You want users to have a great experience - whether consuming your content or making purchases - so that they will tell others (hint: sometimes via links) and come back. If you want to invest in greater visibility, get your site in order and stop trying send people to the questionable warehouses of the Internet.

THEN Explore All the Channels

There's really nothing magic about the white-hat linkbuilding process. From the users and bloggers' perspective, it looks like this:

Sharing leads in turn to more awareness, and the circle of quality continues. In a recent webinar between Rand and Dharmesh at Hubspot, paid advertising was described as "renting attention." This is true, but until you have the free sort of attention, paying for it can be a worthy way of getting the process above started. Try running display ads to content. Try bidding on low-competition informational keywords that you have great content to match. Run PR campaigns to make people aware of the most interesting part of your business. And yes, do some well-thought guest posting to raise awareness of your content. Ann Smarty has a lot of great guidance on doing guest blogging the right way. 

I've singled out guest posting intentionally because its prevalance and average quality indicate that we're losing sight of goals and strategy. Much of what I've said, though, could apply to any channel. Pick a channel from the graphic above, and it's not hard to see you how having a great user experience with great content can make that tactic more financially beneficial.

There is real danger in getting myopic tunnel vision about a link or two in a post. We cheat ourselves out of compounding and self-perpetuating benefits when we fail to lay the groundwork. We're at risk of teaching a generation of bloggers that SEOs are just spammers out to trick bloggers. We're at risk of teaching new SEOs that linkbuilding for linkbuilding's sake is something beside foolish and short-sighted.

I understand the fear involved with taking a bet on the difficult links. It's not easy to tell someone that their content isn't cutting it, and it's even harder to provide a clear vision and map to get there. Connecting the dots between strategy and tactics is mentally exhausting, but you don't need to get it perfect right away. And please, let's stop with the crapstorm of throwing guest posts wherever we can.

4 Tips For Your Mobile SEO Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

Hello SEOmoz fans. My name is Aleyda Solis, @aleyda on Twitter. It's a pleasure to be here with you today, and I would like to show you four tips specifically about your mobile SEO strategy, which is a very hot topic nowadays.

The idea is to really answer some questions that can arise in the beginning of the process. The first question that you may have is how many mobile users you have and how they have found you, because really what you want is to, of course, be able to optimize your site and to be reachable to those specific mobile users that your specific site has.

Use Google Analytics. Go to the audience mobile devices section of your Google Analytics, and you will find there the operating system, the provider, also the resolutions, and the type of handhelds that your users are having when they are browsing to your site.

Also, you can configure an advanced segment in Google Analytics for the organic traffic, and you can specify to only see the specific mobile traffic, which are the pages and keywords and the conversions that get generated from this mobile organic traffic that comes to your site so you can understand better the behavior of that user, which are the topics and the pages and the information that they really consume.

At the beginning, sometimes, maybe you can identify that it's not all of your site that is really attractive to the mobile users, that you have some specific offer that you really want to promote to them. That is why it's very important that you identify first, at the beginning.

Also, use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools has a filter where you can see only the mobile search for keywords and pages impressions. So you can see how is your site already behaving on the SERPs for mobile users.

Finally, always, the Google Keyword tool. Remember the typical Google keyword tool that we use? There is a setting there where you can specify that you only want information for smartphone searches. Do it so you can see also: How does that match with the traffic you already have for your types of products or services?

For example, you can see that maybe the traffic that you are getting is not even near the possibilities and the volume that there is already going for mobile users for your type of product or services, and there's a lot of room to grow or a lot of possibilities in that area. That's another good tip.

Finally, you already know your user behavior, what type of user do you have from smartphones. So you want to move to the next question that usually arises: How does your site look from those mobile devices?

Now, you know that you have those users that they are using the iPhone or maybe a BlackBerry, Simian, whatever. How does your site look from those devices? You can use some tools. Screenfly is specifically good to see the different resolutions, how your site looks from the different resolutions on the different smartphones, tablets, mobile phones. Google Master Tools also has a feature named Fetch as Googlebot. You can set the smartphone option so you can see how the bot is really looking at your code, verify the code that they are really getting from your site, and eliminate any possibility of redirections that you may have at the beginning of something.

You can also use the add-on from Firefox, use their agents feature. You can switch to mobile or smartphone user agent. This relays how your site is also reachable from those type of devices easily.

So, now you know how your site looks. You may have problems with those types of users that can use certain types of smartphones, and maybe you need to improve a little bit how your site looks in them. Okay. That's the first thing to do.

Then the next question is: What type of mobile web is better for you?
Because of the analytics, okay, I know that I have a lot of possibilities. I know that my site is not really attractive for this type of device. But that doesn't mean that you are going to start from scratch doing whatever to make your site friendly. No. You need to identify which is the best strategy for you according to your type of site. Okay?

So the first site -- and this is the recommendation from Google and it's very, very popular nowadays also from a development perspective -- it's the responsive website. This is the ideal situation, also, if you have the same content that you want to deliver for the mobile and the desktop user. You have the flexibility to implement. You have a good CMS or you have development resources that may facilitate the implementation, but let's say that maybe you cannot change something on your site or you have a not flexible CMS and you have just switched six months ago. Maybe you have problems there to implement it. Right? This is, of course, the best for smartphone users or tablet users.

If you have a feature phone base of users that you have identified before, maybe it's not the ideal, because you will have more problems to make this site that is good for desktop also good for a feature phone.

So the responsiveness, you ask a question for this, but then, if some of those different criteria that I have discussed before are not met, you might consider the dynamic serving in the same URL. This is more suitable for those sites that want to really offer a different type of content, produce a type of users. Remember that a lot of mobile users are also users that are looking for local type of searches that you may verify before with a keyword tool or Google Analytics, but that means that maybe, for those type of users, you want to provide some specific offer, a coupon, something different, maybe references to go walk into your next store, a different type of content than for the typical desktop user. Right? So this will be the alternative.

If you cannot implement responsive, I have talked before, if you have feature phone users, then you will do dynamic serving in the same URL. That means that you will be at a parallel site, but this site or this content will be shown through the same URL. The thing is to implement the user agent detection so instead of showing one version of the content, you will show the other.

If you, for some reason, have no other possibility to implement this, then you will move to the parallel site in an "m" subdomain. This means that you will build off a parallel site, but it won't be shown on the same URL as the previous option. Then you will need to add some text or rel=alternate tag to refer user from the desktop version to the mobile one. Also, vice versa, with a canonical tag. So, like this, you won't have any content duplication problems.

At the end of the day, this is not optimal because this means that the crawler, Google, will need to really identify much more content, and you will give much more work to the crawler. It won't be as neat as to have just one URL for everything. You will need to work more also to improve the popularity of this other parallel site because you don't have the same URL for everything. So it's not the ideal situation really.

The fourth question that might arise is: How can Google find my mobile site now, if it is not responsive? Of course, if it's responsive, it's the exact same content that will be shown to the desktop user as to the mobile one.

So what will happen in this situation? For example, you have a parallel in a "m" subdomain. You will need to generate a mobile sitemap and upload it through Google Webmaster Tools. Of course, links, it is always a good practice to link between one version and another of the site if you're using different URLs. Of course, good dynamic serving. If you're using the dynamic server with the same URL, sometimes it's not well-configured.

At the end of the day, the Google bot doesn't realize that there's another version there hidden somewhere. This is not cloaking because you will actually show the exact same information not only to the mobile bot, but also to the mobile user. As long as the user and the bot see the same thing, it's not cloaking, really, but you need to verify that it's well-
configured. That's why it's very important that you check the feature on Google master tools and see if the mobile Google bot user agent is really seeing the code that you want.

So, these are the most difficult questions that arise when you are developing your mobile SEO strategy. I hope that these are of use for you now that this is a very hot topic. You verify and validate first if it has a sense to enable these type of sites right now for you. If it does, where are the best options to do it?

Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Do Improved Social Signals Cause Improved Rankings?

Everyone in search is by now aware that certain social signals are well-correlated with rankings.

In each major study published on the subject, the authors point to how correlation does not imply causation (see, for example SEOmoz and Searchmetrics). Dr. Pete even wrote a whole post on the subject.

I wanted to see if it was actually plausible for these correlations to arise without social signals being a direct ranking factor. I built some Excel models to test this out and see if I could build a model that achieved the observed correlations without assuming social signals as a ranking factor.

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I have a suspicion that this could be the most misinterpreted post I have ever written, so I thought I'd start with a prominent "Cliff notes" to be explicitly clear about what I am saying and more importantly what I am not saying.

I am saying

You can tweet any of the following without misrepresenting me:

• Social signals *may* be correlated with better rankings but not cause them [tweet this]
• Facebook Likes and rankings could achieve high correlation without Likes being a ranking factor [tweet this]

I am not saying

If you tweet any of the following attributed to me, I will write "does not follow instructions" on your forehead in magic marker:

• Likes don't matter [where did I say that?] [tweet this]
• Likes aren't a ranking factor [I don't show any evidence either way] [tweet this]
• Links are dead [what?] [tweet this]
• Correlation studies are a bad idea [I agree with Rand that we could actually use more studies] [tweet this]

What is this based on?

I have built a simplified Excel model of how pages accrue Likes over time. With no assumption of them being a ranking factor, I nevertheless demonstrate that we could see a strong correlation between Likes and ranking position.

Why focus on Likes?

The modelling works equally well with any of the social signals. I simply chose Likes to make the example more concrete - you could build the exact some correlation model with Tweets, Facebook Shares, Google +1s, or any other signal where accruing more social shares makes it even more likely that you will accrue more in the future.

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Starting at the beginning

Every time we see a correlation study, I see evidence that some people haven't completely taken on board the correlation/causation subtleties. This is unsurprising - the mathematics behind the calculations in these study is typically undergraduate level (with some of the advanced analysis verging on graduate level) - most people's intuition lets them down horribly when confronted with probability and statistics. (Don't believe me? Check out the Monty Hall Problem).

So let's start from the beginning:

What are these studies looking for?

When we say correlation in this context, you can imagine that what we are looking for is similarity. We are looking for evidence that two things happen together (and don't happen together).

In the context of these studies, we are typically looking to see if "ranking well" happens together with "strong social signals."

Now - the mathematical part comes in when we try to define "happens together with" properly. The human brain is a remarkably powerful pattern matching device. For example - how many sportsmen and women have a pre-game routine involving a specific pair of lucky socks because of a sequence of events something like:

• Wore a new pair of socks today. Kicked ass.
• Wore the same pair of socks as last week. Kicked ass.
• New socks in the wash. Grabbed a different pair. Got whupped.
• Socks successfully cleaned and dried. Kicked ass again.

Pretty compelling evidence for those socks, huh?

From that point onwards, the athlete refuses to surrender the lucky socks. Any future losses are attributed to other factors ("I did everything I could - I even wore my lucky socks").

Michael Jordan apparently started wearing longer shorts to cover his UNC "lucky shorts"

But let's look at this a little more closely and skeptically. Are there any other explanations for this sequence of events? Imagine that the athlete in question is good - winning roughly 75% of his or her games on average. Imagine also that the socks are, in fact, not magic and that they have no impact on the result (shocking, I know). The odds that the single loss of a set of 4 games will coincide with a single wear of a different pair of socks is then: 0.75 x 0.75 x 0.25 x 0.75 = 0.11

In other words, roughly one in ten pairs of socks would randomly look this lucky.

Given all this evidence, most of us would probably chalk it up to chance (but keep wearing our lucky socks just in case).

Add to this the fact that we can't help but be always on the lookout for these patterns (it's just how our brains are wired) and it's unsurprising that there is always some pattern to be seen somewhere.

Given all of this, we apply pretty high standards of proof before stating that there is correlation [i.e. that two things tend to happen (or not) together]. This is measured with a "confidence" which is similar to the layman's definition but is measured in probabilities. We express our confidence in terms of "the probability that we would see a correlation at least this strong even if there were no underlying correlation." Statisticians typically talk in 95% or 99% confidence ranges (though note that a 95% confidence interval is still wrong one time in 20).

The ranking factor studies undertaken by SEOmoz and others have shown a non-zero correlation with high confidence. In other words, there is a correlation between certain social signals and higher rankings. I don't think anyone is seriously disputing that at this point.

Correlation is not causation

This tricky phrase gets wheeled out with every study. What does it mean?

It means that the mathematical techniques we have applied to be confident that there is a relationship between these two variables says nothing about whether one causes the other.

It's easy to think of correlations that are not causative. More ice creams are sold in months when more sun lotion is sold. Sun lotion sales don't cause ice cream sales and ice cream sales don't cause sun lotion sales. Both are caused by sunny days.

While measuring correlation is straightforward based solely on raw data, this is generally not sufficient to judge causation. This is especially true where neither variable is in your control (such as the sunshine example above). Measuring or understanding causation is a topic for another day.

The important thing to note is that the size of the correlation or the degree of confidence in the correlation have no bearing at all on the likelihood of a causal relationship.

This is one of the common misconceptions with the interaction between social signals and rankings - when people say things like:

"But the correlation is too high - social signals must be a ranking factor"

I'm afraid my response is

"I'm sorry to inform you that you have been taken in by unsupportable mathematics designed to prey on the gullible and the lonely."

Sorry for the Sheldon moment there

Seeking alternative explanations

I believe in a healthy skepticism when presented with bold evidence. I can see lots of arguments why search engines could view social signals as ranking factors (though at least in the case of tweets, I've long supported an algorithmic discounting of nofollow). For all the reasons outlined above, however, I'm not convinced we have seen real evidence that this is in fact what is happening.

Assuming we take the correlation studies at face value, there are three possible explanations:

1. Social signals are a ranking factor (and apparently a strong one at that)

This appears to be the hypothesis of Searchmetrics:

These findings come from a study by search and social analytics company Searchmetrics aimed at identifying the key factors that help web pages rank well in Google searches

From Searchmetrics (emphasis mine).

2. The causation goes the other way - ranking well results in better social signals

Although it's hard to know how strong this effect could be, it's easy to believe there is some kind of effect here. Just think about your searching/liking behaviour:

Carry out a search:

Click on a link:

Recommend the page:

I only used this example because I know how disappointed Mike was when we had to move this page - while the redirect carried across much of the link equity, it reset the social signals - this content has been tweeted and Liked thousands of times. Sorry, Mike.

3. There is a hidden causal variable (some kind of "page quality" signal?) that causes better rankings and increased social signals

The research Dan Zarrella published here last week on the relationship between social signals and links indicates that this is a plausible explanation - since we see that there is a fairly strong relationship between the two. The challenge with this approach is that if we believe social signals' correlation with rankings comes entirely from their correlation with a real ranking factor, it's surprising that we often see a stronger correlation between rankings and social signals than with any other single factor:

Can the alternatives account for the observations?

Whenever this has come up in conversation, I've had people express doubts that #2 or #3 could be strong enough effects to give the results we see.

My intuition said that #2 could be. Mainly based off the fact that any effect that is there will compound over time under an assumption that "Likes beget Likes" which seems reasonable given the way that Facebook edgerank and visibility work. If we have compounding growth to magnify small effects, then over time we could see remarkable correlation appear from relatively small effects.

So I decided to see if I could build a plausible model of #2.

Imperfect models

What do I mean by a plausible model?

I mean that I'm going to simplify a whole raft of stuff from the real world (I'm going to think about a single SERP, for example, and I'm going to think only in time units of months). I'm going to attempt not to have these oversimplifications bias the answer in my favour. My default position (known as the "null hypothesis" in statistics and probability) is that these effects are not strong enough. I'm going to construct a model that biases towards that being true and see if I can still produce a strong enough effect.

Hacking the Excel

I built this model in Excel [warning: macros]. It's very hacky - just designed to find an answer rather than to be a robust model. It takes a set of simple assumptions (none of which include a causal link from Likes to rankings) - you can see these on the "Input" sheet - and you can substitute your own values if you would like to see the impact these have:

• Top ranking pages get 400 visits / month from search (the model over-simplifies to think about a single keyword/SERP getting 1,000 searches a month - this is a proxy for all organic traffic to the page)
• Organic traffic drops off through the ranking positions according to an averaged traffic distribution
• Each website is labelled as doing "Facebook marketing" (whatever that entails exactly) with a 30% probability. Facebook marketing doubles the rate of "random" Like acquisition. <geeky details>Sites not doing FB marketing in the model accrue "random" Likes according to a Poisson distribution with a mean of 10</geeky details>
• Likes --> more Likes at a rate of 3% (i.e. for every 100 Likes a page has, it'll get 3 more in the next month)
• Traffic --> Likes at a rate of 1%

This is what the Poisson distributions look like for the geeks in the audience:

It creates a really simple time series of Likes for each page in each month. The model runs for 36 time periods. Each refresh of Excel runs a new scenario and results in a single Spearman rank correlation at the end of the time period. Spearman rank correlation is the same measurement tool used in the SEOmoz and Searchmetrics studies.

This is what the growth of Likes looks like for a single example run (note that the lines are not ordered by ranking position despite the fact that the ordering is correlated with ranking across many runs):

I then ran the same model a hundred independent times to get a fair assessment of the correlation we could expect as a result of the simple assumptions above. (There is an embedded macro that does this for you if you would like to reproduce it - I'm not a macro expert - there's no doubt loads wrong with this):

This is actually higher than the correlation found in most studies I'm aware of and was based off my first pass of "finger in the air" assumptions. It's easy to tweak the assumptions to get way higher. I'd be interested in a discussion about realistic assumptions and/or flaws in the methodology.

Since there is definitively no causation in my model, unless someone can find a flaw in my method (a very real possibility - I'm a little rusty at this), I'm going to declare that it absolutely is possible for the factors we described above to be strong enough to result in the measured correlation without Likes causing better rankings directly. (Remember - you could build this exact same model applied to any of the social signals so this applies equally well to Tweets, Facebook Shares, Google +1s, etc.)

I'd love to hear if you think I've missed something or got something wrong in building my model.