Google's EMD Algo Update - Early Data

Recently, I wrote about changes we've been tracking in how Google treats Exact-Match Domains (EMDs). Yesterday (Friday, 9/28), Matt Cutts tweeted the following message:

It was initially unclear what 'upcoming' meant and whether the change was in progress or would roll out later in the weekend. Matt went on to say that the change 'affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree,' but didn't pin down the timeline. This morning, our new MozCast "Top-View" metrics showed the following:

We measured a 24-hour drop in EMD influence from 3.58% to 3.21%. This represents a day-over-day change of 10.3%. While the graph only shows the 30-day view, this also marks the lowest measurement of EMD influence on record since we started collecting data in early April.

So, Who Got Hit?

Across our data set of 1000 SERPs, 41 EMDs fell out of the Top 10 (5 new EMDs entered, so the net change was 36 domains). Please note that we can't prove that a domain lost ranking due to the algorithm change ' we can only measure what fell out. Here are 5 examples of domains that lost ranking as of this morning (9/29) ' all had previously ranked for at least the past 7 days:

• www.bmicalculatormale.com (#4)
• www.charterschools.org (#7)
• playscrabble.net (#3)
• www.purses.org (#3)
• www.teethwhitening.com (#4)

The parenthetical value shows the EMDs ranking on 9/28 (the day before the drop). Again, all we know is that these domains fell out of the rankings for their exact-match phrases as of this morning ' I'm not making any statements about the quality of the domains as a whole. As you can see, the affected domains cover a range of phrase length and TLDs (including .com's).

There's no clear pattern in the size of the drop ' some fell out of the top 100 entirely, while others slipped a couple of pages. For example, www.charterschools.org fell from #7 to #23, whereas playscrabble.net dropped from #3 down 18 pages to #183.

What About The #1s?

You may have noticed that none of my example domains were previously ranked in the #1 spot. Across the 41 EMDs that dropped out of the top 10 in our data, none of them ranked #1 the previous day. Three domains held the #2 spot prior to their fall, including www.mariogamesonline.net, which is no longer in the top 100. It's interesting to note that, of the 41 EMDs affected, 5 of them had 'games' in their domain name, but this could just be a fluke (or a sign of an industry with too many low-value sites).

What's The Pattern?

It's not my goal to call these sites out ' some may have dropped in ranking due to factors that had nothing to do with this algorithm update (and were only coincidentally EMDs). For example, www.charterschools.org appears to be a legitimate site representing a professional organization: the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA). At first glance, it appears that their only crime may be choosing a keyword-focused domain over their own brand. The site doesn't really target the phrase 'charter schools' particularly strongly and is tied to one state. It's not a bad site, but one can argue whether it deserves to rank in the top 10 for a competitive keyword simply because of its domain name.

Other sites in the mix do appear to exhibit more traditional low-quality signals ' aggressive keyword usage, low-authority, spammy link-building, etc. ' and seem to have been ranking solely by virtue of their EMDs. There's no one clear signal in play, though ' at this point, we have to assume that Google is weighing multiple factors. Again, it is interesting to note that no EMDs previously at #1 were affected, but our data set is still relatively small.

If you have specific questions about the data, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I'll do my best to follow up. These patterns are surprisingly complex, and I wanted to dig in for a quick first look while the data was still fresh.

Lessons Learned: Scaling to 100 Moz Employees - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. I wanted to do something a little different for Whiteboard Friday because the company is kind of changing. I'm changing a little bit. The things that we've done and accomplished are very different to what we focused on in the past. I still love talking about SEO tactics and social media marketing tactics and content marketing and email, and all these inbound marketing stuff.

But I also wanted to give you some sense of kind of what's been going on here. We have grown in the last only 7 months from about 50 Mozzers on the team to 100 people. We're going to be probably hiring our 100th person either as you watch this or in the week or two following that. We're up at 92 as I record this, which is prior to my trip to Ireland.

So this number is kind of crazy to me. When I started the company, there were three of us. It was me and Matt Inman, who's now the Oatmeal guy, and Jillian, my mom. The three of us would sort of sit in the office and try and figure out what could we do, and for four years, we didn't really have a whole lot more team members. I think Matt joined in like year one or two of that, and then a few years later we had four or five people.

But it's been a strange and crazy journey. A lot of it is self-analysis and self-reflection, trying to figure out, "What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What's going well? What's not going well?"

So, I figured I'd share some of the things, particularly in the last seven months, as we've kind of had this very exciting time of scaling up the company and taking funding from Brad and Foundry Group and having them on the team. Growing the team dramatically, doing our first acquisition, doing some interesting sorts of top-grading additions to the team. Adding in new managers in places, and growing almost a layer of management that we've never really had before, because teams are getting huge, and 18 people can't report just to Jamie. So this interesting time has brought a few lessons that I want to talk about.

So one is that productivity and features can win short term, and a lot of the time when you're building a company, I know I was like this, I mentored some TechStars companies and talked to a lot of early stage startups, and they have this thing too. They think that the accomplishments I need to make are all inside the product, that the product and the features are really what's going to build and sell the company, and it's true. I agree with that to some degree, but that's a short-term kind of win.

What I mean when I say that is that that will not necessarily attract great people to your company. You will not necessarily build a long-term, repeatable, scalable business model. It will not necessarily build up a culture that can hold up to challenges that you almost certainly face as you grow and scale. What will do that are culture and people.

So what I've sort of seen here is that when we have tough challenges and when we've gone through times like everything is broken, customers are very angry and upset, we did something wrong in the community, we're getting a lot of criticism for a blog post that I wrote, or we were getting sued for something that Sarah put on the blog, this was years and years ago. All these types of challenges, we can't raise funding. We went through these two rounds in '09 and 2011 where we couldn't raise any money, the thing that has gotten us through those really tough times has not been, "Oh, well the product is really good. Open Site Explorer is a really good product, or SEOmoz Pro is a really good product." Those things certainly help and they keep customers with us, and they're good things to focus on.

But for me and for a lot of the executive team, what's been the challenge has been focusing on these two things - culture and people. Let me give you a perfect, perfect example of this.

So, we had a really crappy outage with Mozscape, with our web crawl, just this problem where it was going to be, I think, a week and a half, two weeks late. This was earlier this year. It turned into being quite late, and it was just really bad. Like you promise customers, right on the calendar it says, "Hey, Mozscape will update this day." Then two weeks later it's like, "Where the hell is that index? What's going on?"

In any case, so I was emailing with the exec team, and I'm sort of like,
"Hey, we have poured money and resources. We've hired the best people we could possibly find who've done all sorts of amazing things in their career. We're throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month at Amazon building up more instances. We're running simultaneous indices. What's going wrong? Why can't we solve this problem? What's going wrong here?"

Our CTO, Anthony, replied with, "Hey, let's talk about this in depth."
Anthony and I talked about it. I talked to Carr and some of the other team members who are on the big data team. One of the interesting things that I found digging into the problem was that someone on the team had written some code for deployment that kind of failed, and it really borked us, like badly, just really hurt us. What Anthony said that was fascinating was,
"It's okay. Not only is it okay, we're going to work with this guy and we'll get better."

But the beautiful thing that I realized, I was so upset when I had sent that email, and then the beautiful thing that I realized is that we had the culture and the people right, because no one on that team threw that guy under the bus. No one. Think about that. Right? Someone is causing insane, massive amounts of pain to your customers, and no one on the team is going like, "Hey, you know what? This is this guy's fault. He broke this. He f***ed this up."

Well, man, like . . . oh, I probably shouldn't swear on Whiteboard Friday. I'm sorry about that. When you see that happening in your company, when you see that recovery from challenges, that team spirit, that nobody gets thrown under the bus, this isn't one person's fault, this is, "Hey, we're all on the team together," you know you have the right thing right and you can fix this.

The Mozscape update will come out. It'll be okay. Customers will be angry. Some of them will quit, but they'll come back. We'll build the product up better. Six months from now it'll be great. A year from now it'll be the best thing on the Internet. It's okay. If the culture is in the right place, this happens.

Another great example of this, we had a very big launch that was planned for November of this year of 2012, and it got pushed to probably March or April or something of next year. It's super frustrating, right? It's like,
"Oh, my God. We've been waiting for this for so long, and it's such a big project," da, da, da. "We really want to get it out the door, but we have to wait these extra four or five months." Just a killer, and yet, Adam, who is our Chief Product Officer, and Anthony, our CTO, Anthony noted that in any other company he's ever been at and most companies in the world, they would be fighting with each other to show whose fault it was, whose team was responsible for that.

But there was none of that at all. There wasn't even a tiny bit of that. It's that getting the culture and people right first, and then focusing on that stuff. This will come over time with great people and great culture. So, that's an exciting thing but a hard thing to realize.

The second thing I want to talk about, so at some point, sustaining what you've built, keeping consistency, keeping quality up, all that kind of stuff, actually is more important than building all the new features. At some point, people will go, "Hey, I am joining SEOmoz Pro," or, "I'm joining Survey Monkey," or, "I'm joining Unbounce," whatever that product they're subscribing to, "because I love the service. I love it as it is. I know you want to add new features. I know you want to make it better. But I like this product."

Therefore, keeping that product stable and up and reliable and consistent, and spending a lot of engineering time and effort and tech ops' time and effort, and product time and effort, marketing time and effort, customer service time and effort on making that solid, actually becomes more valuable to the business than adding the new features, which is what everybody gets excited about in startup land.

So you sort of have that startup scale point, and then right about here is you've acquired customers, you've got thousands of people on your platform, and they're relying on you. New features becomes a great way to keep growing and expanding, but you've got to have a solid product.

A few weeks ago, when you're watching this, hopefully it's a few weeks ago, our ranking stuff was out, our AdWords data was gone - that might not even be back yet - Open Site Explorer was having problems, the API was having problems, like just everything. Followerwonk was like, "Okay, that's working." But just so many things were broken in our product, and there were just engineers scrambling, staying up until 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning.

You're getting emails from people on the all-staff alias, that are like,
"Hey, I won't make it in until noon, because last night was just hell for me." Man, I mean, these are really, really tough times and tough challenges. But it's a realization that we can't have 90% of the team working on all the new features and 10% of the team trying to sustain everything else. It's got to flip. It's got to be at least a half and half balance, maybe even more towards sustaining. I think that's going to happen here at Moz, and I might recommend it for other companies too.

The third thing, one of the challenges we've been experiencing with people internally is that . . . I'm sure you have this in your career too. I'm sure you get this problem. You're an SEO or you're an inbound marketer, social media marketer, community manager, you're a content marketer, blogger, whatever you are inside your organization, and you think, "Well, how do I grow my role in the company? How do I become more important to this company and a more valuable asset to them, and grow my title and my salary?"

That progress is so important to people. Especially in sort of first-world economies, white collar industries, that kind of stuff, seeing that progress is incredibly important. If you make it such that managing people appears to be the only way to scale up your career, you're going to fail.

This is one of the things that Google got so right. If you're Google and you're an engineer, there's this whole different track for non-manager, non-
product engineers to grow up. I can't remember exactly what it is, but I think it's engineer, senior engineer, distinguished engineer, and then Google fellow or something like that. It's very hard to achieve those top levels.

I think Matt Cutts, who many of you might know because he's the head of the Webspam team, I believe he's either a distinguished engineer or a Google fellow. I think he might be a fellow at this point, and it's a big, big deal. It's very hard to reach those top levels. Obviously, lots of salary and stock and recognition comes with that.

That's a wonderful, wonderful thing because what you don't want to do is you don't want to encourage an engineer or a customer service person or a marketer or a fantastic designer or a great product person to only have the path of success be management. It shouldn't be that way. Management is a very different kind of discipline. It requires a lot of empathy and therapy and those types of things. Being a fantastic engineer, designer, tech ops person, doesn't necessarily correlated with that.

Two of my, like three actually of my absolute role models at this company are people who have held management positions, and then after working with their manager said, "You know what? I don't think this is the right role for me." They've actually stepped down into individual contributor roles, but stayed here.

One of the people who did that years ago was Jeff Pollard, who was our CTO right after we got funding, after Matt Inman left in 2007. He was our CTO until 2009, when we hired Kate Matsudaira. But he came to me in '08. I remember sitting back in our old office above the brewery. He pulls me out of the office, and we're just chatting literally in the hallway because there's no private office space.

He's like, "Rand, I think what this team needs and the degree of technology and engineering that we need to get to, I'm not the guy to lead this team. I think we need to go out and we need to find someone." We did. We had an exhaustive, long search. But think about the humility and the empathy and the just amazing wonderfulness in the person of Jeff, who unfortunately left now. He's at Disqus down in San Francisco, and we wish him the best. But to be able to step down from that role, and then to work here for another two and a half years under Kate's leadership, to kind of grow his own skills, it just takes amazing self-recognition.

The last point I wanted to talk about, this challenge of single points of failure. So as your company gets bigger, your startup gets bigger, you find that, hey, we have that one person working on X project and then they leave. They get sick. They want to work on something else. Their skill set doesn't meet the demands of scale that are reaching up there, and they need some time off. They burnt out. Whatever it is, those single points of failure, people points of failure, technology points of failure, they'll fail.

If there's anything I can promise you in startup life, it's not death and taxes. You'll probably live, and your taxes will probably be low because you're not making very much money as a startup usually. But you will have all your single points of failure fail. I promise. It sucks. It's hard. We've had it so many times. Sometimes you don't even know how many single points of failure you have. So you have to be planning and knowing that all this kind of stuff is going to happen.

Two things on this, number one, the obvious one is that you have to build redundancy. I don't just mean redundancy in terms of like, hey, now we have two people who know how this works, or now we have three people. But, "Hey, what if our hosting here in Seattle fails? Can we have some backup system, something that it goes to? Can we have an error message that is empathetic and smart, and directs people to the right place, and all those things ready to go?" So instead of, "Oh, we didn't even know this could fail, and now we have no error message for it."

So - excuse me - our customers . . . that's me drinking carbonated beverages. I'm going to do some branding for Coke Zero apparently.

All these kinds of things just will build up, and if you can have those redundancy points, it will help you to absorb some of that. You should plan for failures in all of those areas. It's something that we've been kind of obsessed with lately.

But it's one of those things, like in a startup, you just always have the,
"Oh, my God, this thing is really painful. Well, but we have these 20 other things that are super painful. Okay, we have to deal with 17 of those before we can get to this one. Oh, my God. It just got so painful, it's moved up to number four and now it's number one."

That's just how it goes, right? You're constantly plugging holes in the dinghy, while you're trying to build a battleship around it.

The second thing that I would say is that you have to have almost like a happiness that is not tied to just how your product's doing. Or just how your customer service is doing or just how your marketing is doing, right?

International SEO: Dropping the Information Dust

As many of you already know, I am Italian and I am a web marketer. These two facts made me discover International SEO very soon because - let's face it - Italy is well-known, but there are not many people in the world who speak or understand Italian.

If you consider the nature of many Italian companies which rely on the foreign market for a good portion of their revenues, you can understand why SEO and International SEO are essentially synonymous for me and many others European SEOs.

This map explains why I must be an International SEO. Image by: http://www.hu.mtu.edu

This explains my interest in how search engines treat the problems associated with multi-country and multi-lingual sites. It also influences my interest in how a company can come in, attack, and conquer a foreign market. I've seen both interests becoming quite common and popular in the SEO industry during these last 12 months.

Many small and medium-sized  businesses now have the desire to engage in a globalized market. Their motivations are obviously fueled by expanding their business reach, but are also a consequence of the current economic crisis: if your internal market cannot assure an increase from your previous business volume, the natural gateway is trying to conquer new markets.

My Q&A duties as SEOmoz Associate have made me notice the increased interest in International SEO. Rather than seeing a small number of questions community members publicly and privately ask us, we are seeing many questions based on the confusion people still have about the nature of International SEO and how it really works.

In this post, I will try to answer the two main questions above referencing a survey I conducted a few months ago, which (even though it cannot be called definitive) is representative of the common International SEO practices professionals use.

What kind of solution is best for International SEO?

The answers given in the survey clearly show that people seem to prefer to use country code, top-level domains (ccTlds) against the sub-carpet option and the sub domain. (I'm still wondering what 'other' may mean.)

The main reason for this choice is the bigger geo-targeting strength of ccTlds. However, this strength is compromised by the fact that you have to create the authority of that kind of site from the ground up through link building.

Does that mean more companies should go for the sub-carpet option? From an SEO point of view, this could be the best choice because you can count on the domain authority of an established domain, and every link earned in any language version will have positive benefits for the others. Sub-carpet domains could be also the best choice if you are targeting a general language market (i.e.: Spanish) and not a specific country (i.e.: Mexico).

However, there are drawbacks in choosing sub-carpet domains:

• Even though a sub-carpets can be geotargeted in Google Webmaster Tools, they seem to have less geotargeting power than a country code, top-level domain.
• In some countries, users prefer to click on a ccTld than on a sub-folder results page because of the trust that is (unconsciously) given to them.
• If any part of your site is flagged for Panda, the entire domain will be penalized. A poorly organized and maintained multilingual/multicountry site may increase this risk exponentially.

I consider the pro's and con's of both options, and I tend to be strongly influenced by non-strictly SEO needs in my final decision

For instance, it is quite logical that Amazon decided to base its expansion into foreign market using ccTlds. Apart from the SEO benefits, having  all the versions of its huge store on one site would have been utterly problematic.

On the other hand, Apple preferred to use the sub-carpet option as its main site does not include the store part, which is in a sub domain (i.e.: store.apple.com/es). Apple chose a purely corporate format for its site, a decision that reflects a precise marketing concept: the site is for showing, amazing, and conquering a customer. Selling is a secondary purpose.

I suggest you to do the same when choosing between a sub-carpet and ccTld domain. Go beyond SEO when you have to choose between these options and understand the business needs of your client and/or company. You will discover there are bigger problems to avoid in doing so.

The local IP issue and the local hosting paranoia

This is a classic issue I see in Q&A. Google personally responded to this issue in an older, but still relevant, post on their Webmaster blog:

"The server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone."

Nonetheless, in the case that you are using a CDN, examine where its servers are located and check if one or more are in or close to the countries you are targeting. The reason for this examination is not directly related to SEO, but concerns the Page Speed issue. Page Speed is more of a usability problem, but it has an effect on your site's SEO.  

Finally, don't confuse local IP with local hosting as you can use a local IP via proxy from your own server. In certain countries, a hosting solution can be a real pain, and that drives many companies to host their clients sites in servers located in another country.

Takeaway: do not get obsessed by having a local IP for your ccTld site, as it is now a minor factor.

In case you choose the sub-folder option, another important technical aspect is to create separate sitemaps.xml files for every one of them. Again, common sense, but worth mentioning. 

The 'signals'

If you are going to do International SEO, the first problem you will have is translating the content of your site in the language of the country you are going to target.

It is common sense to use a professional translator (or a translation agency), but some people lack common sense and tend to rely on:

• Automated translation services (especially Google Translate)
• People in-house who happen to know the language the content needs to be translated to

The latter is nonsensical. Professional translators have studied for years and know the nuances of the language they translate, whereas a professional translator will usually translate from a foreign language into their own language, not vice versa. If your translator is bilingual, that's even better.

The first choice is officially deprecated because it is considered (correctly) as a bad quality signal to Google. Even though Google's translator tool was created for this purpose, it seems as if they are sending some mixed messages and I advise you to look elsewhere for translating services. 

A professional translation of your content is the best ally for your keyword search. 

For example, let's say you want to rank for 'car sell' in the Spanish and Latin American market. If you use Google Translate (or Babylon, WordLingo, or Bing Translate), you will have just one of the many variants of that keyword possible all over the Spanish variations map:

• Venta de coches (Spain)
• Venta de carros (Mexico)
• Venta de auto (Argentina)
• And so on'

Even worse, maybe you won't discover that some countries have peculiarities in dialect expressions instead of 'official/standard language' ones, or that people in these countries use both the English wording and the equivalent in their language. For instance, in Italy is very common to say both 'voli low cost' and 'voli a basso costo,' both meaning 'low cost flights."

When I have to optimize a site for a foreign language, I give the translator a detailed list of keywords in which they will:

• Translate properly according to the target
• Use in the translations themselves

Once the site has been translated, I use the Adwords Keyword Tool suggestions copy pasting the translated keywords. The process includes:

• Creating a list of keywords with traffic estimations
• Google suggesting 'related to my topic' keywords
• Collecting and analyzing Google Trends information for the keywords
• If you copy and paste the translated page (not just the translated keywords list), Adwords will suggest a larger and more sophisticated list of keywords
• Refinement of the initial list of keywords and, if there are changes to make in the translations due to that keywords analysis, asking the translator to revise them.

Pro tip: Another step I take is to pull the final keywords list into the SEOmoz Keyoword Difficulty Tool to have a complete map of the difficulty and the competitors my site will have to compete with.

Do you think all this is possible using an automatic translator?

A correct translation is one of the most powerful geo-targeting signals a site can have, especially when a language is spoken in more than one country It is an extremely important usability tactic (which is correlated to better conversions), because people tend to trust a vendor who speaks as they speak.

Other classic geo-targeting signals are the use of local currencies, addresses, and phone numbers. Using them is very common sense, but again, some people don't excel in that field.

However, you may have problems when you target a language all over the world and not a specific country. Obviously you cannot use the local signals described before, because you have the opposite objective. What to do then? I rely on the following steps:

• If the language has variants, try to use an academically standardized translation which is comprehended and accepted in every country that language is spoken.
• You may not have offices in the countries your targeted language is spoken, but you might have a customer care department in that language. Try to 'buy' legitimate local phone numbers and redirect them to your real toll-free number, while listing them in your 'how to contact us' page on the site.
• Rely more heavily on other signals such as local listings and a balanced link building strategy.

The never ending story of how to implement the rel='alternate' hreflang='x' tag

If you reflect wisely about I have written up to this point, be sure to notice that "On Page International SEO" is not all that different from 'On Page National SEO'. However, the slight differences arise when we talk about tagging for multilingual and multi-country sites, and there is a lot of confusion about this topic (thanks in part to some contradicting messages Google gave over the last two years).

The geo-targeting tags are needed to avoid showing the incorrect URL in a determined regional Google search. A classic example is seeing a US site outranking a UK site in Google.co.uk, usually due to a stronger page/domain authority. They don't have any other function than that.

At first sight, its implementation is quite simple:

if Page A (US version) exists also in Page B (Spanish), C (French), and D (German) versions from other countires, no matter if they are in the same domain or different, then on page A you should suggest the last three URLs as the ones Google must show in the SERPs in their respective targeted Googles. 

Those tags must be inserted in the <head> section and look like this:

<rel='alternate' hreflang='es-ES' href='http://www.domain.com/es/page-B.html' />

In this line, 'es' indicates the language accordingly to the ISO 6391-1 format, and 'ES' the country we want to target (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format).

You can also submit the language version information in your sitemaps. This is the best choice in order to not burden your site code, and it actually works very well, as Peter Handley discusses in this post. Also, they offer pre-existing tools which integrate the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" value in the sitemaps.xml files, as this one by The Media Flow.

Is not so hard, is it? Unfortunately, SEOs had been discouraged by atrocious doubts, especially when their International SEO previewed targeting countries where the same language is spoken.

What is the reason of these doubts? It is the fear for the (substantially) duplicated content those sites (or sub-carpets) tend to have, and the correct use of rel='canonical'".

For example, in a multilingual site, we have the US American portion of our eCommerce store on www.mysite.com/store/. In www.mysite.com/au/store/  we have the Australian version. Both sell the same products and their product pages are substantially identical.

As we know, duplicated and substantially duplicated content is one of the classic Panda factors. So, does that mean we need to use as canonical of the Australian store pages the American ones? The answer is: no!

Google lists a couple of reasons why this is the case:

• The rel='canonical' should show a different URL than the one self referential only if the page is an exact duplicated content of the 'canonical' one.
• Product pages are not exact duplicates because they have slights differences like currencies, contact phone numbers, addresses, and ' if you localized also the text ' in the spelling of some words.

In this cases, as Pierre Far wrote in August on G+: "The idea of rel-alternate-hreflang is to help you signal to our algorithms that although these two pages have substantially the same content, the small differences between them are still important. Specifically, the small differences are relevant for users of a specific language (and in a country). By the same logic, the title can be different too."

Therefore, using canonical to direct to a different URL will cause your users to miss a page with potential useful and important information.

What about Bing?

Bing does not use the rel='alternate' hreflang='x' markup.

As written by Duane Forrester in this post, Bing relies over a series of signals, the most important being the meta equiv='content-language' content='x-X' tag.

Inbound Marketing, Link Building, and International SEO

Now we have our multilingual/multi-country site optimized, but even if we choose the sub-carpet way in order to have a first boost from the existing domain authority of the site and the flow of its link equity, we still must increase the authority and trust of the language/country targeted sub-carpet in order to earn visibility in the SERPs. This need becomes even more urgent if we decided the ccTld option.

So, why is the sum of the budget for all of your International SEO link building campaigns usually smaller than the one of your national market?

 

Logic should suggest that the first answer ('almost the same'') was the most common.

The reasons typically used to justify this outcome is that 'link building in X is easier' or that 'the costs for link building are cheaper." Both justifications are wrong, and here's why:

1. To do link building in every country is harder than it seems. Take Italy, for instance. is not so easy as you can imagine. In Italy, the concept of guest blogging is still quite 'avant-guarde.'
2. To do #RCS which will earn your site links, social shares and brand visibility is not cheap. In Italy (I'm using my home country as an example, again), the average price for a good infographic (not interactive nor video) ranges between $1,000-1,200 US dollars.

My suggestion is to investigate the real costs for International SEO content marketing, link building, and ' eventually ' social media marketing. You should also ask the opinion of local link builders if you can, even in the common case that you will perform the link building campaigns internally.

In fact, those local link builders are the best source to explain what the reality of link building looks like in their countries. For instance, how many of you know that Chinese webmasters tend to prefer a formal outreach contact via email than any other option? I didn't know until I asked. 

Modern-day link building does not mean anymore directory submissions, dofollow comments, or forum signatures than it used to, but it has evolved into a more sophisticated art which uses content marketing its fuel and social media as its strongest ally.

Therefore, once you've localized the content of your site accordingly to the culture of the targeted country, you must also localize the content marketing actions you have planned to promote your site with.

Luckily, many SEOs are aware of this need:

And they usually work with local experts:

If we consider SEO as part of a bigger Inbound Marketing strategy, then we have to consider the importance Social Media has on our SEO campaigns (just remember the several correlation studies about social signals and rankings). So, if you are doing International SEO, especially in very competitive niches, you must resign yourself to the idea that you will need a supporting International Social Media strategy.

Conclusions

International SEO for Google and Bing is SEO, no questions asked. It is also not substantially different than the SEO you do for your national market site.

Sure, it has some technicalities, but you may need to use them if you want to target other languages spoken in your own country, as Spanish is in the USA. All the rest of your SEO strategy is identical, other than the language used.

All the concepts related to Link Building and Inbound Marketing in International SEO and SEO are the same. The only difference lies in what tactics and what kind of content marketing actions works best from country to country.

What can really make International SEO much more difficult than 'classic SEO' is one basic thing: not understanding the culture of the country and people you want to target. Don't make the mistake of having your International sites written by someone like Salvatore, the literally multilingual character of "The Name of Rose" by Umberto Eco.

Ron Pelman in the role of Salvatore in "The Name of Rose" (1986) - Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Bonus

Here are a few other posts you will find useful about International SEO:

• Webmaster Central office hours about multinational and multilingual sites, Google Hangouts organized by Pierre Far
• SEO for Multilanguage Multicountry Projects, a slideshare by Ani Lopez
• International and Multilingual sites: The Criteria to Establish an SEO Friendly Structure by Aleyda Solis

 

Using AdWords Data for SEO: Unlocking the Ultimate Keyword Research Treasure Trove (Arrrgh!!)

Ahoy, SEOmoz UGC blog lubbers! In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, today's post will show you how to unlock a secret treasure trove of SEO keyword research data from your own company's AdWords account! Avast!

Great SEO always starts with great keyword research ' unfortunately, getting high-quality, actionable keyword data can sometimes be challenging for several reasons:

• Google's keyword tool is an undependable source ' it doesn't always provide complete, accurate data.
• Google analytics is an unreliable source, no longer showing all of the data for organic search referrals. Also, your Google Analytics data, by definition, tells you about what you're already ranking on, not what you're missing out on!
• Keyword suggestion data in general is unreliable from a conversion perspective ' it can tell you how popular a keyword is relative to other terms, but it can't tell you how it will perform on your specific site.

For these and many other reasons, mining your existing Google AdWords campaign data can be incredibly helpful in determining keyword targets for SEO.

In my article today, I'll show you how to unlock a secret treasure trove of SEO keyword research data from your own company's AdWords account!

Keywords vs. Search Queries

Before diving in, I'd like to first call attention to an important distinction in PPC regarding the difference between keywords and search queries.

In SEO, the term "keyword" is usually synonymous with the specific term you're targeting. However in an AdWords campaign, every "keyword" is like a pirate-ship packed full of many different user search queries that triggered your ads, including synonyms, related terms, misspellings, word variations, plurals, etc. of the main keyword.

The keyword metrics you see in AdWords, like clicks, impressions, cost, conversions, etc. are a blend of the performance metrics for the entire set of search queries associated with your keyword.

The key point here is that in order to get our hands on the secret SEO keyword research treasure trove, we'll need to first unpackage the AdWords keywords into their constituent search queries.

Arrr Now Surrrrrender the Booty! (Accessing Search Query Data in AdWords)

Getting your search query data in AdWords is a bit hidden ' a bit like trying to find a buried treasure! Here's how to unpack your keywords into their underlying search queries:

1. Set the date range to as large a date range as possible, to download as much search query treasure as possible.
2. With 'All Campaigns' selected, navigate to the keywords tab
3. Find the 'Keyword Details' button, and then click the 'View All Search Terms' option, as illustrated here.

From there you can see the specific search query terms that users searched on, right before clicking on your ads! Every search query comes with all kinds of great data that we can use to help with SEO keyword research, including impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, conversion rates, etc. as shown here:

The above search query data is much more valuable than the fool's gold you get from the Google Keyword Tool and other free keyword tools, because it's real campaign data for your own site! Key advantages include:

1. Geo-Targeted Volume Data: Most companies target specific countries, states, or cities in their SEO efforts. One neat feature in AdWords is that you can target specific regions or cities, so, the keyword impression data that you're getting is reflective of only the markets that your business caters to.
2. Actual Performance Data: The search query data contains real outcomes on your websites. For example, you can you can see what search queries actually led to happy outcomes, like a lead capture or completed sale.
3. It's Proprietary Data: The search queries are unique to your website. Your competition does not have access to it.
4. Cost-Per-Click Data: This gives you a true sense for the value your company and your competitors place on different types of keywords and can be used to justify the value of SEO in a very concrete way.

Now it's very likely that you're looking at a crap-ton of search query data here, having just expanded you keywords into their underlying search queries ' if your company is spending a few thousand dollars per month on paid search, there could easily be thousands or hundreds of thousands (or possibly even millions) of search queries here.

If you're finding that there are just too many rows of data here, it's important that you sort or filter out some of this data so that your pirate ship doesn't sink from the crushing weight of all this keyword research booty.

Search Query Booty Filtering Ideas

If you have conversion tracking on, the instant metal-detector way of finding the doubloons in the search query data is to just filter out non-converting search queries. This means that all remaining search query data has all proven itself to be both valuable and relevant to your business.

If you don't have conversion tracking on, or if the number of conversions in your account is too low (i.e. too many of your search queries are being filtered out), I recommend filtering out search queries with very low impression volume and/or spend, for example, search queries with fewer than say, 2 impressions, or with less than a few dollars in spend. Both of these tactics will help weed out the 1-off keyword searches which typically make more than half of the rows in your search query report data.

The following screenshot shows how to apply search query filters in AdWords, using the built-in filtering options:

Once you've gotten your search query data down to a more manageable level, download it to Excel.

Panning for Gold (Search Query Analysis)

Now that you've exported your filtered AdWords search query data, it's time to analyze this data to prioritize a few SEO targets.

In SEO keyword research, there are tons of metrics that SEOs use like KEI, or Global Google Monthly Search Volume Estimate, or keyword competition, or keyword difficulty, to help in picking what keywords to target in their content creation efforts.

In AdWords, there's many different search query metrics to choose from. There are too many to list out, but here's some of key search query metrics that I pay most attention to for SEO keyword research, and why:

• Conversions ' Any search queries that convert might be good candidates to target via SEO. Even the terms that are converting at high cost per conversions via PPC could be good terms to target via SEO.
• Conversion Rate ' High performing search queries in paid search will likely enjoy similar conversion metrics in relative terms when targeted via SEO.
• Impressions ' Use keyword impression data to get a better sense for actual search query volume in your targeted region.
• Click Trough Rates ' if you're seeing very high click through rates that means your ad is resonating and should give you some ideas for content creation.
• Cost Per Click ' I have found that this is generally directly proportional to SEO keyword difficulty. Meaning, the higher the cost per click, the harder it will be to rank organically on that same term.
• Total Cost ' By successfully targeting keywords for which your company is already spending money on paid search, you can easily justify the value of SEO to your boss or client in a very concrete way.

Using these and other metrics, you can get a really great sense of which terms have the most overall value to your business, as well as a handle on the effort required to be successful, and even content creation angles to pursue.

Grouping and Organizing your Keyword List into Themes

Once you've pulled out or rank-ordered the different terms that seem to look promising based on your analysis, you may want to re-organize that data to make sense of it, especially because you'll probably still have a ton of keyword data.

For example, say you find that you have a bunch of promising keywords, like:

• best Internet marketing software
• top Internet marketing software
• internet marketing seo software
• ... (etc.)

These search query variations are similar ways for searching on internet marketing software ' it would be nice to try to roll these and other similar search queries into top-level keyword themes, instead of having to process hundreds of similar search queries.

It's kind of the opposite of what we did early on in this process, when we expanded our PPC keywords into their constituent search queries ' it would be nice to somehow repackage our final list of promising looking search queries back into categories and sub-categories based on keyword themes.

An easy way to organize your keyword data is to drop it into WordStream's Free Keyword Grouper, which will not only group your keywords into relevant clusters but also shows you which clusters of keywords from your list are the most profitable (you can enter in the keyword and corresponding visits, which in this case you likely want to use impression data for):

You can use this tool for free 10 times. And heck, because the SEOmoz community is so awesome, if you run out of free credits, just shoot me an email this week (lkim at wordstream dot com), and I'll generate a free 1-year license for the paid version of my Keyword Research Suite (valued at $329 / year) which includes this keyword grouper tool.

The key point here is using a keyword grouping tool such as this one, you can take up to 10,000 search queries and package them back into a more manageable number of higher level topics and sub-topics, and you can use the resulting taxonomy to map out keyword groupings into specific pages on your site in the same way you would with any keyword research process.

Summary: The Pirate's SEO's Guide to Keyword Research using AdWords Data

Mateys: In my article today, we covered:

• How to find and unpack your company's AdWords keywords into valuable search query data
• Tips for filtering out some of the noise from your AdWords search query data
• Tips for analyzing and prioritizing your search query data
• How to repackage and organize your analyzed search query data back into topics, for use in SEO content creation efforts

By following these steps to super-charge your SEO keyword research, I think you'll be yo-ho-ho'ing all the way to the bank!

Arrrr.... About The Author

Captain Larry Kim be the Founder/CTO of WordStream, provider of PPC Management Tools, including the 20 Minute PPC Work Week, and the AdWords Grader.

You can follow him on Twitter or Google+.

In observance of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, all comments must be in the form of Pirate-speak! :)

In-House, Agency, or Independent: What's the Best Gig for You?

There are three main roles in the search marketing industry: you can work in-house, at an agency, or as an independent consultant. What role are you in today, and is it the right one? How can you be sure you're following the right path to achieve search marketing nirvana?

Like me, there are many search marketers who have worked in all three sectors. I tracked a few of them down for interviews on the topic and have included the most inspiring bits in this post. 

Before we dive in, let's take a look at what Internet Marketing roles the respondents to the 2012 SEOmoz Industry Survey are in today. The 5000+ respondents shake out like this:

Take a peek at the unsimplified details here.

In-house roles represent 46% of respondents, agency roles have 22%, business owners represent 19%, and independents took the remaining 13%. You'll notice that I didn't specifically cover the business owners category in this post. That is because a business owner can, and likely does, overlap quite a bit with the other three role types. Agencies are often led/owned by a powerhouse search marketer, so that would land them in two categories, therefore skewing the data.

Now that you have an idea of the distribution of roles in our industry, maybe you're thinking about opportunity. "Look at all those in-house jobs! Sweet, I'm jumping in that pie." Or maybe, "Man I'd love to make a go independent. I'll show that boss of mine."  It is so easy to make a leap into a new role without really knowing what your in for. You've done it. I've done it. Hold your horses.

What strikes me about the jobs I've held in an agency (SEOmoz), in-house, and as an independent (Keyphraseology) is how incredibly different they are from each other. Culture, day-to-day duties and tasks, income, purpose... everything is different! You'll be miles ahead if you know the differences and know what is best for you.

Lets take a peek!

In-house

Commonly described as: rewarding & limited

You might do well in-house if you are diplomatic, detail-oriented, and value stability. An in-house job can be very rewarding but you'll have to be patient. It takes time to educate your colleagues, champion your cause, negotiate for resources, and see your projects to completion. Your in-house job may be limited to one or a few websites, but you will go deep into the details with them and see projects through from beginning-to-end. 

Let's take a look at what some seasoned veterans have to say about in-house search marketing gigs.

Marat Gaziev| In-house SEO at a large credit bureau.

Today, I'm an in-house SEO. When you work in an agency, you don't really get the time to focus on one project, one client, and one website. In an in-house role, you have to think long and hard before making any recommendations, and you start caring for the website like it's your baby. The best part about being "in-house" is that you have the opportunity to truly conceive an idea, follow through on your recommendations, and see the website grow before your eyes.

---

Laura Lippay| President of How's Your Pony?

CNET was an SEOs dream. I worked in an environment where my colleagues were smart and tattooed and in bands and hung out together after work all the time, and while at work we collaborated and brainstormed and learned from each other and built stuff. For SEO, we were not just working on the site issues, but also building an internal hub of best practices and an internal reporting system. Best job I ever had.

---

Rhea Drysdale| CEO of Outspoken Media

I've held three in-house positions-: one at a multi-channel retailer, one with a large Fortune 1000 staffing company, and one with a pair of genius Ruby on Rails developers/designers. In-house, I got to see how SEO was simply a part of a bigger plan and was surrounded by just as many passionate individuals, but in very different roles. This gave me more perspective and more a analytical mind because we could get so granular with the data. In-house, the worst thing I faced was patience; I don't have it. Having to prioritize work and then wait six months before it goes live or gets changed into some bastardized form of the original idea was heart-breaking to me.

---

Aleyda Solis| International SEO Consultant and Global SEO Manager for Forex Club

I'm an in-house SEO for Forex Club, where I'm the Global SEO Manager, and I have also my own SEO consultancy that allows me to do independent work. I work for them remotely and although I have to travel a bit more (which I actually also enjoy), it gives me the flexibility I need to organize my own activities and timings (I do freelance SEO work, co-organize a local SEO event in Madrid, I write for State of Search, etc.) while also enjoying to work with people from different disciplines (developers, product managers, analysts, affiliates, communication, etc.) and cultures (from Moscow, Berlin, NY, Madrid, Taillin, Montenegro) in a highly competitive sector and in many languages and for different countries. It's all very challenging and also rewarding.

---

Agency

Commonly described as: fun, exhausting, & rewarding

You might do well at an agency if you hunger for a fun and fast-paced environment where collaboration and continuous learning are valued. You'll be challenged with a wide-variety of project types and clients to keep you on those multi-tasking toes of yours. The environment can be exciting, but also exhausting. Be prepared for some long hours and late nights. 

Lets see what our friends have to say.

Rhea Drysdale| CEO of Outspoken Media

I own an agency today and it's my second love after my family. I'm addicted to the speed and atmosphere of agency life. I need to be in an environment where I'm constantly generating new ideas and collaborating with teams of equally driven marketers and technicians. In the agencies, I found incredible teams. They were people that were as driven and passionate as me. They were competitive and thrived on the discovery of new tools, techniques, or industry information. At an agency, the biggest problem is often burn out. You've got so many people working so intensely that it's easy to have personalities clash and compete for attention.

---

Shaad Hamid| SEO & PPC consultant and blogger for SEOptimise

I work agency-side primarily. This is because I love the variety of clients and sectors that I work on. Since working agency side, I've never gotten bored. Boredom is my greatest fear, and my experience working within client-side was just that. Although client-side work is really exciting during the first three months, work tends to become repetitive afterwards.

---

Marat Gaziev| In-House SEO at a large credit bureau.

The best parts about working at an agency can also be its negatives. The best part is that you get to work with a number of different clients and websites, each with their own different business needs. The worst part is that you get to work with a number of different clients and websites, each with their different business needs.

---

Independent

Often described as: exhausting, lucrative, rewarding, & unrestricted (free)

Done well, independent search marketing work can be lucrative and rewarding. You'll be the boss, the owner, the search marketer, and more, so it can also be exhausting. If you're eager for the freedom to choose your projects and clients, the flexibility to set your own hours, and the responsibility of doing it all, an independent gig might be right for you. The lack of coworkers can make this option a lonesome one.

Check out these bites from those who have been there.

Marshall Simmonds| Founder of Define Media Group, Inc.

Throughout my career, I've benefitted most from being aware of and identifying when good opportunities present themselves. Jerry said it best: 'Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.' I was the Head of SEO at a small marketing company from 1997-1999. I was green, as was the industry, so I fit in well. Working there, I got the chance to help small companies succeed via search and marketing promotion. This experience lead me to one of, if not the first, in-house positions as Chief Search Strategist with a young About.com in New York City in late 1999. The lesson learned from About.com was enterprise management of an SEO campaign across many verticals and reached over 1200 employees and writers.

In 2005, About.com was acquired by the New York Times Corporation, which presented the unique role of shaping online strategy for one of the most influential (and largest) news organizations in the world. The opportunity also fostered the beginning of Define Media Group, a boutique digital strategy consulting arm of the NYTCo. By design, I left the NYTimes five years later. The goal was to establish an SEO program and integrate it deep into the content creation process in the 150+ year old company, all-the-while building up Define. In January of 2011, the time and 'light were right' and I spun Define off and officially went independent. Not only has my path been one of identifying opportunities, but also when it was right personally and professionally. I wanted and needed experience at all levels before going out on my own. This approach serves me well today and taught me patience, diplomacy, and perseverance.

---

Richard Baxter| Founder of SEOgadget

I'm a very social person and thrive on having people around me. At first, taking the leap to go solo was exciting, invigorating, and for the first time I really felt fully in control of my own future. I was becoming successful, winning clients, and I got an incredible amount of work completed. I grew the business to a turnover of around £150,000 a year just from a bedroom! I should have been happy with that ' but like I said, I was going stir crazy from spending so much time in the house on my own. Obviously, I went out to meet clients and friends a lot. Tom Critchlow was awesome during this period, we'd meet up for chess in the morning (he would always win), and chew the fat over search marketing, SEO, and life in general. I have a few industry friends in the UK that were awesome during this period ' very supportive and keen for a hang out. I'm extremely grateful for having that. I quite enjoyed having some regularity and structure in my life, even if it was just a meet up every other Tuesday! Eventually I decided just to get some shared office space, knowing that I'd have to get up in the morning to use it. I began the hunt for a desk. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for.

I moved in with a small design agency just around the corner from where we are now, around 6 months after I'd started SEOgadget. Within about a week, I was talking with the agency about reserving all 3 remaining spare desks, and a few days after that I'd decided to start hiring. Getting out of the home office acted like a catalyst to start building what I have now. Now, we're 14 strong and turning over slightly above 10X what we did in our first year, or almost triple last year.

---

How about you? What roles have you held and what were your experiences? Don't be shy!

How Many SEO Consultants Actually Know What They're Talking About?

As an industry, SEO has struggled with setting standards of quality from day one. Even with countless professional SEOs doing best-in-class work, the industry as a whole is constantly battling the bad rap of being tactless, unethical, and sometimes even "dead."

Black-hat or black cat?

At SEOmoz, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised day after day by the array of high-quality SEOs that make our industry such a wonderful place to be. Unfortunately, the time finally came where we had to ask ourselves the nagging questions looming over our industry: where was all this negative noise coming from? Had we been missing a widely accepted fact in the SEO world? And, most importantly, was the current state of SEO really as awful as some were making it seem?

There was only one way to find out.

Inspired by a post highlighting the "sad state" of today's SEO consultants, we decided to conduct a survey of our own to determine the true, calculated quality of SEOs in 2012. Similar to the Webmaster World member whose less-than-awesome exchange with various SEO consultants sparked this hot debate, we chose to reach out to real, third-party SEO companies for advice on how to improve rankings to collect our data. But we wanted to do it bigger.

Enter: The PEPS Project

To collect data in the most neutral way possible, we knew we wouldn't be able to use our own name for fear of skewing responses (i.e. if SEOmoz emailed you, asking for beginner-level SEO advice, would you believe us? No? That's ok, we probably wouldn't, either.). We decided to partner with the charitable organization and long-time friend of SEOmoz, Program for Early Parent Support (PEPS), to help us out. PEPS is a great organization that we'd been wanting to get some SEO help for for quite some time. In return for allowing us to go "undercover" as a PEPS employee when reaching out to SEO consultants for advice, SEOmoz would foot the bill for a complete site audit for PEPS. The consulting agency to conduct the site audit would be the best SEO selected from our study, and everyone involved would win!

The project design

After setting a Moz employee up with a PEPS account, it was time to get to work. We compiled a list of general, broad questions that a site owner new to SEO might ask in reaching out for SEO advice, all the while making sure that the questions would be solid indicators of an agency's level of ethical or unethical SEO knowledge. Once we selected the top few benchmarks that should be hit, we pulled together an email including these four questions:

1. Do you see any quick areas for improvement? Are we doing anything really wrong or dangerous?
2. We've been hearing a lot of talk about the "Panda"and "Penguin" penalties from Google. Can you explain what these are? Are we at risk for these penalties? How can we tell if we've been hit?
3. We have the opportunity to buy some domains that relate to our services, like ParentSupport.com. We were thinking of building a second version of our site on a .com site that is more related to our services. Is it better to have a.com or a .org domain? How can we leverage buying other domains that have to do with our services to help get more SEO traffic?
4. We get lots of emails from people wanting to trade or exchange links with us. Should we be saying yes? Will this help with SEO?

With our questions ready to be answered, it was now time to select our SEO agencies. To keep the selection as neutral as possible, we ran three search queries for the terms "SEO Firm," "SEO Services," and "SEO Company" for the following locations:

1. New York, NY
2. Los Angeles, CA
3. Chicago, IL
4. Houston, TX
5. Philadelphia, PA
6. Jackson, MI
7. Chattanooga, TN
8. Overland Park, KS
9. Temecula, CA
10. South Bend, IN
11. No location specified

We then took the top five organic and top two paid results for each location under each search query and added them to our list of companies to reach out to. After eliminating companies that didn't provide SEO consulting, we were left with 86 different SEO agencies to contact for the case study. The emails went out, and we waited anxiously for the *hopefully positive* responses to start flowing in.

Case study overview

Of the 86 agencies asked, 28 responded to our outreach with full answers to all four questions. Three clever dudes (Mark Kennedy from SEOM Interactive,  Larry Chrzan from Blue Horseradish, and Brady Ware from Softway Solutions) quickly figured out SEOmoz was behind the project, and the remaining 55 declined answering through email. The two most common reasons for not answering the questions were:

"In order to help you out I would need to speak with you on the phone." - Anonymous

and

"You ask many very good questions below, and if you were a client I'd be happy to answer all of them. Some of the questions you ask require a fair bit of research and analysis to answer correctly and I do not provide free consulting based on an email inquiry. Please go ahead and get all the free advice you can stand, but when you're ready to commit to a paid SEO engagement, do keep us in mind." - Anonymous

The initial responses included an array of answers with an overwhelmingly high amount of white-hat, helpful SEO feedback. Ruth Burr, the lead SEO at SEOmoz, provided answers to use as a benchmark to guage responses. It was a pleasant surprise when the majority of responding agencies offered advice similar to Ruth's initial answers. Because our questions were asked on a broad scale, we categorized the answers as best we could. Here's a breakdown of the responses per question with sample answers from various SEO agencies:

Question #1: Do you see any quick areas for improvement? Are we doing anything really wrong or dangerous?

It's interesting to note that over half (55.6%) of our respondents stated that they didn't see anything wrong or dangerous right off the bat, with a high percentage of those respondents requesting more information before giving a complete answer. A whopping 11.1% decided that they needed a more in-depth view before giving any answer at all, and the remaining 33.3% gave helpful, more specific advice.

Sample answer:

"Without looking under the hood of the website, it doesn't appear you are doing anything wrong or dangerous. For the most part, unless websites are either really old and out of date or people are using bad techniques, most people aren't doing anything dangerous. In terms of quick improvement:

1. You should put your social media channels on your homepage so people can follow you. It was hard to find your Facebook page and I couldn't find you on Twitter.
2. You should make your content shareable by including the like and tweet buttons so people can share it via social networks. Google does take these into account in its search ranking as it considers a tweet or like to be a good reference
3. You have 13 web pages that return a 404 error meaning a link is broken so it goes nowhere. This doesn't hurt you, but it won't let those pages be indexed by Google.
4. You use your name way too much on your site. This means that Google will index your page as Program for early parent support over and over again, which you rank number one for by a mile. One of the best things to do is remove that name off each page and replace it with more detailed keywords about the web page so Google know exactly what the page is about. This goes to the heart of SEO which is the keyword. We always start with a goal...what do you want to do with the website? Sell stuff? inform people? Make ad revenue? Once the goal is determined we start looking for keywords via Google's keyword tool that already have a lot of searches and low amount of competition meaning there aren't a lot of websites with that information. We then swap out the keywords and have Google recrawl your site so you can get indexed for those searches as well."

' - John Cashman from Digital Firefly Marketing

Question #2: We've been hearing a lot of talk about the "Panda"and "Penguin" penalties from Google. Can you explain what these are? Are we at risk for these penalties? How can we tell if we've been hit?

An overwhelming 88.9% of respondents gave the answer we were looking for in regards to the Panda and Penguin updates! We didn't see any shocking or fully incorrect answers out of the remaining 11.1%, but they were a bit broader than we preferred.

Sample answer:

"Panda: Google Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren't necessarily spam but also don't offer great quality. In other words, sites with 'thin' content - really designed to do nothing more than hold ads and make money.

(Side note: it's important to follow this one rule that we always adhere to when building content for sites: Google is in the business of producing the absolute best result for any given search query. The best sites are built around this concept. Build using quality content and your rankings will follow. Of course SEO isn't really that simple - it's complex. But, that principle is where all good SEO begins.)

Panda really hit sites that were designed for ads only and offered no real content. Things like page layout and quality content have a lot to do with this. Panda was also designed to stop 'scrappers.' (Sites republishing other company's content.) I don't think you have an issue here, just browsing over your home page.

Penguin: According to Google, Penguin is an 'important algorithm change targeted at webspam.' And that is the very, very short explanation.

Penguin was designed to further cut rankings back on spam-related sites and push up quality sites that are offering regularly-updated and useful content and showing quality incoming links, articles and other content. People seeing problems from Penguin are using techniques like aggressive, exact-match anchor text, exact-match domains (overuse of these) poor quality blog posts and keyword stuffing, to name a few. In other words, spammy-style techniques designed to 'trick' the search engines into a ranking. 

Again, we tell our clients is to always focus on quality content and don't try any 'tricks' to achieve rankings. This is always bad policy.' 

- Kirk Bates from Market 248

Question #3: We have the opportunity to buy some domains that relate to our services, like ParentSupport.com. We were thinking of building a second version of our site on a .com site that is more related to our services. Is it better to have a .com or a .org domain? How can we leverage buying other domains that have to do with our services to help get more SEO traffic?

Although all four of the above categories are 'correct' in one way or another (dependent on preference), 66.7% of respondents gave the answer we were hoping to see. The remaining 33.3% of answers were spread across the multiple categories, but there were no shocking or fully incorrect answers provided.

Sample answer:

'It doesn't really matter if you get a .com or a .org- whichever one you want is fine. If you wanted to have a separate site for a specific area of your industry, then you can do that as well, but you don't need a bunch of URLs all pointing to one website in order to rank in the search engines.' 

- Owen York from Stellar e-Marketing

Question #4: We get lots of emails from people wanting to trade or exchange links with us. Should we be saying yes? Will this help with SEO?

This question served as the most interesting indicator of SEO knowledge in our survey. We were pleased to see that 48.1% of respondents advised strongly against trading links with any other site based solely on email solicitation. 44.4% responded 'yes' or 'maybe' while cautioning PEPS to be selective on sites to trade links with. Unfortunately, 7.4% of respondents encouraged PEPS to exchange links with other sites that ranked well.

Sample Answer:

'NO! Do not buy or exchange link with anyone who contacts you. This is completely against Google's policies and if they were to find out, you could be penalized."

- Brad Frank from IT Chair

The (SEO) Fab Five

After comparing answers from all 28 responding agencies, there were five in particular that stood out above the rest. The top five consultants and agencies (in no particular order) were:

1. John Cashman from Digital Firefly Marketing
2. Dave Davies from Beanstalk SEO
3. Kirk Bates from Market 248
4. Brad Frank from IT Chair
5. Owen York from Stellar e-Marketing

The answers we received from these five agencies included actionable, ethical SEO advice. (You may have noticed a few of their responses as our 'Sample Answers' under the above charts - if not, check them out!) Each response went into great detail to provide the foundation and reasoning behind the piece of advice. Despite the topics being at a high-level of SEO knowledge, the responses were explained in a way that could be easily understood by a website owner new to SEO. We would recommend any of these five companies as an agency worth working with :)

And the winner is...

After a neck-and-neck race to finish between our top five SEO agencies, we decided to select Dave Davies from Beanstalk SEO as our case study winner of the PEPS site audit. Dave's company Beanstalk SEO showed up as the second result in our "no location specified" organic search. (They are based out of Victoria, BC.)

Dave was a front-runner from the beginning. His answers were lengthy, helpful, and provided a fantastic example of how an SEO can explain their work and its tremendous necessity to a potential, first-time client. When we let Dave know that he was on 'SEOmoz candid camera' and had been selected to complete the audit, he was thrilled to have the opportunity to not only complete an audit for a charitable company, but to help show the current industry just how sustainable and ethical SEO truly is.

Beanstalk SEO, Inc. is a search engine optimization agency based in Victoria, BC. The Beanstalk SEO website even addresses their stance on unethical black-hat tactics in their 'About' section. Beanstalk SEO follows guiding principles similar to SEOmoz's TAGFEE mission, which made them a perfect fit for the PEPS site audit!

The current state of SEO consultants

When we started this project a few months back, we had high hopes for the responses. The project was driven by the opportunity to display irrefutable data whatever the outcome, but there was definitely some *selfishly-inspired* desire that the answers would help support our initial hypothesis. I'm happy to report that the outcome of our case study exceeded every expectation we set!

Out of our 28 respondents surveyed, well over 50% of surveyed agencies provided ethically sound answers for all four questions. Although we did receive a few responses that didn't fall exactly in line with our expected answers, we did not see one shockingly black-hat response. If's that's not a true indicator of an industry with ethically-driven motivations from the majority, I'm not sure what is.

Although the experience documented on Search Engine Roundtable that inspired this project wasn't pleasant, I have to argue that it is absolutely not indicative of the current state of the SEO industry. After analyzing the results of our study, it was clear that an overwhelming majority of respondents are practicing white-hat, sustainable tactics. There are SEOs who can be tactless and unethical in their work, and there will always be haters who claim the industry is 'dead.' However, after our data assessment and analysis (coupled with our love of this wonderful industry), we couldn't disagree more.

I want to give a big thanks to all of the agencies that participated in our study, Ruth Burr and Kurtis Bohrnstedt for gathering data, and PEPS for allowing us to go undercover. The faces we know - and plenty of faces we haven't met yet - are a breath of fresh air who make this industry so vibrant, ever-changing, and full of possibility. There's never been a better time to be involved in SEO, and we thank our lucky stars to work with you all every day.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the current state of the SEO industry. How do you think the industry as a whole is doing? What direction do you think we're headed in over the next few years? What sustainable, ethical practices do you wish more agencies and consultants practiced?

Seventeen Ways To Improve Your Blog - Case Study

Can you still succeed at blogging?

Blogging is tough these days. Its a crowded realm with a staggering amount of people in the game. According to Pingdom, by the end of 2011 there were:

• 70 million WordPress blogs
• 39 million Tumblr blogs
• 555 million total websites

SEVENTY MILLION WordPress blogs.

Sure, some of them might be your link networks or small micro-sites - but let's cut that number in half, and you get 35 million. Even that number means for every 100 people in the US, 8 of them blog. That's crazy.

What's left to do but...

source

But... NO! Don't give up! Some writers among us has achieved that success - and you can, too! You just need to know how to go about blogging in today's landscape. 

You COULD be successful with blogging

You could be. But you've got to get it right. (And you may want to continue reading... *cough*) You've got to create the right mix of elements and put in the time, dedication, passion, and effort. But don't let anyone tell you it can't be done.

There are still bloggers, new bloggers, who start from scratch (in the past 12-24 months) and achieve success that looks like this:

Or this:

Yep - that's 90 linking root domains to one single post and 14,900 facebook shares.

In this post, we're going to look at an exciting case study to show you how to improve your chances for success with blogging.

We're going to break it into a few pieces;

Table of Contents - Seventeen Ways to Improve Your Blog

1. Meet the blogger
2. Eight past ingredients of success
3. Three SEO challenges and solutions
4. Six recommendations to take it to the next level

8 + 3 + 6 = 17 Ways :-)

Let's go!

---

Meet the blogger behind NoahsDad.com

If you've been hanging around the Moz community long enough, you may have noticed a cute little child commenting on posts or asking questions in Q&A:

Smart kid! Ok, ok... I'm playing around of course. Little Noah hasn't learned to type. That's Rick Smith, aka Noah's Dad.

I first came to know Rick through the Moz community. I then noticed this Q&A Discussion (which by the way is the most thumbed up of all time). In it, Rand suggested he do a case study about noahsdad.com. I know Rand's a busy guy, so I offered to do the case study instead. So, here we are :)

Oh, right, back to Rick...

Besides being a welcome member of the Moz community, Rick has been achieving a special kind of success with his blog noahsdad.com. His son Noah was born with Down Syndrome December 15th, 2010 and Rick has been documenting their journey as a family since May 2011.

There have been some particularly interesting SEO challenges for the blog along the way and with his success, there is always an underlying question: what can Rick do (really, what can ANY blogger do) to take this success further? 

---

Eight ingredients of success for NoahsDad.com 

In essence, this is a case study for all bloggers who want to grow their blog and achieve more success.

Although Rick is not a professional writer and has only been blogging on noahsdad.com for about 15 months, he's achieved a noteworthy degree of success. They've been featured or mentioned on Time.com, ABC News, The Huffington Post, FOX News, and more. Average monthly visits are now in the 5-digits.

And, how would you like these kinds of metrics for a single post?

What has Rick done so far to achieve this success? What can you do and learn from and apply to your own personal blog?

1. Theme your blog with one concrete topic/have a purpose

I don't think anyone would question what Rick's blog is "about." Its about Noah, Rick's son, who has Down Syndrome. This is concrete. It anchors the purpose and meaning of the blog into something tangible. 

I can think of a good example in the SEO world. Jon Cooper didn't just make an SEO blog, he made a link building blog. Specifics matter. 

Takeaway: How can you hone in on a more concrete topic for your blog? Or, if you're thinking of starting a new blog, how can you focus your topic more?

2. Use Random Affinities

I completely, 100% took that from Ian Laurie's post (as you can see in the link). However, Rick has basically nailed this instinctively. Just about every time he uses a random affinity in a post, it's wildly successful.

For example, look at the post he wrote about a Target advertisement which discretely uses a child with Down Syndrome. According to Open Site Explorer, it received 90 LRDs and 14,900 facebook shares. It got linked to by the Huffington Post, ABC News, and many more quality sites. Rick combined the topic of Down Syndrome, with the department store Target and its advertising message.

By tying together the theme's of Target, Advertising, Special Needs, and Down Syndrome, Rick tapped into a much larger audience.

Takeaway: Read Ian's post :)

3. Create content the media would be likely to cite

Focus on creating a resource that does the job of a reporter to make their lives easier. Reporters are more likely to use your post to explain a facet of what they're reporting on if they can simply point to your article.

That's exactly what this reporter from the Huffington Post did when he linked to an article on noahsdad.com:

Takeaway: Find news articles in your niche. Study the types of resources they are linking to. Analyze what makes them linkable. Create your own content with the traits you find in mind.

4. Be consistent and post daily

Since day one, Rick has been posting content on almost a daily basis. But honestly, the consistency part of this is most important. Look at the success of Whiteboard Friday!

If finding time to write on a regular basis is a challenge for you, make use of the scheduling feature in WordPress or your CMS.

Takeaway: Choose a publishing schedule that is realistic for your schedule and that fits your audience. It might be once a week, everyday, etc. Whatever you decide, make use of scheduling features in WordPress or your CMS and publish content consistently.

5. Drive traffic with social media

It's analytics time. Tell me Rick's traffic is not tied to social... this is the all traffic segment and social media traffic segment (more on how I made that chart later).

You can see that social media is absolutely driving those peaks and valleys of traffic.

Takeaway: Social media can be overwhelming. I always recommend to choose one or two platforms and do those really well. Don't try to be on all of the social media platforms, at least not right away. Choose the 1-2 where your audience is most likely to be and start engaging.

6. Use personal and intimate images that tell a story

Maybe it's because this piece takes an extra bit of effort, but so many bloggers don't use images well or at all. Rick does, and he does it extremely well. A few examples:

Not only is Noah adorable - you see family. You get the "moment." You feel like you know Rick and his wife. You make a connection.

This is Rick, with baby Noah, finding out about the hole in Noah's heart. If that isn't an intimate and touching photo, I'm not sure what is.

Rick uses these consistently on noahsdad.com. Images make a huge difference in audience interaction.

Takeaway: In a way, you always have to curate your own photos or graphics along the way. Make sure you have personal, engaging photos to go along with your posts.

7. Video! Video! Video!

The guys from Distilled have been recommending video for a while now. Moz arguably built its blogging success in part to the Whiteboard Friday video series. Rick has been posting little short videos of Noah - "A Window Into Their Lives" - and he does them on a very regular basis. 

Just check out his YouTube page. 185,958 video views to date!

Takeaway: Similar to photos, you almost have to always be ready to capture something (if your blog is about events). Also, if you're at a loss for something of higher quality than just your iPhone or smartphone - follow Mike King. He's an SEO but as been focusing more on video these days, and he shares good tips about equipment, lighting, etc.

8. Do #RWS - Real WORLD Shit

What's #RWS? A small takeoff on Wil Reynolds #RCS (or Real Company Shit). noahsdad.com isn't a company so I'll call it "Real WORLD Shit" - #RWS.

Many of the topics Rick writes about, by nature, comes from real things that happen in the real world. Bring the offline online. Things that make a difference and matter will help your audience connect. 

Like the post "An Update And History On Noah's Heart Conditions." Rick doesn't just write an endless sea of prose after the fact. He brings you there with him. There's photos. There's drawings of Noah's heart. And there's actual medical information.

Takeaway: Want to incorporate more #RCS or #RWS into your blog? Watch Wil's session from Mozcon (which Moz released for free!) 

---

Three SEO challenges and solutions

Rick and I had the chance to speak on the phone a few times, and I got to learn a little bit about some of the challenges he was facing. This case study is a perfect opportunity to share my recommendations with everyone.

Challenge one: how should I categorize the content on my blog?

Even for a seemingly simple blog, site architecture, content categorization, and menu structure can be elusive. That's often because there are different ways to bucket content, depending upon what point of view you're looking from.

For WordPress specific info on how to utilize categories vs tags, check out my post on WordPress. 

For the simplicity sake of this post, we're simply going to focus on the menu. We're going to assume the underlying architecture and URL structure makes sense. So, yes, I suppose this is a little bit of UX (Is it really that different from SEO?)

Here's the current structure of noahsdad.com:

Its pretty good, but Rick asked for some suggestions to make it better. Rather than just show you want my suggestions are, I want to walk through the process.

Step one: List the types of people in priority order of who you most want to find your content. 

You simply have to understand the different people who you are trying to attract to your blog.

Step two: Break the list down into its most simple elements. This gives you a basic map for the informational space you're playing with. 

These are the four most distinct and simple buckets of content I can think of surrounding a blog about a son who has down syndrome:

I advise all bloggers to do the same. How many categories can you elegantly break down your blog into?

Step three: Using steps one and two, create variations of this simple question: who is looking for what and why?

A few examples;

• A parent of a child with down syndrome (who) is looking for a community (what) for emotional support (why).
• An expectant parent just diagnosed (who) is looking for useful and compelling information (what) to help decide if they should keep the child (why).
• A medical student (who) is looking for medical facts and information (what) to use for a study in school (what).

We could come up with many more variations, but you see how aligning the people with the content and their reasons to search for it starts to give you a vivid picture of how to structure the categories.

This process helps me wrap my head around the topics and give them context. I am understanding the topic at hand as well as the people.

Step four: Structure the menu for people. In this particular instance, I want to help Rick set up his menus to anticipate the needs people will have when they arrive on the site. You can understand the needs by understanding what specific circumstance they're in - which is where steps 1-3 got us.

Arrange the menu in a way that requires the least thinking possible, and makes people think, "Wow, Noah's Dad read my mind and knows where I'm coming from!"

Although Rick might want to change around the particular wording a little or move a few things around, I think this is headed in the right direction. The menu is designed more user-centered rather than perhaps just topic-centered.

Tip: When structuring your content, don't reinvent the wheel! This resource about Down Syndrome was very useful when coming up with the menu.

Challenge two: should I rank for misspellings?

This was another interesting challenge. Although the appropriate spelling of Down Syndrome is "Down" and not "Down's" or "Downs", many people still spell it and search for it improperly. The question than became: should Rick try to rank for "Down's Syndrome?" The problem is, anyone who knows what the proper spelling is, would possibly believe that Rick is being disrespectful or simply incorrect.

The fact is, its not so easily to tell at face value if you should target a misspelling. So I made a little flowchart.

Flowchart - Is it worth targeting that misspelling?

Let's walk through that process for the keyword "down's syndrome."

Does it get good search volume? I'd say arguably yes, although it gets less than the correct spelling, it still gets enough they are showing it in the AdWords KW Tool

This was odd to me - being curious I wanted to know why... Wikipedia uses both versions.

OK, found it. Apparently the UK will still use Down's

This is getting tricky, and already throwing off our flowchart! One last screencap before we get back on course. Does the UK have search volume for "down's?"

Yes, they do, but still not a significant amount more than the US.

Secondly - are the SERPs much different for Down vs Down's?

As I found out, they are a little different, but Google still seems to treat down's like down, as you can see with the bolding.

At this point (we haven't even gotten to step three), I'm thinking it probably doesn't make sense to try and rank for "down's" on its own. But what about something else?

Rick should create a little resource explaining why its Down in favor of Down's.

Besides Wikipedia, the only other relevant results are out of date. Time to put something new up there, Rick!

So, in this case, we came to an alternative strategy. Don't target just Down's but create a resource explaining the difference between Down and Down's.

Challenge three: what do I write about?

Another challenge Rick brought up to me (which I think any blogger faces trying to create daily content) is how to continuously come up with ideas. Not jus any idea. Topics that people will actually care about. How do you do it? Obviously, you've got tools. We all know about them:

• Ubersuggest
• Soovle
• Google Insights
• AdWords KW Tool
• Your own Analytics / Webmaster Tools Data
• Your brain
• The thesaurus

But you see that one mixed in... your brain? Often forgotten about, we look for tools to do this work for us. It's amazing how can we apply some creative thinking to squeeze more out of the tools we have.

Start Asking Ubersuggest and Soovle Questions - Everyone knows how to use Ubersuggest "normally," but we can still get more creative with it. Wil Reynolds has been talking about this. Like this formula:

[Question words] + keyword.

Question words - try;

• can
• does
• will
• would
• how could
• why does
• when does
• where does

Examples...

Also, we all know to use "vs" - like in eCommerce - "nike vs ...." Try "the difference between [keyword] and.... "

(By the way, this does work for eCommerce - and you may get different ideas, or another set of keywords to target.)

Go nuts with those, but remember that this is only what Google suggests. What about Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, EBay, YouTube, and others? Enter Soovle.

Well said indeed! I want to show you a quick example of how Soovle can generate some different ideas than Google depending on your niche.

Pretty cool, eh?

By now, your brain is startin' to fire up, I hope. Don't just use the examples I gave. What creative ways of using Ubersuggest and Soovle can you come up with?

Let's keep talking about your brain. Highly underrated in SEO. 

Now, what I would do is this. Remember the hierarchy of potential visitors? You can call them personas or keyword level demographics. And we don't have to get as intensely technical as Mike's post. The point is to just put yourself in someone else's shoes and brainstorm (keyword: brain. storms work too though) - what's important to them?

Let's cover the two top most potential visitors in our hierarchy: expectant parents or parents of newly born child with Down Syndrome, and they just received the diagnosis. What would you be feeling, thinking, wondering, hoping?

I don't have kids and I don't know about you, but I'd want to know the following:

• What's it like raising a child with down syndrome?
• How does it differ from raising a "normal" child?
• Do they face challenges in life?
• Can it be "cured" or managed?
• Do they go to school? Get married? Get jobs? Have kids of their own?

In a nutshell, I'd be wanting to know two things: what their quality of life going to be, and what's my family's quality of life going to be like.

Start searching Google as if you are that person who just received a diagnosis your child has Down Syndrome.

Don't forget to go to the bottom...

Then, start bucketing your keywords into categories in a spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be super complicated. Just devise a way to remember your ideas but also start to organize them. This chart is not even a far cry from complete, but you can see how I begin the process. I would continue to tag and categorize them, and then start running some metrics like search volume, rankings, impressions, traffic etc.

Keep a curation of keywords and ideas going like this for each persona and you'll never run out of topics (and never forget them too, I hope).

The best part, of course, is that now you know these ideas are going to help people because they are actually searching for these things.

---

Six ideas and recommendations

OK... we're just getting started! Above there were eight things noahsdad.com is doing well, three ways to overcome some challenges, and now we've got six recommendations for Rick to take his blog further. Remember? Seventeen ways to improve your blog.

And again, these are things that can help all bloggers.

1. Set blogging goals

Rick's site obviously doesn't sell anything, and he's not focused on selling advertising as a primary goal, either. But for every site (yes, even your blog about cooking or running or music production), you can still come up with something to measure.

Rick and I spoke about this, and came up with a few key goals he wanted to measure;

• RSS Signups
• RSS Email Signups
• Social Sharing
• Increase in Social Followers
• Commenting / Engagement
• Traffic For Specific Keywords, especially related to new parents or expecting parents
• Brand vs Non-Brand Traffic (I added this one in myself Rick, in case you were wondering)

Perfect, now we know what to measure... let's get to the how! 

2. Measuring goals

In the scope of this case study, we can't cover every detail of measuring these goals. But I will show you a few in particular which I set up for Rick, and you should do the same for your blog.

Events: Are there links on your site, which send a person somewhere externally, but fulfill a goal? Like an RSS button or a link to your Twitter Profile? You should track as many of those as you can with events.

Choose the link or button you want to track.

Add the event tracking code to the <a> tag:

I can't cover this in detail here, but the code I used was:

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'RSS','Click','Feed'])

Just do this search and you'll be set.

Add these to all links you feel it would be worthwhile to track - like an RSS email subscription at the top of the page:

Fortunately, the widget Rick is using has the analytics tracking option built in:

Goals - Then, turn your events into goals.

Here's what I did for his social media profile clicks:

Again, more here in this search if you need it.

Custom Reports: Now that your events are being tracked as goals, you can create a super useful custom report. 

Here's what the final report will look like:

Brand vs Non-Brand Search Traffic: This is huge! If you guys aren't doing this, you are really missing out. Brand traffic can often be a challenge to segment because of misspellings. But I've got a pretty good method for you.

This assumes you have a list of all the possible spelling/variations of your brand. But basically, it comes down to a simple RegEx:

(^noah|^www.noah|^noha|^www.noha)

FYI - ^ means "begins with" and | means "or"

Remember to create a segment for Non-brand search traffic (so you're filtering out brand terms):

Social Media Advanced Segment: Google Analytics currently gives you a Social Media section, but I don't find it all that useful. That's why we're going to create an advanced segment to measure social media traffic better.

Plus, analytics includes WordPress as social...yeah, ok maybe. Creating your own segment gives you absolute control over the sources you want to include.

In this case I'm choosing sources I know Rick is most actively promoting.

Yes, yes, yes... you can do that with RegEx as well. This post shows you how if you want to do that. Although a little outdated, Avinash has a superb post on advanced segments, including one for social media.

3. Building your community? Start a forum!

When Rick and I spoke, he mentioned wanting to somehow connect his audience. In other words, he's looking to grow a platform for his community.

Start a forum!

He might know something I don't, but all the ones I could find were either outdated, low traffic, or poor quality.

There is definitely an opportunity in the space here. And he already has a crowd of followers to help seed content and get it going. Plus, long-tail traffic and building your domain authority by maintaining control of the content on noahsdad.com

Just a fair warning though: forums require close moderation. But I feel, in this case, a forum may provide more benefit than negatives.

You have some options for software:

• vBulletin - The standard one everyone knows
• Xenforo - A client of mine just started trying this. We're not out of testing, but it looks very promising.
• Mingle WordPress Plugin - this looks like a good plugin for WordPress. Haven't tried it myself though.

How about anyone else? Does anyone have recommendations for forum software for Rick?

4. Host Google Hangouts

Rick also mentioned wanting to bring more of his audience to Google Plus. The demographics of visitors to noahsdad.com fit mommy bloggers more than anything else. And they are not on Google Plus.

So you need a unique selling proposition for why they should be on Google Plus.

What can Google Plus do no other network can? Hangouts. Try it! It may take a few tries, but I bet you'll start pulling some momentum if that idea sounds exciting to you.

Schedule it. Send invitations. Bring your audience there and show them how fun it can be. Try it at least 4-5 times on a regular schedule and see if it can get you some traction in G+.

More stuff here.

5. Start a podcast

OK. So this may take more time. And more resources. And just more work. But it could bring you to an entirely new level.

There's one small catch. I was looking around for existing Down Syndrome podcasts.

Most of them were really old... like this...

This was the only current one I could find. Just got started this past summer. However, the audio quality is shaky, they seem to run very long, and the engagement on their website is low.

In other words: I think Rick could do better. Just speaking with him on the phone and I think he would make a perfect host. He's personable, speaks well, and is very engaging to interact with. 

He might even know this person. Who knows?  So if he pursues it, he should obviously not "step on anyone's toes" but I think there's a fantastic opportunity here if done right.

I see some good resources on this search to start...

6. Create An App

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income created an app for his blog. It does nothing more than allow people to:

• Read his latest posts
• Listen to his latest Podcasts
• Read his latest tweets
• Share his content
• Find his facebook page

That's it! But he knows people are increasingly mobile. You can get all that stuff on your mobile device, but now with his app they're all in one place. And...he's discoverable in the iTunes Store.

Here's a sample of what it looks like:

There's obviously more you can do with Apps, but this shows you even a simple app could be worthwhile to get you in front of a new audience and allow people to consume and share your content more easily.

---

To conclude

Yes - to conclude. Where do we finish? Rick's obviously doing a lot right on his blog - and I hope this gave him and you some ideas for taking your blogs further.

There may be 70 million WordPress blogs out there, but out of those 70 million - I'd like to know how many people keep going. I'd like to know how many of those use vivid and intimate images, how many use video, how many of them talk about something real? Real World Shit. #RWS!

I'd be willing to bet the answer to those questions are "not many." There's always going to be a high noise ratio of content on the web, and it's only going to increase. But Rick proves to us that if you're passionate, dedicated, personal, take risks, and be real, you still can achieve success.

And time... time is the ultimate filter of signal vs noise. Five years from now, I'll remember Rick and Noah and their blog. What blogs or content will you remember 5, 10, 20 years from now?

Let's help each other out

With all this blog talk, I'm up for a discussion...open to anything, of course. But let's help each other out.

• Where are you at with your blog?
• Is it a company blog?
• A personal blog?
• What tips in this post do you find challenging?
• What do you struggle with? Coming up with content? Making it "quality?" Getting traffic? Getting comments?

I'll start. But in the comments as soon as this posts tomorrow... see you in the discussion!!

-Dan

PS - Or, perhaps I'll see you in real life somewhere :-)