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A New Day, A New SEOmoz
Posted by randfish
It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.
If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?
Big Improvements to PRO Membership
It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:
• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.
• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.
• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.
• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.
If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.
Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website
Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:
• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)
• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.
• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)
There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.
The Web App is Now in Public Beta
Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.
We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.
As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.
Still Ironing Out Some Kinks
There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon.
I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.
We Love Your Feedback
If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.
Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)
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Day 1 at the SEOmoz Training Raceway
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.
Presentation Off
Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).
Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:
- Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
- You pitch SEO before that.
- Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
- Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
- He showed the Mozzers how to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
- He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.
Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>
Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:
Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO
- Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
- In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.
Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic:
<If you're taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...>
Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.
“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."
Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:
- Show competitors in SERPs.
- Match it with yeyword demand.
- Show how they are doing, side-by-side.
And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.
OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.
Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”
She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:
1. What is your website trying to do?
2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?
3. What is the biggest threat to your success?
You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)
Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:
- Social Network Filters – combine
- Google Image Search - Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
- Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.
Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised.
MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().
Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”
Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics
Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:
- Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
- Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
- Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
- Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
- Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
- Show the action items (not the data) to your company
- Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.
Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds:
Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO
Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:
High Priority Tactics:
- Sitemaps
- Education
- 301s
- Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
- Rel=canonical
- Rewriting urls
- How much it will make? What's the cost/traffic potential
Low Priority Tactics:
- Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
- URLs
- Link Flow
- Video SEO
- Duplicate content
- CMS Overhaul
- W3C compliance
Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point.
Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:
Optimize all assets!
Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.
Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:
- rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
- Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
- Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
- Title is the most important element.
- Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
- Omniture – over reports search referrers
- Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
- Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.
Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.
Tom Critchlow
Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:
- Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
- Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
- Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
- QDF = Query Deserves Freshness
- QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links.
- Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!
Keyword harvesting tools:
- Google Search Suggest
- Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific
- Google Related Searches
- Mozenda + API = WIN
- Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool.
- Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
- Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
- Look at how people tag stories on Delicious
The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)
Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)
Build an SEO friendly CMS:
Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:
Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:
The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:
It’s not that hard! <sigh> Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.
Thank you, Tom!
Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits
Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.
Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.
The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:
She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:
Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.
She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.
Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization
The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.
Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.
Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:
How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ...
Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:
- Unclear call-to-action
- Too many choices
- Asking for too much info
- Too much text
- Not keeping your promises
- Visual distractions
- Lack of trust
We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.
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From Clicks to Conversions at the SEOmoz Training Raceway
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.
Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."
When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.
Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.
From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between
1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."
The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:
- You have to be seen as a brand.
- You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.
- You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.
Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.
- Image results don’t always match image SERP's order, i.e. images for the artist "manet."
- Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.
- Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.
The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image
Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."
Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:
Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.
So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.
Video SERPs
It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:
Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages
Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos
Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit
Step #4: PROFIT $$$
See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.
Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:
"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."
2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:
Straight from Google’s mouth:
Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)
And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)
Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:
- Craigslist
- Twitter
- FaceBook
- Citysearch
- Google Products
- Mobile devices
- Garmin GPS
- Wikipedia
- Virtual Augmented Reality
Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:
- Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites.
- Local SEO is about optimizing locations.
Takeaway:
"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."
"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!"
Resources to claim your listings:
"The Big Three" major data providers:
Citations - David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder
Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.
3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.
Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:
Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.
Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!
Takeaway: Try to stay positive.
If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.
Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.
Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.
Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:
Timing for retweets:
Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.
Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?
- Put a bit.ly link in the browser.
- Type a plus sign after it;
- Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.
- Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.
Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...
He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)
Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.
Check out Dan's set of social media tools.
4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.
I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.
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