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30 SEO Resolutions for 2012

Tad Chef — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:05:14 +0000

Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

Content Creation

I will create less shallow content and more quality “one of a kind” pieces of content.
I will create more content using multiple rich media such as images, audio, videos and the like.
I will write shorter, more readable postings instead of long, hard to read ones that nobody can follow.
I will create more content on site and waste less time on third party sites that require me to give away “User Generated Content”.
I will provide less average sales copy and create more outstanding content for inbound marketing purposes.

Link Building

I will perform fewer tedious tasks such as contacting unwitting webmaster about link exchanges and provide more appealing incentives for people to link to me voluntarily.
I will go after more citations and fewer links to get traction on local search and Google Places instead of just the organic index that gets less exposure.
I will make sure my old inbound links are still there and also fix 404 errors on my own site.
I will link out more, not only to get noticed and more links back, but to reach out honestly to like-minded industry professionals – after all, we don’t compete most of time.
I won’t sneak in “free links” anymore on unsuspecting sites that would not voluntarily link to me.

Social Media

I will market less and contribute more in order to become a valuable contributor to social media.
I will get organised while social networking and not just waste time drifting from update to update on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
I will follow fewer hypes and not just jump in on every social site that web celebrities want me to. I will go where the real value is.
I won’t just share links all the time on social sites but instead use them in a balanced way, adding networking and conversation to my daily habits.
I will schedule times for my social media activity instead of just dropping in and getting distracted all the time during work hours.

Blogging

I will blog more regularly instead of just updating my social media profiles on third party sites.
I will guest blog on other blogs, both the already important ones and the not yet very well known.
I will focus my blog writing on the desired outcome – not just blog for the page views and social shares.
I will socialise with other bloggers both online and in real life to establish lasting relationships.
I won’t check web analytics daily or more often and obsess about metrics that only make sense to check in the long term or every other week.

Tools

I will use fewer tools and more techniques. SEO and SMO are still about how you use them, not how many tools you use.
I will use the tools I prefer more in-depth instead of just scratching the surface of the features.
I will take more time for social media analytics and monitoring and find out what real humans say about me, my contributions and why.
I will not trust tools with everything and make sure to cross check data and compare with other outcomes.
I will recommend only the tools I truly use, not the ones I’m an affiliate of.

SEO

I will perform more SEO tests and publish the results to the benefit of the SEO community, no matter how vague the outcomes are.
I will provide more advice to educate the clients and their teams and make them more self-sufficient.
I will share my techniques, tools and case studies, not just to show off but to get recognition from the SEO community.
I will rant and complain less about Google, other SEOs and bloggers and instead keep on improving my own arsenal.
I will build a recognisable brand instead of just relying on generic rankings on Google.

These resolutions are written in the first person to make it easier for you to identify with them and to apply them yourself. They are not necessarily my personal resolutions.

On a side note: this is my last post on SEOptimise after more than four years. I hope you liked my posts. If you did, you can keep on reading my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

The SEOptimise team will take care of this blog completely from now on, so there won’t be any shortage of posts.

* Creative Common image by Aftab Uzzaman.

SEOptimise’s 58 most awesome blog posts of 2011

Matthew Taylor — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:32:20 +0000

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2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews (oh and one best blog award).

With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts, judging by the most popular posts a lot of you are. So ever eager to please, here is a list of the 58 best/most popular posts of the year.

Our 10 most popular posts

What better place to start than the most popular posts of the year? Between them, the posts below generated almost 100,000 pageviews. So, working on the basis that 100,000 people (ok, maybe not people) can’t be wrong, there must be some awesome SEO gems contained within them.

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011 – the first post of the year is also the most popular, with Tad’s post about what was going to happen to search and social in 2011 receiving over 17,000 pageviews. As you would expect, there were a few predications that didn’t come true, but a fair few that did.

30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People – with businesses seemingly falling over themselves to become more social, it’s good to know what you can use it for, and this post rounds it up.
30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate – a one-stop guide to some of the more misunderstood Google ranking factors: link decay anyone?
What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours? – this post got a fair few mentions at conferences, on other blog posts and even in the mainstream media. While the answer may seem obvious, you never know until you try, and Marcus did.
30 (New) SEO Terms You Have to Know in 2011 – this was the most shared post on our blog in 2011 and, amongst other things, told everyone what a content farm is shortly before Google tried to destroy them all. Still, there are always the 29 other terms.
High Risk SEO: 33 Ways to Get Penalised by Google – a post that summarises ways to get penalised by Google. Best used as a “how not to guide”, but I’m fairly sure people will still try a few and cross their fingers.
36 Must-Read Local SEO/Google Places Resources from 2010/2011 – with Local and Places results becoming ever more prominent in the SERPs, it’s best to know how to master them. This post did the hard work and aggregated lots of the best sources for you.
30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change – despite only being published in late November this still made the top 10 list. Judging by the accuracy of the one Tad did for 2011, it’s probably worth a read.
Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes & Tweets? – there was a lot of talk earlier in 2011 about the potential use of social signals in Google’s algorithm, so Marcus tried to find out if there was anything to back up the chat by experimenting.
30 Link Building/Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011 – With the Panda update (potentially) devaluing a lot of low quality links, Tad refreshed our memory about some of the great link building tactics that are still available.

The 20 posts that got you sharing

The later half of the year has all been about one thing – social media, largely fuelled by Google’s latest attempt at social media, Google+. Bearing this in mind, we had to check what got our readers sharing during 2011.

30 New SEO Terms You Have To Know in 2011 – shared 1,510 times
30 Ways To Use Social Media for Business People – shared 1,284 times
30 Web Trends For 2012: How SEO Search Social Media Blogging Web Design Analytics Will Change – shared 890 times
30 New Google Ranking Factors You May Over or Underestimate – shared 678 times
How To Write a Social Media Audit – shared 599 times
Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes Tweets – shared 597 times
High Risk SEO 33 – Ways To Get Penalised by Google – shared 582 times
30 Link Building & Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011 – shared 406 times
What Makes a Real SEO Expert – shared 404 times
30 Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners – shared 397 times
30 Efficient Web Tools That Save Time and Make Money For Power Users – shared 369 times
30 Google SERP Changes that Impact Your SEO Strategy – shared 357 times
157 Awesome PubCon 2011 Takeaways – shared 346 times
What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours – shared 322 times
30 Web Trends You Have To Know About in 2011 – shared 285 times
Google Dropping Analytics Keyword Data: What Does This Mean – shared 273 times
30 SEO Myths That Are True or False Depending on Who You Ask – shared 247 times
30 Ways To Optimise Your Site for Speed – shared 235 times
Experiment Do Google+1S Impact Your Rankings – shared 229 times
Social Media Why an SEO Background is Better Than PR – shared 229 times

The three best experiments of the year

Due to the secrecy behind Google’s algorithm, a lot of popular SEO theory is based on anecdotal evidence and guess work. But, every so often Marcus, our resident SEO mad scientist, likes to don his lab coat shark outfit, lock himself away and get experimenting. Below are three of his best experiments from 2011 (no animals were harmed during the making of these posts – but a few sites were).

The 10 greatest SEO tool posts

The one thing common to all SEOs is that we like our tools, whether it’s to crawl a site or just optimise it. In the SEOptimise office we like to try everything out, and the good news for you is that we love to write about them too. So here are the 10 greatest posts about SEO tools we wrote this year.

10 awesome SEO conference posts

As an agency we get like to go to and talk at as many conferences as we can (especially if they are in Vegas). But we also know that not everyone can go to them all, and even if you do there is a lot to remember, so we always try our best to post a round-up of the stuff we hear. So below I have summarised our 10 most viewed conference related posts.

Five wicked polls

We love a good bit of crowdsourcing in the SEOptimise office, and we are very lucky that we have followers who like to get involved and share their opinions. Here are five of the best and most interesting polls we ran this year.

So these are our greatest hits of the year, hope you all found some cool stuff. Next year there will be more of the same, plus hopefully a few more video blogs as well. If there are any blogs that we haven’t included but you think deserve a mention, let me know in the comments section.

Finally, we are always happy to take requests, so if you want us to blog about something in particular you can add those to the comments too.

*Image credit: negatendo on Flickr (I had to use a cat picture once this year).

30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Tad Chef — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:50:40 +0000

It’s this time of year again! In the previous years my web trends lists were very successful, both as predictions and by traffic or number of shares.

People working in the web industries want to know what’s ahead.

So for 2012 I want to tell you again what’s coming up. Basically I’m not predicting anything here; instead I just list trends you can already see and measure, but which will be obvious next year.

SEO

Good bye PageRank and links – links and PageRank matter less and less. In 2012 more ranking factors will probably be about other signals than conventional a href links. Google will use all kinds of other data including feedback human quality raters to overcome the big decade long link buying spree.

Freshness – the latest Google update is perhaps more important than the high quality update dubbed Panda. Nobody cries about it because it wasn’t about penalties for sites but about improvements for searchers this time. This is good news for big news sites and bad news for brands with questionable business practices. The bad news will show up on top.

Quality – the Panda update wasn’t really about pandas, as I hope you know: it was about ”high quality” sites. Thus focusing on quality metrics that entail usability, readability and overall usefulness is key in 2012. Underpaid quality raters are out there to get you, sometimes even without a look on your actual site.

SEO is just a part – SEO isn’t dead in 2012, but it’s more and more part of bigger ideas and concepts. This year it seems it’s not SEO 2.0 or findability anymore. The new en vogue terms are content marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing or Internet/online marketing (again). SEO practitioners do just stuff meta tags, but their tasks now encompass much more.

SEO marries CRO – The two disciplines, SEO and CRO or conversion optimisation are just two sides of one coin. While SEO focused on getting traffic, CRO concentrates on making this traffic work for you. I’ve watched these two disciplines converge more and more. In 2012 you will rarely have one without the other. I know I predicted this for 2011, but many people still tried to divide the two sides of the same coin.

Search

Google does it again – Google has quickly reacted to competition from small contenders like Blekko, Ixquick and DuckDuckGo. It has appropriated all improvements and features by these faster competitors – be it the removal of content farms by Blekko or the introduction of SSL search by Ixquick or referral blocking by DuckDuckGo, Google offers it all now as well.

Even more confusion – last year I predicted more clutter in Google results and was nevertheless unprepared for the wide range of changes leading to portal-like search results. In particular, many changes on local searches lead to even more information stuffed in the SERPs. Furthermore, the manifold social enhancements such as who +1′ed, shared or authored a post make the SERPs look like a collection of gif clip art. I’m afraid this won’t be the end of this trend of more confusion.

Search without clicking – in 2011 several small moves by Google showed a tendency to show search results as content directly on Google, thus making a click to the actual page not necessary anymore. We will see more of it until people start suing Google for stealing their content.

Google does it already on Google News, Google Places and Google Images. It also owns YouTube, where most video searches end up. They want the same thing for text search as well. They don’t want people to leave Google properties at all. Google+ brand pages just add to it.

Google reads your mind – we already got used to the sometimes annoying instant search results that appear even before you type something meaningful. Google works on more ways to find out what you need and give it to you even before you ask. Just consider the multiple data sources Google now has about you: Google toolbar, Chrome, Profiles, Plus, search history…

Speech recognition – Siri, the speech recognition ”assistant” on the latest iPhone, makes people talk with their phones and it’s extremely popular already. In 2012 we will see Apple’s competitors come up with similar tools so that we don’t need to talk to people or type in search queries anymore. Is this the end of SEO as some journalists assume (just like some suggest after every other major change in the search industry)?

No, it just means different kinds of queries, maybe more colloquial or clumsy ones. Maybe more dialogue with your search engine, for example ”I want something to eat”. I can’t imagine people just saying one, two or three word queries in public without looking silly. So they will talk as they do with other people.

Mobile grows – no surprise here. Mobile search will grow in 2012 again. How big it will become? Some pundits suggest that more than 1/5 of all searches will be conducted via mobile devices.

Social media

Google+ stays tiny – Google+ is being heralded and pushed by Google in search results because it’s still tiny – it hasn’t even reached a social networking market share of 0.5%, while Facebook owns approximately 65% of it.

Facebook losing ground – despite its almost monopolistic position, Facebook is already losing ground. In 2011 Facebook lost 6 million users in the US. The various privacy scandals and annoyances, along with alternatives like Diaspora, Google+ or Tumblr, will accelerate this process in 2012.

Oversaturation – it has been evident for a while already, but in 2011 most people noticed it: people can’t join more social media sites and spend even more time there without spending 24h on social networking and creating user generated content. We witnessed this when Quora appeared and demanded constant attention and production of high quality content.

Also, the emergence of Google+ has shown that most average people already have enough to do with Facebook and the likes. In 2012 it will finally become obvious that the social networking and UGC market is saturated and that creating another site that demands time and effort is not a valid business model anymore.

Social bookmarking vs social saving – last time I predicted the death of social bookmarking. In a way I was right, though luckily Delicious, the original social bookmarking site, has survived. Nonetheless it moved on to a different model of sharing links. Other social bookmarking sites or their competitors have created something that has no name but that I’d like to call social saving.

People are saving snippets or whole webpages using tools like Diigo, Evernote or bo.lt to collect, edit and share them. The future is bright for these type of tools in 2012 as webpages, articles or blog posts you want to bookmark vanish faster than you can look.

Curation – Curation is the collection of resources by an editor or a user who acts as an ad-hoc editor. Search engines like Blekko or Rollyo use curation but also third party services that create “Twitter newspapers”. With the relaunch of Delicious as a curation site for compiling small lists (aka stacks of links), the idea has been given another push. Adding +1 votes to search results is another kind of curation.

Social CRM goes prime time – customer relationship management (CRM) and social media converged for a few years now but there was no perfect solution to merge those two. In 2011 Nimble CRM appeared. This tool is so simple to use and flawlessly combines CRM, email and social media sites Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place, so that you can save lots of time and effort when trying to generate leads right on there on social media sites.

Blogging

Quantity vs quality – in 2011 people blogged less often, but when they blogged they wrote long articles. With the new freshness algorithm Google just introduced, the process might get reversed, as now the latest articles are more likely to show up on top in the top 10.

Tumblr – miniblogging is still growing, at least the market leader Tumblr. Why is Tumblr such a success? It’s a bit like Facebook, a bit like blogging and a bit like Twitter, but it combines the best of all of them. You can like or “heart” postings, you can reblog them and you can use a pseudonym like on Twitter. In 2011 many high level bloggers even moved their blogs from WordPress to Tumblr for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. Also, never underestimate the huge Tumblr audience.

Corporate blogging fails – businesses dump blogging in order to invest in Facebook marketing some statistics suggest. This is like giving up your office and doing business from Starbucks. Despite logic, this seems to be an appealing business model both in real life and online. Why host your own website and practice SEO, networking and advertising to get people to visit it when you can rent a “table” at Facebook. This is quite a short-sighted and risky move but business people tend to follow this trend.

Line breaks – for the sake of readability bloggers use more text-decoration, lists and breaks. Some overdo it though it seems. Not every line needs a break after it, not every post has to be a list and every second word has to be bold.

Web development

No more Flash – there will be no Flash on Android and RIM tablets and smartphones anymore. Thus the original Flash will die finally. Adobe is already working on a HTML5 implementation instead. So Flash will be probably resurrected based on Web Standards.

UX surpasses usability – if you believe Google Insights for search is a reliable statistic, you can see that in 2011 the interest in UX or user experience design has outgrown the dwindling popularity of the keyword usability. Fewer and fewer people are satisfied with usability because it’s too limited. The overall user experience, which includes emotional states of the user in its ideas, is the more important discipline of both.

@font-face usage - I remember it as if it was yesterday, when I first heard about the @font-face CSS method to embedding web-safe fonts to websites around 2004; I couldn’t wait until web browsers started supporting them. It took almost a decade and half a dozen font replacement techniques to make this CSS3 method work in most modern browsers. Now most browsers support it and we already see an abundance of websites using beautiful and readable typography. In 2012 we will probably see this going mainstream.

HTML5 innovation – when HTML5 came up, the hype was huge but I rarely ever noticed some HTML5 that wowed me. Most websites still seemed to look boring. Yes they were readable, usable, maybe even findable but what about the 21st century design I’d expect in 2011? Well, now the sites that really use HTML5 to create a design beyond a few boxes start appearing in larger numbers.

Analytics

Referral keywords - Google proprietary SSL search kills the Google keyword referrer. You can’t even see it on an SSL site, as Google removes the keyword using a script. Thus people will finally look at conversions not keywords.

Klout – no other metric has been so obsessed about both in a positive and a negative way recently. People love and hate Klout as if it was a nation or a religion. Whether you like Klout or not, it’s the elephant in the room. The social media influence measurement may be flawed at the moment, but it’s still the best there is. Also, Google has similar metrics for authors or might acquire Klout in the near future, maybe even in 2012. What’s safe to say is that in 2012 you won’t just measure websites but also people.

Rankings, traffic – simple SEO metrics such as rankings and traffic die a slow death. The search referrer blocking by Google may be only the last nail in the coffin of simplistic SEO metrics. When you can’t even see what keywords people use and thus can’t segment your search traffic properly, this metrics becomes useless.

Real time analytics – Google finally caught up with the competition this year, adding real time features to Google Analytics. At least a dozen of other vendors have been offering real time data for a while, and even better than Google Analytics if you ask me.

ROI – business people finally seem to overcome the ROI frenzy. ROI is important for both SEO and social media campaigns, but you can’t quantify everything by chasing after Return On Investment. It seems that in 2011 this simple truth has dawned on marketers and analysts all over the place so that we can sit back and watch other metrics in the coming year.

Feel free to add more trends you want to get noticed in the comment section or on social media.

* Creative Commons image by Express Monorail.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Everything I Know About Effective Blogger Outreach

Marcus Taylor — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:39:19 +0000

Those of you who follow my tweets will probably know that I’ve recently launched a book called Get Noticed, which is a guide that explores the processes and techniques that successful networkers use to get noticed.

In the course of writing the book I carried out a lot of research around how people meet and what it takes to develop a strong relationship, which has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of successful blogger outreach. On Wednesday morning I sent out 100 e-mails to YouTube video bloggers and so far I’ve received 77 replies (not bad when most sources suggest anywhere from 3% to 25% is a good response rate for an outreach campaign).

In this post I want to share a few tips and tricks I’ve learnt about outreach from researching, writing and marketing Get Noticed to help you improve the success of your outreach campaigns.

Image Credit: ekai

I’m going to assume that you’ve already done some blogger outreach and know the basics like finding the right bloggers to target, personalising your e-mails, sending them at the right time and including obvious call-to-actions. This one’s for the pros

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Marketing Get Noticed

A 5 second meeting in person is worth 100s of e-mails

When contacting high-profile bloggers, a five second in-person introduction has an incredible impact on increasing the likelihood of that blogger helping you out. Busy people tend to use ‘filters’ to manage their time efficiently, and one of the major filters that busy people use is ‘have I met this person in real life?’

I cannot emphasise enough how beneficial it is to attend blogger conferences as a means for improving your outreach campaigns. Second to this, a simple tweet telling the person that you dropped them an e-mail seems to significantly improve response rates as it suddenly presents you as a real person in their world. Being ‘real’ to someone outside of their inbox is effective for outreach.

Scalability is awesome IF combined with quality & selectiveness

It’s common sense that sending 100 e-mails is more effective than sending 10 e-mails, but there are two other parts to this equation: quality + selectiveness.

E-mailing 100 bloggers is pointless if your product or offering isn’t good enough. The key to getting a good response rate in an outreach campaign is to give the blogger an irresistible offering. I personally like to sit down with a pen and paper before writing an e-mail campaign and list every possible benefit that I can offer to the blogger, so that my e-mail naturally becomes focused around them and not what I want.

Also, being selective can be very beneficial. Rather than e-mailing 100 Average Joe blogs, could you use the time spent contacting them to get featured on five or six major blogs that would then influence 500 bloggers to write about your product? If your product or offering is awesome, you should be able to get featured by high-profile bloggers.

Picking up the phone is the most effective way to get what you want

A pretty simple concept that I’ve talked about before; a phone call can sometimes take a little bit longer than an e-mail, but it gives you the ability to adapt to the blogger’s immediate response, which is not something you are able to do over e-mail.

If a blogger doesn’t have a phone number listed, I’d recommend dropping them a tweet asking if it’s okay to get in touch by phone with them.

Busy people are better at time management

I remember reading an interesting concept in the book Predictably Irrational, which suggests that busier people tend to be better at responding to e-mails. The theory behind this is that busy people tend to be better at time management and actioning opportunities.

When contacting people for pre-publication reviews of Get Noticed I was shocked to see the first replies come in from CEOs of major corporations and various New York Times Best-Selling Authors.

Don’t be afraid to contact the A-list bloggers just because they’re ‘out of reach’, you’d be surprised at how accessible they are.

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Writing Get Noticed

Be in the right place at the right time, all the time

One of my favourite chapters in Get Noticed is ‘How to Be in the Right Place at the Right Time, All The Time’. Most of us assume that when we we’re supposedly in the right place at the right time, it was a stroke of luck. There is in fact more science and probability at work than we might immediately recognise. Lets break it down:

You were prepared either subconsciously or consciously with specific and clear objectives about the type of person you wanted to meet.
You were both in the same place (either geographically, or virtually)
You were perceptive enough to make the connection with them.

The first step to being in the right place at the right time, is knowing exactly what that place is. Who are the people you are trying to meet and where do they spend their time? If the answer is tech bloggers, then analyse where tech bloggers spend their time and be there. Attend technology conferences and meet-ups, write for the blogs they read, spend time in the cities notorious for tech blogging.

Being in that place ‘all the time’ requires you to analyse how your time is spent and replacing the ‘unsociable’ hours with sociable hours. I met a lot of great people by being ‘in the right place at the right time’ whilst writing Get Noticed by writing the book in cafés and restaurants (a sociable venue) rather than in a home study or office (an unsociable venue).

Broadly speaking, there are three main categories for how we spend our time: at work, at home, at hobbies. Working out how you distribute your time in each category and finding ways to make each aspect more ‘sociable’ can increase your odds of meeting more of the people who will help you.

Understand and be sensitive to a blogger’s accessibility

Just like celebrities, bloggers are both accessible and inaccessible in different places. Understand where it is that bloggers are most accessible and use that channel to cut through the competition and get their attention.

My experience has shown me that e-mail is relatively ineffective when contacting high-profile bloggers, when compared to Twitter and attending conferences, which are both channels where bloggers tend to be far more receptive.

Some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, some will consciously or subconsciously design their site in a way that pushes you towards their preferred channel of communication (i.e. if they have their Twitter link or phone number at the bottom of every post and only a fairly hidden link to their e-mail on one page, you’re probably best contacting them via Twitter or telephone!)

Utilise your existing network

When you do things for altruistic reasons it makes you feel genuinely good about yourself, especially if you’ve helped out a friend. Utilising your existing network is a powerful way to reach bloggers if your current network is likely to know the sort of people you need to meet. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I ask for a lot of virtual introductions to new people who are relevant to what I’m doing. This works amazingly well, as I always link to those who help me out as well as those who I virtually meet in the blog posts that I write.

If you need to meet sport bloggers, send a few e-mails to your friends or send out a tweet to see if anyone can help you out – don’t feel like you’re burdening your network, you’re not, in fact you’re helping them, too.

Be likeable, genuine, and understand a blogger’s motivations

I receive a fair number of outreach e-mails to my personal website e-mail accounts, and the #1 reason why I don’t reply to some of them is because they’ve forgotten to mention or outline what the benefit is to me.

Why should I waste half an hour helping someone I’ve never met increase their rankings and profile by blogging about them? There are plenty of reasons, such as: it gives me extra content, I could receive affiliate commissions, a free product to test, promotion from their company’s social media accounts or an invite to an exclusive webinar, but they rarely mention my motivations.

Also, remember that only 7% of communication between humans is ‘what you say’, 93% of what you say is non-verbal communication, which means that if you’re e-mailing someone, 93% of your communication is lost in translation as the recipient cannot see your body language, facial expression, and to some extent, tone.

This means that you need to make ‘what you say’ compensate for the lack of non-verbal communication by ensuring that your tone is likeable and that the core message to your e-mail is genuine and honest.

Significant Traffic Sources You Probably Miss Unless You Blog

Tad Chef — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:25:36 +0000

Top 20 WordPress Plugins – 2011 Edition

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:02:28 +0000

Tonight I was delighted to be invited to speak at the London Blog Club and presented about the WordPress plugins which I find most useful.

Here are the slides from my talk:

20 Top WordPress Plugins – 2011 Edition – Kevin Gibbons, London Blog Club

If you have any questions on this please let me know in the comments or on the meetup.com page.

Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size

Tad Chef — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:54:08 +0000

These days the “content is king” and “you need great content” mantras are everywhere. While some people in the SEO industry challenge it by stating that great content is not enough, you need to push, promote or market it as well. I rarely see an article that actually explains what great content is or actually could be. Also, many sites that allegedly offer great content provide mostly big or just long content.

It seems that many content creators rely on size to measure greatness, while on the Web it’s often the other way around. The faster someone can convey a message, the greater the content.

With the latest Google update aimed at so-called content farms, we’ve seen a flurry of articles focused on content quality. This is a good start, as content farm articles are often just long without offering value. Long or even big shallow content is not enough these days. Great or quality content is the key.

I’ve been guilty of producing big content instead of great content myself here on SEOptimise. Let me explain the differences between the three common types of content you encounter on the Web today:

Great content

Great content is content that, no matter what its size, offers some unique solutions or insights. Great content doesn’t have to be long or big. It has to be insightful, easily digestible and self-explanatory.

Big content

Big lists that are big on social media and appeal to the crowds not the experts, specialists or early adopters. Over the years the Web has been flooded with big content. While those who popularised big content in the early days were also providing great content, just think Smashing Magazine or Mashable lists the copycats were just taking the form (of the list) and filling it with average ingredients.

Lists of “creative images” or “nice art” still got quite big on the Web, but they wore out as time passed and people became wary even of the lists with great resources. I’ve been providing big content here on SEOptimise for years and while I strive to make it great as well, the perception by my industry peers was in more and more cases telling me otherwise: the posts were shared by outsiders, newbies or people from the main stream. So while big content often draws crowds it doesn’t often help to build a reputation of quality.

Long content

Long content can be a very long article, a collection of numerous images, a video that takes 20 minutes or anything else that takes that long to view, read and digest. With short attention spans predominant on the Web today, it only gets skimmed rather than consumed in its entirety. In the best case it gets saved for later in the “to read” folder and it never actually gets read as a whole.

It seems that long content has evolved for many reasons other than what readers on the Web really prefer. SEO practitioners aimed at providing more content for the Google bot, while writers who got paid for the number of words tried to earn a living by producing longer instead of better content. Mass media needed more page views for their ads, so they spread a series of loosely similar images over ten or more pages and forced visitors to click to see the next one. Videos have been hailed as the new must-have online medium as more and more people turn to YouTube instead of TV or text-based sites.

So webmasters provided long monologues from their webcams just to show up in YouTube in Universal search results. All of these reasons to create long content were not based on actual demand by the consumers but by structural requirements of the production or dissemination process. Reading and viewing habits on the Web have been known for years. People want quick solutions for particular problems. They don’t want to read long copy. So providing long content is a user experience no no.

When you take a look at content farms you will notice that their content is often long but shallow. The length does not provide actual depth; it only feeds Google with more words to index.

Quality content

The old idiom “quality not quality” still rings true. Quality is not measured by the size of a list, length of a video or the number of words. Quality means an inherent value of its own.

Beyond content

The concept of content is a very limited one. Ask a film-maker, poet or chef whether they provides content and they won’t often say yes. A film-maker creates movies, a poet poems and a chef recipes. It’s not just that these are more specific terms. They also imply quality, or rather another mindset.

The term content is used in a technocratic way.

Content means the stuff that gets published on a blog or site other than ads. So artists do not see themselves as content creators. Rather those who make money from their works, just as content thieves make content out of art by republishing it in a more readable way. So at the end of the day you should aim for writing powerful poetry not great content. The reason why Google always preaches great content:

Google needs content for their ads.

Good SEO is not just providing Google with fodder; it’s giving the people what they want. It also does not mean attracting large crowds with mainstream content. Often the better business model is to go after a narrow niche and become a specialist or expert in it.

Google allowed content farms to thrive for years because it was a win-win situation.

The content farms used Google Adsense to monetise their low quality content. As people often click Adsense ads when the content is not really what they’re looking for, it was big business for the content farmers and Google alike.

Now that Blekko shows Google how you can provide clean search results without shallow Google-optimised content, they had to act. They lose money in the short run, but they hope to make more users stay with them instead of using Blekko and other social search engine contenders.

One day quality will become the new king and then sheer content won’t rank anymore. A love poem of a few lines will then outrank a huge article of 6000 words about love. So content creation is not a long term strategy – it’s just good now, as long as Google depends on size and we depend on Google.

Cruel irony: I couldn’t make this article short and concise and still bring the point across.

* Image by danorbit.

How to Link Out for SEO Benefit

Tad Chef — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:44:26 +0000

Outgoing links are one of the most underestimated weapons in the arsenal of every SEO and webmaster. After all, you want to get backlinks not give away links by linking out, don’t you? So it seems to be a contradiction. Popular wisdom also suggests that you would lose by linking out rather than gain some SEO value.

Most people seem to assume that linking out leads to:

Users leaving your site
Search engines assigning less value to your site (aka PageRank leaking)
A bad user experience as readers interrupt reading to jump to other sites
Supporting your competition
Appearing less authoritative (so that you have to link out to others who know better)

to name just the most obvious perceived drawbacks of linking out people.

All of this can happen, but doesn’t have to. Also, even if it does happen, a short term loss can be a gain in the long run.

You can try to mitigate the negative effects of outgoing links by linking out correctly and by adopting a strategic approach to it.

The SEOptimise blog has thousands of outgoing links in the editorial part and we rank at #1 for [seo blog] in Google UK despite or because of this, so we must do something right, mustn’t we? In SEO terms, you refer to us as a so-called hub site. Some people assume that Google loves hub sites and favours them in search results. Aren’t we the best proof of this SEO benefit?

So the question is not whether you link out but how. Let me split this up into several more specific questions:

Negative Approach to Linking Out

How to deal with users leaving your site via outgoing links

Link out in a new window/tab using target=”_blank” in your link. This way, users will stay on your page or return by closing the new tab or window. This was frowned upon by some Web users before everybody used tabs, but these days it far less of a problem. You can have lots of tabs open in modern browsers without experiencing any issues.

Link out at the bottom of the article. Treat your blog post or page like a landing page and streamline it. It starts with an eye catcher, then some easily readable lists or tables follow; structure it with sub-headlines, citations and small digestible chunks of text using a bit of bold and italic text decoration. Then add the external links at the bottom of the post or page. Just like scientific publications do – the Internet was originally based upon this concept.

Add internal links to similar articles before the outgoing links. Add thumbnail images to these internal links.

How to convince search engines to assign more value to your page by linking out

Link out to very relevant high quality resources using deep links. I see people linking out to the homepage of Wikipedia.com, Flickr.com, BBC or even Google as the source. These links are worthless. Even if somebody clicks them, they are useless as nobody will search on those sites for the actual page you refer to but which you are afraid or too lazy to link to.

Of course Google engineers are smart enough to figure out which links are useful and which are not. Search engines don’t work on a page to page basis; they also form topical clusters. Just check the Google Wonder Wheel to see what I mean. Google does not favour outgoing links just for the sake of them; it also categorises the pages linked out linguistically.

Don’t be stingy. Link out plenty or don’t link out all. Why? Google has been known for years to favour so-called hub sites. Hub sites are sites that link out to many other authoritative and relevant sites. In the SEO industry, hub sites like Search Engine Watch or Search Engine Land have been the most successful publications over the years in spite of other sites like SEOmoz or SEO Book being even more on topic and targeted.

How to make sure your visitors have a good user experience

Link out where it makes sense. Add sources and additional resources below the article. Don’t link out to obvious sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter when mentioning them. Rather, link to actual messages or updates and your profiles on those sites where appropriate. Use self-explanatory anchor text for both internal and external links. Highlight links with CSS, but don’t overdo it. Link to the subject of your article in such a way that people who want to go there don’t have to look hard.

How to ensure you don’t support your competition, or rather how to make it a win-win situation

You can’t prevent your outgoing links from supporting your industry peers; even by crippling them with nofollow. Either you link out to colleagues from the industry or you don’t. Decide not to link out, and they won’t link to you either in most cases. Decide to link out and they will link, like and Tweet you as well in most (or at least many) cases. So, embrace linking out to industry peers wholeheartedly and don’t be nit-picky about every single link.

How to appear more authoritative by linking out

Link out to those people who offer really in-depth articles on parts of the topic you write about. Do not link out to people who are describing exactly the same but better. Link out to those who cover certain aspects that you don’t.

Also, collect the links you want to link out to before you actually write your own post so that you can expand on the issue or concept that others have covered before.

Don’t reinvent the wheel just for the sake of making yourself appear as the first person who has written about a certain topic. You aren’t, and everybody knows it. You can also find your own angle and provide links to others with a more general approach.

Positive Approach to Linking Out

Now that we have dealt with the issues you might face using external links as an SEO weapon, we can add some of the SEO benefits you are after when linking out. Outgoing links are actually the best method to get incoming links. Sometimes it’s as easy as pinging another blogger. Sometimes it can be more of challenge, but it may pay back in manifold ways after a while.

Link out to get noticed

When you start out as a blogger, especially with a business or corporate blog it is quite difficult to get noticed at all. There are millions of other blogs out there and nobody cares about your great content. The best way to make people notice and care is to tell them. You can’t tell them upfront by aggressively self-promoting without annoying people though. This is not a good start. There is a way to make people notice and care: notice and care for others first. Read the blogs in your niche, industry or from your area.

Don’t treat them like competitors. You can’t compete with the whole world anyway. You can cooperate with other bloggers though. That’s the secret behind the concept of the blogosphere. It’s a social sphere made up of bloggers.

Link out to fellow bloggers who are similar to you and write about them in the best case. They will notice you. Do it a few times, Stumble, Tweet, like them, and comment on their blogs. Unless you fail at blogging completely, some of them will start to care for you as well. At least use them as sources and provide ”via” links back to their articles.

This is a strategy that does not work without a blog. So get one. A site without a blog is quite dead these days. A blog is often far less time consuming and rewarding than other options like a forum or a feedback community.

Link out to get backlinks

As noted above, it’s just a matter of pinging other bloggers to get a backlink. Don’t overuse this and keep in mind that ultimately you are after real editorial links from other bloggers or webmasters. Even non-bloggers check their web analytics tools to find out who links to them, and they might link back to you. You just have to provide an incentive to do so.

Link out to become a hub site

The hub site is the holy grail of SEO. For about a decade it’s almost a mystic topic few people write about: a hub site is a site that gets preferential treatment by Google for the sheer variety and resources it connects around the Web.

To become a hub site you have to link out plenty to authoritative sites. Linking out solely to your own properties on other domains won’t suffice. It’s not the sheer number of links, it’s about the authority and variety of sites you link out to.

Hub site success stories

The best example of a successful hub site has been Drudge Report. A study has shown how this one page news site that only contains links has a much higher engagement than major news sites like CNN.

Searching for [news] on Google.com from the US results in Drudge Report being at number 4 in spite of Drudge Report not even having the word ‘news’ in the title or headline of their site, two of the most important on-site ranking factors. Google News and News at Yahoo follow at 5 and 6.

There is barely any “SEO” on Drudge Report at all, so it is really difficult not to attribute its success to plenty of linking out. Alltop is another good example for a link-only hub site. They rank in the top 10 for generic queries like [design], but also competitive keyphrases like [seo news].

So you see: a “one man show” site can compete with huge organisations mostly by linking out.

SEOptimise has been in the top 10 for [seo blog] for years, but just recently when I stepped up my linking out efforts by providing several highly popular 30+ resources lists in a row, we moved up to #1 in the UK.

What Checking Broken Links Can Teach You About the Web & Linking Out

Tad Chef — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:25:10 +0000

Probably you haven’t noticed yet as I haven’t told you yet: starting from 2011 I’m stepping up my efforts on SEOptimise. I write more regularly for the blog and I’ll help the SEOptimise team with their blog SEO among others. So I start with the basics: broken links.

Blogs amass a record number of broken links over the years as they often deal with short-lived developments or news.

The Web deteriorates fast and with it your site quality when you link out. In my last post I argued that linking out is important for SEO. That’s true but you have to keep in mind who you link out to. Seeing hundreds of websites either disappear or move without proper redirects can teach you a lot about the Web and links. What did I learn?

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t care for broken links

You might assume that companies owning search engines themselves would get the issue of broken links on their own sites. They don’t. There are plenty links to fix here. Google is really awful, many URLs do neither return a 404 nor a 301 to the new version. Yahoo and Microsoft sites like MSN tend to offer proper 404 pages bu does not bother to redirect to newer URLs. So in case you care about longevity you better just link to the blog posts that announce a new service by Google as these tend to stay online longer.

Startups tend to disappear after a year or two

In my highly popular tools list which I compiled over the years but even with a list covering web analytics I saw a considerable number of dead links. I’ve seen that before on my own blog over at SEO 2.0 – tools disappear fast, especially tools based on third party services liketter. Almost all of the first generation Twitter tools from around 2008 had disappeared by the time I update it in late 2010. At the same time most of the blog links were still working. Even those that get acuired are often gone, either by getting swallowed completely by the company that bought them or by sheer neglect.

Sites by people who comment for SEO vanish fast

When installing Broken Link Checker for WordPress and letting it run for a while on a blog that has been online for a few years you might experience a shock: hundreds of links are broken! Soon you’ll discover though that most broken links stem from blog comments. Most of these are not your regular commneters but those who offer less value and comment mostly for SEO purposes. It’s amazing how many comments, track and pingbacks lead to nowhere after a while. It’s often generic sites the likes of expert-internet-marketing-services.biz that vanish the fastest.

Some well known SEO publications do not redirect all posts to new URLs

Pronetadvertising.com was one of my favorite sites over the years. Also Kevin has linked their posts as far back as 2007. They are still around but some seemingly still valid posts have changed URLs or disappeared completely. I could restore some of those links manually both on SEOptimise and on SEO 2.0 I was surprised though to see SEO experts forget this. There are many reasons for such issues, sometimes the blog gets rid of old outdated posts. In other cases the company restructures or the blog gets underfunded in the long run so that obvious tasks like redirecting to new URLs get forgotten.

Even flagship blogs sometimes go offline after a few years

This is probably the saddest part of checking broken links: witnessing the demise of your idols’ blogs. Well known and respected industry blogs doshdosh.com and tropicalseo.com are just two sad examples of blogs from acknowledged experts that are no more. So long out is always a bit of a hazard n the long run. Even the best of us can fail to keep up their blogs after a few years.

Black hat SEOs hijack your legitimate links

Linking out to bad neighborhoods is even worse than linking to broken pages as your site is not just full of holes due to broken links but also may inadvertently become part of spammy link network. Thus you have to check redirects as well not just 404s. Often links get redirected to

How can you check your blog/site for broken links?

You can use lots of free or affordable tools.

How to link out for longevity?

Link out to news sources from stable websites or blogs not the actual tools you describe. The tool might be long gone while the article will be there for years. So you better link to an NYT article about a new feature by Google than the Google feature itself which might disappear altogether in a year. Remember Google Wave and Google SearchWiki. There were gone within a year.

How to fix outgoing links without breaking your posts?

Link out to archive.org for important sites. When doshdosh.com went down I linked to the archived versions of Maki’s articles.
Use a site:brokenlinkurl.com “headline of linked post” to find it elsewhere on the site.
Unlink the the link altogether when it doesn’t hurt the value of the post
Delete the whole post whenever a post only consists of the link or is built around on it. Many early posts on SEOptimise were tumblogging short notes consisting mainly of a link.
Make a screen shot and link to it for pages where you expect a quick change (like AFP stories on Google News or Wikipedia that might get deleted soon)
Save a local copy and set up a mirror once the original disappears you can use the Firefox extension ScrapBook o save web pages with ease

Why check and fix broken links at all?

The SEOptimise blog exists since 2006, yes it’s already five years old so it’s only logical that many links are not valid anymore. Google seems to assume that older blogs have lots of broken links as I couldn’t see much of an positive impact in search results after fixing of hundreds broken links on my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

At the same time I’ve seen static pages jump back to top results after an update with the obligatory link check. It may depend on the level of change or on the fact of adding a new date.

Still I highly recommend fixing your old postings as it directly harms the user experience and ultimately your reputation when visitors end up on outdated content full of broken or misleading outgoing links. Sometimes even internal links break. As search engines often show older content people will end up on your outdated pages as well.

So at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether Google really takes broken links into account as a direct ranking factor.

You have to fix links anyways to stay a credible source over the years. It’s also not just about the broken links. Years old advice or suggestions are often not true anymore or there are better solutions by now. Thus I sometimes replace old links with new ones to a completely different resource.

Linking Out Instead of Link Building to Rank in Google

Tad Chef — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:05:01 +0000

Recently I noticed that the SEOptimise blog ranks at #1 for the query [seo blog] in Google.co.uk

Then it dawned on me why we rank at #1: the single most important factor to getting there was linking out.

Yes, it wasn’t link building or even getting links; it was simply linking out. You could argue that it’s lots of great content etc, but many SEO blogs from the UK have great content. Nobody is linking out like we do though.

Just consider my most popular posts, the 30+ lists you love. Many of these lists link out to 30+ resources; some don’t, but most of them contain at least several links to resources outside SEOptimise.

I have often pondered whether it’s good or not. I have linked out to authority sites in the SEO industry but also beyond it. In most cases my motive for linking out was a great article, tool or other resource. I’m quite sure that many links were influenced by my virtual friendships. I know and trust many people in the SEO arena now, even without having met them in real life. But even given that bias, the links were genuine.

Great content by itself does not rank

There are lots of great SEO blogs in the UK. I often read and link to them, but many of them rarely show up in the generic rankings for [seo blog]. There are, of course, other reasons not to rank for that particular keyphrase; because it’s not as popular and lucrative as others, some people who blog about SEO don’t aim for it.

Some SEO blogs call themselves search, search marketing or online marketing blogs to name just a few synonyms. Some of the bigger agencies and more well-known SEO companies from the UK do optimise for [seo blog], but don’t even rank in the top 10 – despite publishing regularly and getting links from all over the place. I mean very well known and valuable blogs by the likes of Dave Naylor or Freshegg, who really deserve to rank in the British top 10.

Note that both SEO blogs mentioned above have a PageRank of 5, while we only have a 3. SEOptimise is linking out more than getting links in from other industry publications, so that we actually lose PageRank. As toolbar PageRank is not really a ranking factor but just a metric measuring the number of incoming vs outgoing links, it proves the point even more.

There are only two other UK blogs on the first page for the [seo blog] query on Google.co.uk, while #2 to #6 are firmly in the hands of the US allstars.

Of course I cannot prove the theory that linking out made us rank; it’s my gut feeling. I can’t show you pretty graphs of the number of outgoing links vs the ranking for [seo blog] over time, as I don’t watch these numbers that closely.

What I know for sure is that people I link out to often notice it and either link back sooner or later or at least spread such a post on social media. This is of course logical, and who isn’t glad to get mentioned on another publication. Also, contrary to popular belief, sites that link out plenty do not necessarily lose readers; the best example is Drudge Report which has a much higher engagement than other news sites despite being simply a one-page link list.

Moreover, Matt Cutts acknowledged in 2009 that outbound links are a ranking factor.

Linking out is a strategy not a tactic

Ok, now you think linking out may be an SEO trick or something, you try it out and… nothing happens. Michael Gray of Graywolf SEO did that a few years back. He linked out for testing purposes and tested whether his ranking would go up just by the sheer fact of linking out. His logic was to test whether Google uses linking out as a direct ranking factor and rewards sites that link out accordingly. It didn’t work, at least back then. Still, it doesn’t suffice to link out to Wikipedia from time to time.

Linking out is a strategy you have to embrace holistically.

You link out to make people notice you.
You link out to get returning visitors who want more links.
You link out for Google to notice that you are a great resource, a hub, offering relevant links to all kinds of valuable resources.

This is what happened here on SEOptimise. It’s not just the great content we have. Other UK SEO blogs have great content as well, maybe even more in-depth content, but we offer a resource which is like a gate in many directions, while other blogs focus on making the readers stay longer on their own sites. We are not afraid to send you away because we know you will come back. Also we don’t hoard PageRank because we know it’s not been a real SEO metric for a few years.

Linking out also establishes credibility on the Web so that users ultimately come back to your site for more, even where they left via a link they’ve found on your site.

I’m not the only one to suggest that linking out is actually a modern SEO best practice. Check the following articles from renowned industry publications and experts for more opinions on linking out:

Blaming SEO for Bad Search Results is like Blaming Mechanics for Bad Roads

Tad Chef — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:15:45 +0000

For most people, SEO still is either a complete unknown, magic or the scapegoat for almost everything that doesn’t work on the Web. In particular, bloggers seeking attention, publicity and links love to leverage all the ignorance and prejudice and launch attacks on SEO as a whole again and again.

Recently, another popular blogger, who leads one of the most important technology blogs (which uses all kinds of SEO techniques) did it again. This time it was not the average “SEO is rubbish” attack; it was a broader “search sucks” attack where of course not search engines themselves are guilty of being broken but the scapegoat: SEO.

Before we go on, let me define SEO again for all those who still don’t understand it: SEO is the craft of fixing and improving websites so that they can be found in search results, among others. Of course, good SEO is also good for the users. I know this SEO definition is still kind of abstract, so let me use a metaphor to explain it even better:

Imagine the Web as a virtual world, where search engines provide the transport infrastructure to move from A to B.

Most websites are like buildings, while some are more like cars, buses, trains or even planes. A blog like ours at SEOptimise is like a bus: it has lots of outgoing links and thus leads to lots of places many people want to go to. Whereas a site like Microsoft.com is like a huge building complex or a skyscraper. People need cars and buses, and of course they need an infrastructure to get to where they want to go. Google is like that infrastructure; it has a road, rail and airport system leading to all kinds of destinations. So people need car-like or bus-like sites to get there.

The SEO specialist is like a mechanic.

The SEO specialist doesn’t build the road system or control the airports, but he allows you to get to where you want to go by fixing your car or bus. An SEO may be an architect as well. You may ask an architect to refurbish a home or a shop, or to build one. Now imagine blaming mechanics for harassment by TSA on airports, for dilapidated public transport systems in US cities or the broken railroads in both the US/UK. Did the mechanics repair too many cars, so that the streets are jammed with traffic? Are they guilty of repairing cars? Are there too many planes in the sky because mechanics have fixed them? Are there too many buildings out there because evil architects have refurbished them?

Likewise, blaming the SEO industry for bad search results is nonsense and absurd. Let’s take a recent example from the “increasing spam by SEO means” debate: content farms. Content farms are the Walmarts of the Internet. One stop shops for everything. It may be low quality, cheap and Made in China but people flock there by the thousands. Do you hate Walmart? Why do you go there then? I have read lots of criticism of Walmart but I’ve rarely heard the idea that it’s evil architects who brought us Walmart to pollute our environment. And it’s not evil mechanics fixing your cars who have allowed the public rail or road system to deteriorate.

The only thing you can blame mechanics and architects for is that they broke cars instead of fixing them, or that they built houses that break down or shops that don’t sell.

Incidentally, Techcrunch, the tech blog which has published the nonsense article about SEO being to blame for bad search results, uses outdated SEO techniques such as PageRank sculpting (using the nofollow attribute on internal links). Effectively, they mark their own internal links as untrustworthy. They should blame their own mechanic for being bad at SEO.

* Image by Jeffrey Smith.

Reverse Engineer the Search User

Tad Chef — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 15:48:10 +0000

Michael Martinez of SEO Theory published an article a few days ago that explains in depth how useless it is to chase Google’s algorithm. I won’t repeat what he wrote here, you can read his explanation in case you haven’t yet:

Martinez refers to reverse engineering the Google algorithm as futile and decries good old ranking factors as obsolete. I would probably not go as far as he does but nonetheless my approach is similar. I always tried not to obsess about what Google really counts and what not. I was always keen on knowing what is out there in the know but I followed my own “secret list” of ranking factors.

Back in 2004

When I started out in SEO in 2004 the first thing I wanted to sell my first client was a blog: I argued that a user wants to see relevant content on a site and a blog is the easiest way to provide that. By then blogging was popular for 3 years at least but corporate and business blogging was in its infancy. At that time it was still far from apparent that Google prefers blogs in search results. So how did I know?

Well, I simply tried to reverse engineer the search user.

I was a complete novice to SEO in those days unlike now where many people consider me a must read blogger both on SEOptimise and on my own blog. So sometimes I was wrong or years ahead of time or both. For instance I expected Google to favor whole grammatically correct sentences in the title-tag. I imagined the user wanting something similar to a readable meta description up there in the title not just a stupid list of keywords. For years Google seemed to favor repetition and lists over grammar though but today it’s not that obvious anymore. Proper English ranks as well these days.

SEO: short term vs long term

So in way I failed in the short term then. On the other hand reverse engineering the search user allowed me to provide future proof optimization years in advance. I don’t tell you to abandon well known ranking factors even in case they are not so bullet-proof as we might hope. Combine your knowledge of ranking factors with common sense reverse engineering of the search user though. Start with yourself. Try to sit back and look how you really search. Then combine this with user testing and finally with A/B testing. Chances are that what’s best for the user will also be honored by Google sooner or later.

The explanation is quite simple: Google engineers are tweaking their algo constantly to provide users with what they want, when they want and how they want it. So chances are that they discover the same user preferences you do.

Attempt to anticipate Google’s next step by looking not at Google but at Google’s source, the actual search user.

* Image: Engine by Ack Ook

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011

Tad Chef — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:53:14 +0000

After writing the rather humorous post on predictions for 2011 I noticed more and more trends so I finally decided to write a 30 trends for 2011 list again this year. These trends are the ones you really have to know about if you ask me. These changes take place already or are unfolding and you can’t afford to ignore them as an SEO, web design or other Web professional. So here they are:

Web Development and Publishing

Google Chrome becomes one of the most important browsers
I’m not a friend of Google Chrome. I tried to ignore it until now but its market share is so significant by now that you can’t ignore it anymore. Make sure to offer your toolbar, add on or custom feature available in Chrome as well in 2011.

RSS is dying
The rumors of of the death of RSS have been returning over the years. This time it seems RSS really has a problem: Google Chrome and Firefox 4 drop or limit RSS support.

E-mail marketing returns
While RSS has struggled over the years an almost dead medium made a come back, e-mail. E-mail marketing and “creating a list” is a must have again. You can’t rely solely on RSS. Even substituting RSS with Twitter and Facebook updates won’t suffice. Aweber and MailChimp are your friends among others.

HTML 5/CSS 3 usage goes mainstream
HTML 5 and CSS3 are around for a while but with significant improvements in browser support their usage will go main stream in 2011. You can have a competitive advantage by applying these still new techniques. In the SEO industry only a few of us have embraced the new possibilities. Our colleagues from SEO Gadget are leading by example.

Scrolling
Did you know that the “above the fold” web design and usability rule is a myth. Modern mice make scrolling very comfortable and people scroll all the way down it seems. Just scroll this.

Social Media

Facebook is the emperor
With Goldman Sachs financing Facebook there is no doubt that Facebook will be the most powerful player. So you need to be on Facebook or you risk a disadvantage to those who have a presence there.

Location rules but not on Foursquare
Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based social media were the rage in 2010 but they are already stagnating. Why? It’s because of the big players adding location features to their own services. In 2011 location will matter but not the small startups that made it popular.

In Africa mobile phones boom and with them social media
Surprise, surprise Africa is not the place war, AIDS and famine spreads but the most promising mobile and social media market. Africans leapfrog landlines, computers and static websites and start using social media sites on mobile phones.

Q&A surges but not solely Quora, Yahoo Answers still rules
The current hype is Q&A site Quora. While it’s a valuable service it’s still barely a blip compared to Yahoo Answers. Other Q&A sites still matter and Yahoo Answers is much bigger than most other social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious.

Meta tools that publish to several social sites
These days almost all newly popular social tools apparently support Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes. Amplify, Sendible, Trunk.ly or Sprout Social are just a few of useful examples I’ve tested recently. As you will notice they come from different directions but tackle the problem of reaching all your friends and followers on different platforms.

Social Bookmarking disappears altogether
I predicted the end of Delicious last year but was nevertheless surprised to see it happen. I still hoped the flagship of social bookmarking will stay with us. In 2010 many other social bookmarking had to give up or restructure their services. Standalone social bookmarking won’t survive in 2011. Only services like Diigo that have evolved beyond bookmarking long ago can compete.

Search

Constant change
The only thing constant on Google in 2010 was the change. The number and frequency of changes was mind-boggling. As Google is desperate to find more revenue sources and get more money out of search I’m pretty sure these changes will happen as often in 2011.

Clutter
Do you remember the days when Google was a simple and easy to use search engine? These days the search results are so cluttered and full of annoying ads and other additional results or features that you really struggle. Sadly the clutter is here to stay it seems. It’s not a bug it’s a feature.

Blekko
The new advanced search engine Blekko was huge news in 2010 but it will be daily business for SEO practicioners and other Web professionals in 2011.

Privacy
Google is a privacy nightmare for most of us but until now most people preferred to ignore that fact. In 2011 more and more people will care about it and the FCC and other regulators do as well. Even Google’s search engine competition uses Google employees who have stalked teenagers to advertise.

Alternatives
For the first time in a while there are a few really good alternatives to Google, at least in English: Bing, Blekko, Yandex.com and DuckDuckGo are symptoms for a broader need: People do not want to be forced to use Google, they want choice. They have it again.

SEO

Conversion optimization
Conversion optimization or CRO has been around for years but in 2010 it reached new heights. Most reputable SEO companies practice and offer it by now. Either you do it as well or you can sell “search engine submission” and “meta tag optimization” again.

Diversification
Mobile SEO, local SEO, video SEO, social media SEO etc. are not new. Also specialist for each discipline focus on each one of it for years. Still the diversification of SEO services reached a point where no single individual and rarely a company can do it all at the same time. While some preach the rise “digital marketing” of bigger agencies offering everything I don’t believe SEO will stay a one size fits all game. I expect specialized services to flourish.

Facebook SEO
Facebook search and it’s ranking algorithm reached a new complexity in 2010 where the term Facebook SEO has appeared as the logical next step. I see some people who are already specializing in Facebook SEO as well.

Link building on social media
Facebook SEO is just one aspect of the relationship of Facebook and SEO. When Google and Bing confirmed that Twitter updates and Facebook likes/shares count as ranking factors as long as they are public people in the SEO industry weren’t really surprised. Those who haven’t yet considered building links on social media or rather using Twitter and Facebook to spread awareness of their business have to now.

RDF/Rich Snippets
While introduced in 2009, rich snippets have become crucial over 2010. Reviews get used for local and shopping search and you can’t ignore them anymore.

Ecommerce

A/B Testing
A/B Testing or multivariate testing exploded in 2010 with lots of tools and services offering and facilitating it. In 2011 everybody will try to convert the visitors they already have instead of just wanting more of them. A/B testing is probably the best method to find out what really works on your site.

Mobile Payment
Believe it or not but not only paper money is obsolete by now, credit cards are as well. What’s next? Mobile payment via your phone. Everybody uses it in emerging markets only we conservative Westerners still stick to the past. Finally some useful use cases appear for mobile payment so that we might embrace it as well in 2011.

Groupon
Groupon was huge in 2010 but it’s not the end yet. In 2011 it will become even more prominent. Use it or lose it.

Reviews
Reviews are the new links. Both local and ecommerce businesses get ranked by the number and sentiment of user reviews in Google. So you can’t live without (positive) reviews anymore in 2011.

Real life businesses gaining ground
Many Google local search changes have mostly one thing common: They favor brick and mortar real life businesses with an address. So the Internet uses a big part its virtual aspect as real life businesses get preferential treatment. Also Google Streetview compels people all over the world to clean up their facade or get less customers.

Blogging

Miniblogging
Tumblr, Posterous and a large number of other microblogging or rather miniblogging tools has been gaining popularity over the recent years. By now miniblogging service Tumblr is one of the biggest social sites. Tumblr is also bigger than WordPress.com by now. Also it’s easier to use to has a sleeker web design than both Blogger and WordPress.

Hosted blogging
Spam, security issues and constant hacking attacks on WordPress, content theft and censorship on both Blogger and WordPress.com have hurt hosted blogging platforms in the past. With the rise of new services like Tumblr many private bloggers turned away from self hosted WordPress blogs to hosted blogging platforms again.

More quality less quantity
The myth of blogging daily has been overcome in 2010 it seems, while some blogs turn media companies blogs several times a day and some group blogs do daily most regular blogs run by one blogger focused more on quality than quantity in 2010. This trend will remain sting in 2011 as the daily bloggers will move on to miniblogging while quality bloggers will focus on thorough research and killer content.

Blogging identity crisis
In 2010 with services like Google Buzz the definition of blogging got blurry. Also when you take a close look at what Facebook and Tumblr do you could consider both services blogging. Content sharing and blogging have finally merged. At the same time the focus on quality in real blogging made it more professional and journalistic. There is an apparent blogging identity crisis palpable 2011.

These trends have been mostly obvious in 2010 already but you can’t ignore them in 2011 anymore or at least you have to know about them. In case you decide to ignore them there will be others who’ll embrace the new opportunities.
SEO is rapidly changing and adapting to new Web trends all the time. That’s one of the reasons people scream “SEO is dead” each time a major change occurs. At the same time the Web slows down, the early phase of innovation is over and only a few big players control it now.

* Image: 2011 by Sebastian Oliva.

30 Great SEO Blogs You Might Not Know Yet

Tad Chef — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:59:11 +0000

Recently both my own SEO Blog SEO 2.0 and the SEOptimise blog have been featured in a few “top SEO blogs” lists. While I was of course delighted to get so much appreciation for publication I write for I also noticed that some of the “best blogs” weren’t best at all while other really good blogs about SEO were missing. Thus I decided to compile a list of 30 great SEO blogs you might not know yet.

These blogs and the respective bloggers involved are often funny, intriguing and posting in-depth articles. Others are on point and stay on top of events or cover SEO in a manner everyone can understand.

OK, long story short below are the blogs I refer to. For each blog I have a post I recommend as an example of the respective writing skills.

SEO Blogs by SEO Consultants, Execs and other Specialists

SEO Blogs by SEO and other Companies

Blogs by SEO Allstars and Veterans

SEO Related Blogs from Outside the SEO industry

Of course these 30 blogs are nit the only blogs I really recommend. Time limitations made me limit this list to those who caught my eye ore recently. I’ve collected many more weblogs from the SEO industry and beyond on Blekko in the offical /seoblogs slashtag.

Which dark horse SEO blogs do you read? Add them in the comment section. You can promote yourself as well or complain for not being included!

Christmas Crackers: Top Comments from 2010

Kevin Gibbons — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:42:35 +0000

As we all wind down for the Christmas week, I thought I’d revisit some of the best comments left on my guest blog posts over the year…

Image credit: Flickr

Regular readers of my Twitter feed will know that I am a regular guest blogger, often appearing on websites such as Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy and Search Engine Land, as well as writing here on the SEOptimise blog.

Some of the responses to posts I write are extremely knowledgeable and often provoke informed debate.

A blogger like me values these insights from readers, because a blog is not just a one-way street and the comments can often really enhance the usefulness of a post.

So, as the year draws to a close, I wanted to shine a light on some of the best comments left on my blog posts. Here are my top comments from 2010:

Digital marketing careers advice

Where? My Econsultancy post ‘So you want to work in SEO?’
Who? Vivien Underwood, training and operations manager at Econsultancy
Why it’s top: Vivien responded to other comments suggesting that there is insufficient digital marketing training in schools.

She offered an opinion – that most teachers and careers advisers will not be sufficiently “clued up”, gave some examples of university courses that cater to the industry and even briefly reviewed them.

Then Vivien offered some excellent advice to school leavers on standing out from the crowd.

“I’d advise school leavers to consider digital specific work experience during their undergrad studies and then look to do a postgrad or professional digital marketing qualification which includes lots of sessions with practitioners and project based work to hone their skills.”

Social is not commercial

Where? My Econsultancy post ‘How not to use Twitter, by Rentokil’
Who? Deborah Lewis, PR adviser at agency The Hero Machine
Why it’s top: In one short example, Deborah highlights the major issue with how so many companies operate on Twitter and other social platforms.

In fact, I have since used this example when illustrating the limitations of social marketing, and the importance of using it correctly to gain long-term benefits rather than short-term wins.

She said: “Just because really good friends will help you paint a spare room or clear out a basement doesn’t mean you should go out there, pretend to make friends in order to get a house cleared or decorated. And that’s why I think corporates get it wrong on social media – they’re not being social, they’re being commercial.”

There is no ‘magic formula’ for SEO

Where? My Search Engine Watch article ‘Why Google is Never the \’Only Customer\’’
Who? Heather Lloyd-Martin, head of copywriting agency SuccessWorks
Why it’s top: Because Heather and I share a passionate dislike for those who believe that there’s a magic formula to writing SEO-friendly copy. There’s no ‘trick’ to online copywriting, it’s down to creating useful, informative and shareable articles that will be popular online.

Heather admitted she felt my pain.

“Like you, I’ve chatted with clients who believe they have the magical formula for SEO content – normally something stupid like an 1,000 word article with a specific keyword density. When I talk about writing for customers, persuasive copywriting – heck, even writing something that folks would want to read – a typical response is, ‘Well, we just care about Google.’

“Hunh? I mean, we all love those happy Google rankings. But if a page doesn’t convert – and worse, the writing is so bad that it hurts the brand – the company doesn’t ‘win’. In fact, they’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money for nothing.”

How staff can stonewall an SEO campaign

Where? My Econsultancy article ‘Five things to consider before starting an SEO campaign’
Who? Russell Hogg, of web design and print agency Superheroes of Search
Why it’s top: Russ elaborates on a problem so many SEO agencies encounter – a lack of staff buy-in among their clients. A lack of co-operation from a company’s full-time staff can actively harm an online marketing campaign and this comment highlights the real issue. A successful relationship between agency and client requires work both ways, as Russ explains.

“At the end of the day, the client needs to understand the needs of any agency they employ, and vice versa…it’s a 2 way street, but all clients should expect, as a minimum, detailed benchmark reports on a regular basis so the client can at least keep tabs of progress…or not!”

Linking online and offline marketing

Where? My #JUMPchallenge post on SEOptimise ‘ How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing’
Who? Matt Owen, social media producer at Econsultancy
Why it’s top: My post explored the benefits of linking online and offline marketing efforts, and how that could be achieved. It was written from the position that many companies already have splintered efforts – techies on one side and PR experts on the other.

What Matt highlighted was where this splintering often begins.

“Especially good to see emphasis on team integration. Too often companies find their departments at odds as the organisation scales up, so it’s incredibly important to keep people in the loop and invest them with a set of core values rather than overly segregating them.”

This advice will help some readers prevent the problems and join up their marketing from the start.

The importance of communication
Where? My Econsultancy post ‘Five reasons your client hate you’
Who? A corporate identity from ambergreen Internet Marketing
Why it’s top: My post highlighted five different reasons an online marketing agency might have alienated its clients and this comment makes the list because it highlighted the issue that underlined most of the points I made.

“Of course Clients do not like to be patronised by agencies using jargon or treating each client in the same way with the same formula. No business is the same, and until other agencies realise this they will not give clients the bespoke, tailored service that is needed.”

The comment also reiterated the importance of communication across the whole of the company, as SEO is not an isolated effort.

“The larger the client, the more departments and people who will need to be involved and on board with any marketing or PR plan and the more important it is that an account manager exists to understand the layers of the business, after all, search does not work in a vacuum.”

Guest blogging in action

Where? My Econsultancy post ‘Link building for SEO beginners’
Who? Ashley Friedlein, CEO at Econsultancy
Why it’s top: My post advised creating interesting articles to encourage blogs to accept your guest posts without sponsorship. It also recommended making as many industry friends and acquaintances as possible so that more people are willing to publish your articles.

What I liked about Ashley’s comment was that it highlighted to readers the value of guest blogging – by drawing attention to the benefits of my own guest blog post.

“Very sensible advice. And, of course, this very post, on this very site, is actually an example of what you say in action! Valuable/interesting content + you’ve made friends with us (we like you back ;)) + link to your blogger profile which in turn links to your member profile which has SEOptimise – Search Engine Marketing which is nice link with nice anchor text. And now look… I’ve gone and linked to you again ;)”

How to Turn a Loss into Something Positive

Tad Chef — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:19:09 +0000

The UK SEO community was so inspiring during the last several days. After the sudden death of Jaamit Durrani, one of the most popular UK SEO specialists the community has proven that even a huge loss like this one can have a positive impact. The way people have come together to support Jaamit and his family and to spread the love all over the Web and in real life as well has made the virtual tubes feel a bit warmer this winter.

I’m probably not the right person to commemorate Jaamit though, others who have known him better than me already did write some powerful tributes.

Today I want to write about another case of loss many business people will face online. The loss of reputation. A by now infamous New York Times article dealing with an ecommerce vendor who even provoked bad reviews to get better rankings on Google has highlighted this topic last week. So what do these two quite different negative news have in common? People are dealing with problems or even downright tragic events and are trying to turn them around to have a positive impact in the end.

Of course I don’t compare the overwhelming and uplifting reaction by the SEO industry to the tragic death of one us to the awful “any publicity is good publicity” attention whore the NYT describes.

The point here is this: You can turn a big loss into something positive but you can also mess up like the guy the New York Times features. It depends on you and how sincere you are. It happens all the time: Disgruntled customers vent their anger on the Internet after they have been treated badly, or simple because the service or product they paid for was poor.

Google reacted quickly and made an “algorithmic change” to prevent webmasters from taking advantage of this loophole. Now you can’t get higher rankings by collecting negative reviews anymore according to Google itself.

Now that I have witnessed that even a tragic death can make people come together and act together on behalf of those who suffer it seems far easier to deal with common problems people encounter in their daily life and on the Web. You have to act though. Or rather you have to find out there is a problem in the fisrt place and then act.

Find out who suffers:

There are plenty of tools by now that allow yo to listen whether someone suffered because of your poor service or low quality product. You need to at least search twitter one in a while for your name or arther brand name on Twitter to find those who did.

React accordingly:

When someone suffers you need to stop the suffering. When someone is angry or sad because your product failed you need to help. At first you need to communicate your desire to help. Even that you listen and notice is sometimes enough to alleviate the suffering your failure in the past has prompted.

Make sure there is no repeat suffering:

When one person voices a problem with your product or service s/he is probably not the only one who actually suffers from it. Either find the others who do (aka recall) or inform potential victims of that issue and how you deal with it. It might be an outage, a data loss, a security breach where people need to be warned and informed to prevent repeat suffering.

Myself I’m on both sides of the table. Quite often I consider an angry blog post or at least a tweet to vent my anger and frustration with some awful company or utility. In most cases I don’t write anything. Sometimes I do. These week I did write two blog posts powered by deep disappointment. On the other I do client ORM (online reputation management), listen and care for disgruntled customers myself. I know that even behind some awfully misguided rants there is always a true true story of disappointment.

Always remember: An angry and frustrated customer is better then no customer at all. Any publicity is not good, but any feedback is good feedback. It’s like a pain in the gut which tells you that you’re sick. Without it you wouldn’t go to the doctor. On the Web you need to listen to the pain of your customers to heal your business and to fix your products or services.

I use blogs in this way: I blog about the product and encourage all kinds of feedback. It’s better the people have an option to voice they’re concerns in the first place. Facebook and Twitter are fine but not enough. Encourage the feedback where you are and where you can help best. Set up a feedback community or site. There are plenty of services out there where customers can make their voices heard even without badmouthing you on third party social media.

You can use online tools like Uservoice and Get Satisfaction or software you install on your own servers like OpenMind and Vox Populi. Listen up, reply and repair. Negative feedback and even loss of your online reputation can lead to sigificant improvement.

* Image by Benson Kua

SERPd Review – The New Search Marketing Social News Community

Tad Chef — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:33:50 +0000

Many of us in the SEO industry bemoaned the decision of Sphinn, the only social news community for search marketers, to remove the voting option. This way a community turned to a completely editorial site. That may be not as bad for for the Sphinn team, instead of fighting spammers and voting rings they can focus on seeking out valuable stories now. On the other hand it has been a huge blow to the

global SEO village: Where can we convene virtually? On the manifold forums, Twitter or Facebook?

This opportunity was quickly seized by some of the most active Sphinn users and prolific social networkers. They created a new social news community for us out of scratch. It’s called SERPd and it seems to work well from the start from the user perspective.

I’ve been using SERPd for a few weeks now and I really like it. It’s not perfect but it offers plenty of useful options and features to enhance your industry news reading experience.

The SERPD team still struggles with some minor design issues and bugs but overall they made many things right already. Let me review these features:

Number of views

SERPd displays the number of views a submission gets. This number does not equal the number of visitors or pageviews you get on your site though. It’s most probably the number of views an item gets on serpd.com itself. Despite this shortcoming this number is very helpful to determine true popularity. You can easily distinguish between artificially voted up links or those that barely made the frontpage at the last minute and the truly successful postings many people click.

Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon integration

SERPd also includes Facebook “likes”, a Twitter button (no number of retweets) and StumbleUpon views of the source page. This way the site is not an island but very much part of a larger social media ecosystem. You can spread the news on those other sites most people take part already.

serpds.us UR Shortener

Another welcome feature is the SERPd owned URL shortener serpd.us – clicking on the “Tweet This!” button will result in the shortening of the URL. Clicking on the short URL will lead to the submission page on SERPd.

Upcoming and latest posts

Right now there you can see upcoming posts (those almost popular or with most votes) and latest posts (those just submitted) in the frontpage sidebar. This is quite helpful to gain a quick overview of the news.

Latest activity

Almost every action gets displayed on the FP as well, be it a vote, a comment or submission, called “bookmark” here. There still seems to be some kind of confusion here between social news and social bookmarking we’re used to from Delicious. SERPd, like Digg, doesn’t make sense as a social bookmarking service. You can’t organize or search your own bookmarks using tags for instance. SERPd is clearly a niche social news site. The latest activity on the frontpage sidebar allows you to follow a short stream of what other people did on SERPd. This helps a lot as the popular items don’t change much by now.

Follow and get followed

You can follow people on SERPd and get followers as well. You can also see the latest activity of the people you follow and your followers too. Unlike on Facebook, Twitter or the new Digg you don’t see a stream of activity but the latest action of each user you follow (or follows you). This way you need to take a close look to see what’s new. Also the people you have followed most recently get shown o the first page then. To see your older friends you need more clicks. While following works better than on Sphinn where it didn’t make much sense at all to me at least it’s not as advanced as I’m used to these days. Hopefully SERPd will expand this concept.

Frontpage and popular stories

There is a great way to determine current and historically popular submissions by ”day, week, month, year, all time” using the according links on top. On the other hand the frontpage has the typical drawback of all social news sites: It’s not always the best content that gets popular but the content most people know about, approve of or understand.

Categories

The categories reflect a traditional spectrum of internet marketing disciplines, ranging from blogging, SEO, SEM, PPC to social media, searching and copywriting. You won’t find some of the modern disciplines like local SEO, mobile SEO, video SEO or viral marketing though.

Issues

The site title of SERPd says “Search Engine Marketing & SEO News”. This does not sound very inclusive. Only SEM/SEO news? What about internet marketing as a whole? Blogging and copywriting has been added later and the broader “social media” is there as well but it seems that most people who are not part of the SEO industry will not feel like taking part. Sphinn at least started with the broader scope of internet marketing as a whole and ended up quite limited to search marketing. The SEO niche might turn too small to gain enough momentum for SERPd.

Will SERPd stand the test of time?

Frontpage based social news sites like Digg, Mixx or Propeller all struggle while the stream based mode of social networking and non-hierarchical link sharing sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) has proven the more popular way of socializing on the Web recently. This is also one of the most important reasons why Sphinn failed.

The frontpage metaphor leads per definition to abuse. You can’t abuse Twitter or Facebook as easily as there is no central hub for the popular links. So you get only popular with your friends and followers not due to a frontpage.

The frontpage as such has been adopted from print. Today we know that there is no real frontpage on the Web. All pages of a site are landing pages and the homepage is just meant to organize information.

Said that and given the issues Sphinn had to deal with SERPd works quite well as of now. It needs more active users to stay afloat though. Right now I’m one of the most active ones just by checking it out two or three times a day. So you have the opportunity to become a valuable user people listen to without too much effort.

40 Social Media Tools & WordPress Plugins – a4uexpo Presentation

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:53:26 +0000

Today I presented at a4uexpo London on 40 Social Media Tools and WordPress Plugins. This was split equally between the two sections and I’ve shared the slides and individual links, plus provided a very quick summary for each below.

a4uexpo – 40 Social Media Tools & WordPress Plugins

Top 20 Social Media Tools

Hootsuite – manage your social media accounts online and link up with your traffic stats in Google Analytics.
Untweeps – tidy-up your Twitter account by finding the accounts you’re following which have gone stale.
Klout – find influencers based upon Klout score and find ways to improve the influence of your own account.
Topsy – find the top influencers to connect with and help retweet your messages, based on a keyword query.
Wikipedia Traffic Statistics – view how much traffic an individual Wikipedia webpage has generated.
Flowtown – customer insight tool to find which social media sites your customers and contacts are using.
Social Mention – online reputation management tool to show brand mentions and overview of topics.
Scout Labs – view recent stats on brand mentions, plus all information from blogs, news, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.
KnowEm – protect your brand by claiming the social media profile handles to stop other people from registering them.
Pitchengine – promote your press releases to social media channels.
Journalisted – find top UK journalists based on a search query – recommend searching for industry name.
SWix – comprensive tracking and reporting to pull together a range of social media profile stats into a single dashboard.
Domain Superstar – find new domain name opportunties based on a keyword query.
StumbleUpon advertising – give social media campaigns a boost with some extra paid visits.
Skimlinks – quickly and easily convert external links to affiliate links, when there is a merchant available.
ad.ly – advertise via Twitter and MySpace to promote your content by paying per tweet/message.
oDesk – find freelancers online to hire for a wide-range of web-based tasks.
Fiverr – build Facebook fan pages and Twitter followings, amongst many other small tasks.
Omgili – search just for forums and find new discussions based on a keyword query.
TubeMogul – distribute your videos to all of the top video sharing websites via a single upload.

Top 20 WordPress Plugins

Sharebar – useful WordPress plugin to display all popular social media bookmarking buttons alongside blog posts.
Blackbird Pie – easily share your favourite tweets by embedding them directly into blogs posts.
su.pr – encourage StumbleUpon votes when using URL shorteners to send links out on Twitter.
Backtype – pull together the latest discussion around a blog post from social media websites.
Subscribe to comments – encourage the continuation of blog discussions, with email alert messages to commenters.
All in One SEO – automatically optimise title tags, description and noindex/follow meta tags.
Yet Another Related Posts – automatically build internal links to related content from each blog post.
Google XML Sitemaps Generator – great way of automatically generating an XML sitemap to keep your blog up-to-date.
Redirection – easily manage the redirection of a blog from one URL to a new version.
SEO Smart Links – automatically create internal/external links when keywords are mentioned within content.
Feedburner FeedSmith – automatically forwards any RSS URL’s to use a single Feedburner version.
RSS Footer – add copyright, external links and promotions for subscribers and scraper sites using RSS feeds.
WordPress Database Backup – make sure you have a backup of your site incase the worst happens.
WP Super Cache – make sure your blog is running as quickly as possible, looking to keep users and search engines happy!
A/B Theme Testing Plugin - split test two different WordPress designs or layouts alongside each other simultaneously.
Zemanta – get inspiration to brighten up posts, with images and external links recommended to bloggers.
WP Robot – automated plugin for important Amazon and eBay products into a blog automatically. Be careful with this one!
WP125 – ad management tool to rotate ads and manage the expiry date for direct advertisers.
Geolocation targeting – try targeting your ads specifically for your most popular audience locations.
WP-e-commerce – convert your WordPress site into an e-commerce store so that you manage the buying process.

Also if you have any questions from the session, please ask – happy to answer either in the comments or via Twitter.

Stop Chasing Traffic – Practice Human Powered SEO

Tad Chef — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:46:05 +0000

Image: Catching up by M.Danys.

While working on an extended review of the new social news community for SEO, SERPd I had a realization. Thus the review will have to wait till next week. First I have something more important to say. Listen up SEO people: Stop chasing traffic!

On the Web today traffic is a side effect.

Traffic can not be your goal. Also once you have the traffic it’s just a milestone on your way to conversions and ROI. SEO is complex these days. Depending who you are and who you work for SEO can be anything and everything that makes a business more profitable on the Web.

SEO may be web development, SEO may be PR, SEO may be usability. We all know that, I hope at least but SEO is also relationships with other people. You know, all those

influencers
connectors
bloggers
journalists
industry veterans

ultimately decide who you are and where you are. Of course you can ignore them and do your own thing but it’s far easier to be part of the larger social sphere you belong to in the first place instead of just being a lone ranger.

SERPd fills in the void Sphinn has left after they discontinued voting. It’s still nascent, sometimes buggy and the design isn’t as polished as one would expect these days. Also SERPd is just a tiny social news community. It may have around 300 members now. This reminds me of course of the early days of Sphinn when I started out there as an enthusiastic contributor.

Sure, Sphinn has proved be a great targeted traffic source at the end. A frontpage appearance on Sphinn was good enough for a thousand qualified visitors. It never was the main motivation though. The most important thing Sphinn has given me were the relationships with my peers. Living in Germany I haven’t met most of the individuals I converse with online about SEO. So I have to use the Web to be part of the international SEO community. These days I mostly do on Twitter but in the early days om my international blogging career I did mainly on Sphinn and partly on StumbeUpon.

The sites change but the people are still around.

They still know me, who I am and what I stand for. I managed to insult some people over the years. They don’t like my anymore. Some people have disappeared altogether. Either they moved on from SEO and social media to something else or they don’t socialize that much anymore online. There is a huge number of people who still there and more people show up all the time.

It’s how you interact with these people that determines your future SEO success.

It’s your peers who link to you, it’s the social media users, it’s the professional bloggers.

It seems that I am the third most active user on SERPd right now, the other two are the people behind the project. I didn’t even try very hard. I just went there and contributed to the budding community. A community is like a garden, you have to plant seeds first to reap later. This post is not about Sphinn or SERPd though. It’s just an example.

The main point is that you need people. You must go after the people not the traffic.

Be kind, supportive and part of the community and you will get the links, the traffic and the support in the future. Of course you have to deserve it. You won’t get it without a good blog, great content and some true expertise but being there and being part of the community is crucial.

When I started out on Sphinn nobody knew me, my blog was new as well and I only had been around some forums. Within a short time frame I managed to get a substantial amount of attention from the industry as well as from a wider audience. Throughout the years I had many other opportunities. I got clients, job offers, software providers ask me to review their tools etc. etc.

Never underestimate the power of relationships. Stop chasing traffic. Practice human powered SEO. You will be faster by bike than by car during the rush hour to extent the metaphor.

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Linking Out Instead of Link Building to Rank in Google

Blaming SEO for Bad Search Results is like Blaming Mechanics for Bad Roads

Reverse Engineer the Search User

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011

Web Development and Publishing

Social Media

Search

SEO

Ecommerce

Blogging

30 Great SEO Blogs You Might Not Know Yet

Christmas Crackers: Top Comments from 2010

How to Turn a Loss into Something Positive

SERPd Review – The New Search Marketing Social News Community

40 Social Media Tools & WordPress Plugins – a4uexpo Presentation

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SEOptimise » blogging

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Everything I Know About Effective Blogger Outreach

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Marketing Get Noticed

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Writing Get Noticed

Further Reading on Blogger Outreach

Top SEOptimise posts in September…

Significant Traffic Sources You Probably Miss Unless You Blog

Top 20 WordPress Plugins – 2011 Edition

Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size

How to Link Out for SEO Benefit

Negative Approach to Linking Out

Positive Approach to Linking Out

What Checking Broken Links Can Teach You About the Web & Linking Out

Linking Out Instead of Link Building to Rank in Google

Blaming SEO for Bad Search Results is like Blaming Mechanics for Bad Roads

Reverse Engineer the Search User

30​ Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011

Web Development and Publishing

Social Media

Search

SEO

Ecommerce

Blogging

30 Great SEO Blogs You Might Not Know Yet

Christmas Crackers: Top Comments from 2010

How to Turn a Loss into Something Positive

SERPd Review – The New Search Marketing Social News Community

40 Social Media Tools & WordPress Plugins – a4uexpo Presentation

Stop Chasing Traffic – Practice Human Powered SEO

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011