Posted by randfish

You may have seen the recent string of posts about SEO vs. Social Media, starting with this effective, but poorly argued controversy-bait, which was excoriated by Elysia Brooker and Hugo Guzman, then followed up with a more nuanced view by Darren Rowse. While I’m not particularly interested (nor do I think there’s much value) in re-hashing or arguing these points, I did think the topic warranted attention, as it brings up some excellent points marketers should carefully consider as they invest in their craft.

We Search for What We Want + Need

The search for information and answers has been essential to humans since time immemorial. And there’s no sign that our latest iteration, web search, is losing any steam:

Even as we’ve reached a maturity point with broadband adoption and online population, searches are rising. We’re not searching less every month; we’re searching more.

Search is an intent driven activity. We don’t search casually (much), we search to find answers, information, goods and services to consume. The power of search marketing – whether paid or organic – is simple: Be in front of the consumer at the time of consumption. There’s no more effective time to be present and no more effective way of knowing what is desired. All the social graph analysis in the world won’t tell you that Sunday evening, I got fed up with my current selection of footwear and, after some searching, spent a few hundred dollars on Zappos. But being front and center when I queried mens puma shoes brought them some nice business.

We’re Social to Discover and Share

Social media – whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon or something else – is about connections, interaction, discovery and distraction. We hardly ever use these portals as a way to find answers, though they certainly may provide plenty to unasked questions.

Social media marketing advocates often make the case that social is how we find out about new products on the web, but, at least so far, the data doesn’t back up this assertion:

-
ATG Study on How Users Discover Products via SearchEngineLand

However, I am strongly inclined to believe the claim that social media is how we find out about new content on the web, particularly when we’re not seeking something in particular (as with a search). Blogs, pictures, video, research and the like are surely seeing an increased share of their visits from social, and that branding exposure is definitely valuable.

Some recent GroupM Research helped to shed the light of data on this supposition, noting that:

• The click-through rate in organic search results for users who have been exposed to a brand’s social marketing campaign are 2.4X higher than those that haven’t; for paid search, it showed a jump from 4.5% to 11.8% (in both cases, this is for branded queries)
• Consumers using social media are 1.7x more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to those who do not use social media

Ben Yoskovitz talked about this value in his recent analysis:

Based on the information in this report, it’s reasonable to argue that social media marketing can increase the quality of leads (and not just the volume). It’s possible to hone in on, and understand intent through search and how social media exposure affects that intent. And as people are exposed (and I would say involved with – since exposure sounds like you’re just broadcasting stuff at people, which isn’t what social media is about) to social media their intent is more focused and driven towards lead conversion

That’s the kind of social media marketing value I can get behind. Get exposed to potential customers through social so that when they build their consideration set, search and purchase, you’ll have a leg up on the competition.

What Drives Traffic (and Converts) for Whom

It pays to understand the bias of this flare-up’s instigator, and I’ve got plenty of compelling data myself to see his perspective. Last weekend, I started publishing content on a personal blog – no domain authority, no links and little chance of performing well in search. But the results from social media – Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News in particular – are fairly remarkable:

The search traffic demand, all 78 visits, was generated from the articles that went popular on Twitter & HN. The site itself still doesn’t rank for its own name. Yet, social media sent 22,000 visits over 9 days. No wonder bloggers, in particular those that monetize through advertising, sponsorships and other traffic-driven systems, have a proclivity for investing in social traffic. Perhaps it’s not so crazy to suggest on Problogger.net, a site about growing blog traffic and improving monetization, that social can be "better" than SEO.

I’d still argue that overall, referring traffic of all kinds sent from social, particularly from the largest network (Facebook), is only a fraction of the visits Google sends out each day (unless you’re in the business of appealing to the Facebook audience biases – I was a bit frustrated with how the data was clearly manipulated in the reference piece to fit the story). But, social does eliminate some of the inherent biases that search engines carry and let content that appeals to social users flourish no matter the site’s ability to grow its link profile, make content accessible to spiders or effectively target keywords.

Now let’s look at an example on the opposite end of the spectrum – conversions for a B2B product.

SEOmoz’s PRO membership may not be a good investment unless you’re a marketer actively engaged with SEO, but given that both the search and social traffic our site attracts likely fall into this intent group (interested in SEO and likely to be in web marketing), a comparison seems fair.

First, I did some prep work in our Google Analytics account by creating an advanced segment called "social traffic" that contains any referral source with "twitter," "facebook," "stumbleupon," "linkedin," "flickr," and "ycombinator" – these represent the vast majority of our social media sources. Next, I compared this traffic quantitatively with our search referrals over the past two weeks:

• Social Traffic – 26,599 visits from 30 sources
• Organic Search Traffic – 102,349 from 20 sources

I then compared the percent of these reaching our landing or purchase pages for PRO membership. Here’s organic search:

And here’s social traffic:

Here’s what I see:

• 4.5% of organic search visitors considered a purchase
• 1.3% of social traffic considered a purchase
• While I can’t disclose full numbers, I can see that a fair number of search visits converted vs. zero for social.

In fact, looking at the entire year to date traffic to SEOmoz from social sources, it appears not 1 visit has ever converted for us. Social may be a great way to drive traffic, build branding and make a purchase more likely in the future, but from a direct conversion standpoint, it doesn’t hold a candle to search. To be fair, I’m not looking at full life cycle or even first-touch attribution, which makes this analysis less comprehensive, though likely still directionally informative.

Takeaways

Given the research and data here and in the posts/content referenced, I think we can say a few things about search and social as marketing channels:

1. There shouldn’t be a VS.: This isn’t about pitting web marketers against each other (or perhaps, more accurately, themselves, since our industry survey data suggests many of us are responsible for both). There’s obvious value in both channels and to suggest otherwise is ideological nonsense and worse, self-defeating.
2. Search Converts: $20 Billion+ isn’t being wasted on Google’s search ads – that sucker send intent-driven, focused, conversion-ready visits like nobody else on the web.
3. Social Has Value: Those exposed to a social campaign are better customers and prospects; making social not only a branding and traffic channel, but an opportunity for conversion rate optimization.
4. SEO Is Hard in the Early Stages: Without a strong link profile, even great content may not perform particularly well in search results.
5. Segmenting Search and Social is Key: Unless you separate, analyze and iterate, you’re doomed to miss opportunities and falsely attribute value. I’m particularly worried about those marketers who invest heavily in social to the detriment of SEO because the immediacy of the rewards is so much more tangible and emotionally compelling (He’s following me on Twitter! We have 200 Facebook fans!) – make sure appropriate effort goes where it can earn ROI; it’s our job.

For another interesting (and more social-media biased) perspective, check out Search vs. Social from Bradford Cross.

I’d love to hear more from you on this topic, too. 

Do you like this post? Yes No

Continue reading →

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the use of rel=canonical and we’ve certainly seen a decent amount of Q&A from SEOmoz members on the subject. Dr. Pete of course blogged about his rel-canonical experiment which had somewhat interesting results and Lindsay wrote a great guide to rel=canonical. Additionally, there seem to be a few common problems that are along the following lines -

• When should I use a rel canonical tag over a 301?
• Is there a way that the rel canonical tag can hurt me?
• When should I not use the canonical tag?
• What if I can’t get developers to implement 301s?

I’m going to attempt to answer these questions here.

The 301 Redirect – When and How to Use it

A 301 redirect is designed to help users and search engines find pieces of content that have moved to a new URL. Adding a 301 redirect means that the content of the page has permanently moved somewhere else.

Source: http://www.ragepank.com/images/301-redirect.jpg

What it does for users

Users will probably never notice that the URL redirects to a new one unless they spot the change in URL in their browser. Even if they do spot it, as long as the content is still what they were originally looking for, they’re unlikely to be affected.  So in terms of keeping visitors happy, 301 redirects are fine as long as you are redirecting to a URL which doesn’t confuse them.

What it does for the search engines

In theory, if a search engine finds a URL with a 301 redirect on it, they will follow the redirect to the new URL then de-index the old URL. They should also pass across any existing link juice to the new URL, although they probably will not pass 100% of the link juice or the anchor text.  Google have said that a 301 can pass anchor text, but they don’t guarantee it.

In theory a search engine should also remove the old page from their index so that their users can’t find them.  This can take a little bit of time but usually can take no longer than a few weeks.  I’ve seen pages removed within a few days on some clients but its never set in stone.

Where is can go wrong

Not knowing your 301s from your 302s

The classic one which I’ve seen more than once, is developers getting mixed up and using a 302 redirect instead. The difference with this is that a 302 is meant to be used when content is temporalily moved somewhere else. So the link juice and anchor text is unlikely to be passed across.  I highlighted an example of this in a previous blog post, if you go to http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ you’ll see a 302 is used.  I first spotted this several months ago and it still hasn’t been fixed and I’d assume that this isn’t a genuine temporary redirect.

Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL

Another common mistake I see involves site migration. An example being if your website has 500 pages which are moving somewhere else. You should really put 500 301 redirects on these pages which point to the most relevant page on the new site. However I’ve often see people redirect all of these 500 pages to a single URL, usually the homepage. Although the intention may not be manipulative, there have been cases of people doing this to try and consolidate all the link juice from loads of pages into one page, to make that page stronger. This can sometimes put up a flag to Google who may come and take a closer look at whats going on.

Matt Cutts talks about this in this Webmaster Tools video:

When you should use a 301

Moving Sites

You should certainly use 301 redirects if you are moving your website to a new location or changing your URLs to a new structure. In this situation, you don’t want users or search engines to see the old site, especially if the move is happening because of a new design or structural changes.  Google give clear guidelines here on this and advise the use of 301s in this situation.

Expired Content

You should also use a 301 if you have expired content on your website such as old terms and conditions, old products or news items which are no longer relevant and of no use to your users. There are a few things to bear in mind though when removing old content from your website - 

• Check your analytics to see if the content gets any search traffic, if it does, do you mind potentially losing that traffic if you remove the content?
• Is there another page on the site which has very similar content that you could send the user to?  If so, use a 301 and point it to the similar page so that you stand a chance of retaining the traffic you already get
• Is the content likely to become useful in the future?  For example if you have an ecommerce site and want to remove a product that you no longer sell, is there a chance of it coming back at any point?

Multiple Versions of the Homepage

This is another common mistake.  Potentially a homepage URL could be access through the following means, depending on how it has been built -

http://seomoz.org
http://www.seomoz.org/home.html
http://www.seomoz.org/index.html

If the homepage can be accessed via these type of URLs, they should 301 to the correct URL which in this case would be www.seomoz.org.  

Quick caveat – the only exception would be if these multiple versions of the homepage served a unique purpose, such as being shown to users who are logged in or have cookies dropped.  In this case, you’d be better to use rel=canonical instead of a 301.

The Rel=Canonical Tag – When and How to Use it

This is a relatively new tool for SEOs to use, it was first announced back in February 2009.  Wow was it really that long ago?!

As I mentioned above, we get a lot of Q&A around the canonical tag and I can see why.  We’ve had some horror stories of people putting the canonical tag on all their pages pointing to their homepage (like Dr Pete did) and Google aggressively took notice of it and de-indexed most of the site.  This is surprising as Google say that they may take notice of the tag but do not promise.  However experience has shown that they take notice of it most of the time – sometimes despite pages not being duplicates which was the whole point of the tag!

When to use Rel=Canonical

Where 301s may not be possible

There are unfortunate situations where the implementation of 301 redirects can be very tricky, perhaps the developers of the site don’t know how to do it (I’ve seen this), perhaps they just don’t like you, perhaps the CMS doesn’t let you do it.  Either way, this situation does happen.  Technically, a rel=canonical tag is a bit easier to implement as it doesn’t involve doing anything server side.  Its just a case of editing the <head> tag on a page.

Rand illustrated this quite well in this diagram from his very first post on rel=canonical:

Multiple Ways of Navigating to a Page

This is a common problem on large ecommerce websites.  Some categories and sub-categories can be combined in the URL, for example you could have -

www.phoneshop.com/smartphone/3G
www.phoneshop.com/3G/smartphone

In theory, both of these pages could return the same set of results and therefore a duplicate page would be seen.  A 301 wouldn’t be appropriate as you’d want to keep the URL in the same format as what someone has navigated.  Therefore a rel=canonical would work fine in this situation.

Again, if this situation can be avoided in the first place, then thats the ideal solution as opposed to using the canonical tag.

When dynamic URLs are generated on the fly

By this I mean URLs which tend to be database driven and can vary depending on how the user navigates through the site.  The classic example is session IDs which are different every time for every user, so it isn’t practical to add a 301 to each of these.  Another example could be if you add tracking code to the end of URLs to measure paths to certain URLs or clicks on certain links, such as:

www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav

When Not to Use Rel=Canonical

On New Websites 

I’ve seen a few instances where rel=canonical is being used on brand new websites – this is NOT what the tag was designed for.  If you are in the fortunate position of helping out with the structure of a new website, take the chance to make sure you avoid situations where you could get duplicate content.  Ensure that they don’t happen right from the start.  Therefore there should be no need for the rel=canonical tag.

On Pagination – maybe!  At least use with caution

This is a tough one and unless you really know what you’re doing, I’d avoid using rel=canonical on pagination pages.  To me, these are not strictly duplicate pages and you could potentially stop products deeper within the site from being found by Google.  This seems to have been confirmed by John Mu in this Google Webmaster thread.  He gives some interesting alternatives such as using javascript based navigation for users and loading all products onto one page.  

Having said that, John Mu has made a point of not ruling it out totally.  He just advises caution, which should be the case for any implementation of the canonical tag really – except if you’re Dr Pete! 

Across your entire site to one page

Just a quick note on this one as this is one way which using the rel=canonical tag can hurt you.  As I’ve mentioned above, Dr Pete did this as an experiment and killed most of his site.  He set the rel=canonical tag across his entire site pointing back to his homepage and Google de-indexed a large chunk of his website as a result.  The following snapshot from Google Analytics pretty much sums up the effect:

Conclusion

In summary, you should use caution when using 301s or the canonical tag.  These type of changes have the potential to go wrong if you don’t do them right and can hurt your website.  If you’re not 100% confident, do some testing on a small set of URLs first and see what happens.  If everything looks ok, roll out the changes slowly across the rest of the site.

In terms of choosing the best method, its best to bear in mind what you want for the users and what you want them to still see.  Then think about the search engines and what content you want them to index and pass authority and link juice to.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Continue reading →

Many of us have already noticed the new Google Instant Preview feature on Google search engine results page. Its a simple addition to the Google Instant makeover, where you get to see the preview of a website, while hovering the mouse over a search result. It is the next step in bringing value to Google’s [...]

Join Dailybloggr Community on Facebook

Does Google Instant Preview affect SEO & Traffic ? was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

Continue reading →

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Brands and company-specific brand name products have become much more important to search engines recently. Google tries to serve us with relevant content, so if it thinks we want to know more about Adidas or Puma, it’s going to tell us about these brands rather than about the random online shoe stores that we’ll probably click away from (you know the ones!). This might be great if you’re a major brand, but what if you’re not? And what’s happening if you are? How is it working? This week, Rand is here to let us know more about search engines and how they rank brand name products and sites.

if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed(‘wistia_217444′,640,360,{videoUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/b9d2e89507c9f37c70380428c84c919d58082f17.bin’,stillUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2655b490a2b5c3be3a3eb1c414b06bb77cc38f6e.bin’,distilleryUrl:’http://distillery.wistia.com/x’,accountKey:’wistia-production_3161′,mediaId:’wistia-production_217444′,mediaDuration:535.54})

View statistics for this video

Embed video

<object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_217444" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/b9d2e89507c9f37c70380428c84c919d58082f17.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2655b490a2b5c3be3a3eb1c414b06bb77cc38f6e.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&endVideoBehavior=default&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_217444&mediaDuration=535.54"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_217444" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/b9d2e89507c9f37c70380428c84c919d58082f17.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2655b490a2b5c3be3a3eb1c414b06bb77cc38f6e.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&endVideoBehavior=default&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_217444&mediaDuration=535.54"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed(‘wistia_217444′,640,360,{videoUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/b9d2e89507c9f37c70380428c84c919d58082f17.bin’,stillUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2655b490a2b5c3be3a3eb1c414b06bb77cc38f6e.bin’,distilleryUrl:’http://distillery.wistia.com/x’,accountKey:’wistia-production_3161′,mediaId:’wistia-production_217444′,mediaDuration:535.54})</script><a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz – SEO Software</a>

 

Video Transcription

Dobar den! Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. That’s my attempt at some Bulgarian. I think "dobar den" means hello/good day in Bulgarian. We’ll find out. I’m sure someone will comment on the blog.

Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. Good to be back in the States. Good to be back here in Seattle at SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday studios talking about an interesting topic that’s come up quite a bit — search engines and brand entities. There’s this concept that’s been talked about in the SEO world for a while, for a couple of years now, that Google sort of has this favoring of brands, of sites that have built up what you would call brand recognition and brand entities in the minds of consumers. It is sort of interesting because SEO folks have been asking some questions like, "Well, how do I know if I am a brand? What constitutes a brand and what doesn’t? Why would Google be going in this direction? What can or should I be doing?" We don’t have scientific great answers to all of these questions, but we can start to try and tackle some of them and at least get a lot of folks in the search marketing sphere thinking more about this branding stuff. I think that definitely the changes that Google’s been making around the Vince update, maybe some of the things around MayDays, certainly some of the things around showing more branded results in queries when, for example, someone types in a search plus SEOmoz, they might be showing a lot more than just two results from the SEOmoz.org website thinking that there is a brand intent to show things from just one site.

So, first let’s start by talking about why brands? Why does Google care so much about this? There’s that famous quote, of course, from Eric Schmidt, Google’s president, that Aaron Wall has brought up on SEO Book a number of times saying, you know, "Brands are how we sort out the cesspool." So, there is this cesspool of content on the Web, a lot of it being stuff that users don’t want.

You can kind of imagine this if you put yourself in the mind and the shoes of a searcher. Shoes particularly, right. So, in this case, Google is kind of looking at these the way a human would. So maybe we’ve got our guy over here and he’s sort of looking at these different sites. He’s done a search for running shoes. He sees Adidas, which makes tons of sense; Adidas is a running shoe brand. Great, great thing to have in the result. Puma, sure. Vibram, okay, that’s kind of an emerging brand coming up. And then there is tennis-shoe-store. Yeah, I mean, maybe they’ve done a great job earning links and maybe they have a good website and that kind of thing, but consumers get kind of suspicious of this. Searchers get kind of suspicious of this. The non-brand results bring some dissatisfaction. You can see that in some of the search engine research and result testing that various organizations have conducted, including the search engines themselves. You can kind of feel it viscerally. When you look through the results yourself you kind of go, "Man, I don’t know about these. It’s a lot of hyphenated domains and sites I’ve never heard of. Can I trust them?" I go and visit them and they look sort of almost SEO heavy but not content or usability heavy. It’s so frustrating, right. I think Google is kind of saying, "Hey, we’ve got some ways to identify this. Maybe we’ll send some of the preferences over to brands."

So, let’s try and tackle the question, what makes a brand? What is it that separates a brand from a non-brand in the minds of the search engines when it comes to domains, when it comes to websites and pages? You can think of a lot of different things. Certainly Google has put out some patent applications that suggest some of the things they might look at. They made an acquisition of a company called Metaweb that does a lot of these things, including a service called Freebase that kind of makes entity associations from context and text and word usage. These things can include stuff like appearance and repetition of text content. You can imagine that Adidas, Puma, and Vibram, these show up on the Web a lot more than tennis-shoe- store.info or whatever it is. There is kind of this idea, "Huh, maybe that’s a brand, maybe that’s not." And then there is context of use and positioning of that text and content. You can see that those brands are all mentioned in news and they’re mentioned in blogs. They’re in stores. They’re in different stores both on and off the Web. They’re in eCommerce shops. They’re featured in traditional media outlets, online and offline. You see them in offline media as well. They show up in links. They show up in advertising. Certainly things like Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and looking at tools like the DoubleClick Ad Planner could give you some insight into things that they view as brands and entities and how they associate those verus sites that they don’t really have an audience association or brand association with. The brands appear in things like patents. They appear in licenses. They appear in government and official documentation. There is all this sort of context and use of positioning.

Finally, brands have these user base kind of signals as well. Brands get talked about when people participate in social media. They get talked about when people perform search queries themselves. If Google sees that lots of people are searching for things like Adidas, Puma, and Vibram, but not searching for tennis-shoe-store, that could be a signal that this is a brand entity and these aren’t. There is language and communication which Google has been getting heavily into. They have their GOOG-411 service. They certainly power Gmail. They power a lot of other services where they are essentially looking at what’s being talked about, what’s being said, what’s being recorded, and written by humans all across not just the Internet but across our societies. All of these signals might help Google to make associations around what is a brand and what is not and then return results that are sort of this brand biasing.

A lot of this is sort of interesting theoretical stuff, but I know that many SEOs are going to be asking the question, "Well, what do I actually do with this data?" So, some good things to keep in mind is that we as SEOs sometimes ignore branding. We ignore the impact of let’s do broad-based advertising, let’s participate in display, let’s participate in media or in video or in offline advertising or in things like getting our brand name out there and events, those kinds of things. We become very obsessed and focused on just sort of the very basic elements of SEO — the on-page, getting links, those kinds of things. That might work. But if you’re seeing this brand biasing, you might think about some of these branding tactics as a way to move your site and your rankings forward.

Secondarily, don’t let your SEO get ahead of your organic momentum. What I mean by that is, I see and feel a lot of the times that many SEOs who get very aggressive with their domains, particularly in competitive spaces where there is brand preferences or where Google appears to be trying to do some of those things, we’ll see that they’ll do a great job earning links. They’ll get lots of good anchor text. They’ll earn those links to those pages. They might not always be from the best sources, and they don’t do a lot of these types of things. People are not saying things about them in social media. They’re not positioned in context. They are not mentioned in the news and in natural normal blogs, offline stuff, and advertising. They appear to be these sort of solely pseudo Internet brands. That could potentially be a negative signal, or at least it might not track as well as someone who’s got both signals going.

You know, as part of that, finally, I would say, try and work on making your site and your product and the naming conventions that you use as brand friendly, as branding friendly, as possible. All of those things are going to potentially impact the way your brand is perceived.

The great thing about all of this stuff, about these recommendations and about the concept of branding in general, is that there’s a lot of psychology, a lot of years, decades of marketing science and research going to the fact that, hey, brands get positively associated in consumers’ minds and they drive a lot more behavior. They drive sales, traffic, demand, and all these kinds of things. Certainly search engines can help with that, but remember that in one case when you’re doing brand building, you are sort of building and creating demand that might not have existed otherwise. When you’re doing SEO, all you can really do is serve existing demand, rank for the kinds of things that people already are searching for. This is a great thing to be thinking about not just from an SEO perspective, from a rankings perspective, but from a company building perspective and from a holistic marketing effort. It certainly feels like SEO is going in that direction.

All right, everyone. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow SEOmoz on Twitter! While you’re at it, follow me too: Aaron Wheeler.

If you have any tips or tricks that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Continue reading →

Posted by randfish

I’ve gotten to spend some time recently with folks who run small, personal blogs (including my wife, friend Kim, and a travel blogging dinner meetup SEOmoz sponsored in Seattle this week), and many of them have asked me whether SEO, in particular link building, is an activity they can take on to help grow their online presence. I can certainly empathize with the challenges – from reading many of the guides and posts about link building here on SEOmoz or elsewhere in the industry, you could be forgiven for feeling "in over your head" or that "only real businesses can do this kind of stuff."

This post is intended to provide answers specifically targeted to individuals running their own blog, personally or semi-professionally, on how to engage in activities that will draw in links from other sites and grow you potential to rank in the search engines.

#1: Generic Directories Aren’t Your Best Bet

Thinking of spending a few dozen or a couple hundred dollars on a generic directory listing like Yahoo! or Best of the Web? For personal bloggers, my advice would be to save your money. These directory listings may provide some small amount of value, but there are dozens of different activities you could engage in that cost less or have higher ROI. Generics are also extremely unlikely to send you direct traffic (and what’s more – Yahoo! only lists 46 personal blogs now; it might be hard to make the cut)

_
Not worth the $299 for personal bloggers

Even those like the long-neglected Open Directory Project have such long wait times, tough criteria and poor acceptance rates that it’s barely worth submitting these days. There may be a few exceptions here and there, but on the whole, I’d urge personal bloggers to shy away from large, subject-agnostic directory sites.

Note: These generics may make sense for larger operations and sites, depending on your goals.

#2: Niche Blog Listing Sites Can Be Much More Effective

Don’t give up on directories or listing sites entirely. For personal blogs, particularly those with a targeted niche, there are a lot of good places to create listings or fill out a submission form. For example, here’s some blogs in specific niches I’d be very You can find these types of sites quite easily through searches, but looking at the link profiles of other blogs in your niche that perform well in the search rankings can also provide a lot of value.

• Geography-specific
  • Seattle Startup & Tech Blogs
  • Seattle Mom Blogs
  • Boston Food Bloggers
  • Boston Blogs
  • Boston Blog Directory
• Travel Blogs
  • Travel Blog Exchange
  • Konnector (also open to other types of blogs)
  • Slow Travel
• Technology Blogs
  • Women Tech Blogs
  • Search Marketing Blogs
  • Gadget Blog List
• Crafting Blogs
  • Blogs by Crafters
  • Sewing & Crafting Blogs
• Law Enforcement Blogs
  • Police Blogs
  • Law Enforcement Bloggers Against Prohibition (LEAP) List

You can use search queries like "niche+blogs," "niche+bloggers," "niche+blogs+list" at Google/Bing or try Yahoo! Site Explorer or Open Site Explorer – plug in the blogs you’re most jealous of (or most similar to) and you’ll often find a few dozen to a few hundred opportunities.

#3: A Few Well-Targeted Searches Can Reveal Hundreds of Link Opportunities

Finding quality, targeted directories and lists can be a good start, and may bring traffic as well as better search rankings, but if you get creative with your searches, you’ll often find even more specific and sometimes valuable opportunities. Think of these queries on three levels – overall blog topic (similar to the suggestion above), category theme (of or related to one of your primary, consistent topic areas) and post-specific (related to an individual piece you’ve authored or are considering writing).

For category themes, you’ll want to identify a particularly strong category-focus on your site. For example, my wife has a collection of posts about air travel, and could find opportunities for links specifically to this section or posts in them using queries like air travel blogs suggest or air travel resources. Don’t give up if you don’t find opportunities on the first page of results -dig deep – it’s often where you’ll find the best opportunities.

You can also use this tactic on individual posts – particularly those that tackle important, controversial or high-demand topics – the kind that fit nicely into resource collection lists.

_
This Labs tool can help make running the right queries easy

Once you have a few posts or categories in mind, leverage link searches from this SEOmoz list, this one from SEJournal or this one from SELand. You can also use the Link Acquisition Assistant from Labs and this free tool from SoloSEO to help.

#4: Answer Questions in Online Forums / Q+A Sites 

When you participate positively in online forums, it often sends referrals to your site from those who check out your profile. Many of these are nofollowed (meaning they don’t pass link value in the search engines’ eyes – more on this here), but the traffic you receive from those who ask the questions or who find value in your response can be useful – and earn you links.

As an example, for the past 6 months, I’ve been answering a question or two each week on Quora, a relatively new but well-regarded Q+A site focused on technology and startups. My answers page shows that I’ve left 77 total answers since April (~11/month) and you can see the impact that has on traffic back to SEOmoz:

_
SEOmoz’s traffic from Quora (past 30 days)

While not stellar, it has been building as the site grows and the answers get indexed by search engines and seen by more people. For personal bloggers, spending a few hours each month contributing to 5-10 relevant Q+A sites or forums can have a substantive impact on your traffic and on links that you generate inside your community. It’s a great way to "interact" with those who, otherwise, might never stumble across your site.

Some of the broad Q+A sites I recommend looking at include:

• LinkedIn Answers (particularly if you have a professional focus)
• Yahoo! Answers (depends on your topic – some areas are very low quality)
• Wiki Answers (gets good search traffic, but a less active intra-community population)
• Facebook Questions (very new, but big possibilities for the future)
• Askville (from Amazon, generic, but large and well-trafficked)
• Quora (the above mentioned startup – currently has a tech/valley bent, but is growing and expanding fast)

Of course, you’ll also want to identify niche and subject-specific sites where contributions can be made. A good example starting point would be something like StackExchange’s list of Q+A sites on their platform or using a list of communities (e.g. ODP’s Math Chats & Forums). 

#5: Submit Your Best Work to Relevant Social Portals

If you have posts that you feel are especially brilliant, interesting and potentially "viral" (meaning lots of web visitors will want to share them with others once they’ve seen it), there are a number of portals that can help drive traffic and attention through social "voting" or editorial review. A relatively good list is here (though it’s not fully comprehensive), but I’ll also tackle some specific examples:

• Kirtsy – a niche social site focused on fashion, arts, style and family.
• Care2 News – one of the most popular niche social voting sites on non-profit, environmental and societal stories
• Hacker News – a very popular community around startups, technology and entrepreneurship
• Subreddits – Reddit has grown to become one of the most trafficked social sites on the web, and they have categories (aka "subreddits") for many topics

Just be aware that submissions should be carefully considered. If you spam these types of sites with everything you write or even a few inconsistent or irrelevant pieces, you can be banned, downvoted or simply shunned by the other contributors/voters. The best way to know what to submit vs. not is to read the site’s top pieces regularly and get a "feel" for what’s appropriate.

#6: Use Twitter (and possibly Facebook + StumbleUpon) on Every Post

While you should be cautious about submitting every piece you write to social voting sites, there are fewer reasons to hold yourself back from promoting everything your post on Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon. In fact, may of your fans, friends and followers on Twitter/Facebook may be surprised and disappointed if they don’t see a stream of your latest content through those channels. While subscribing via RSS or email are still quite popular, many folks use Twitter/FB as a way to keep up with your content.

I do strongly recommend that if you’re sharing via Twitter (in particular) that you use a URL shortener like bit.ly that captures and dispalys click-through data so you can measure an improve (see my blog post on Twitter CTR for a more in-depth analysis of that issue).

_
StumbleUpon’s "Interests" include hundreds of topics

StumbleUpon is bit different, in that you earn traffic from it based on the ratio of visits to "thumbs up" received by those seeing your work. However, unlike a Reddit, Hacker News or Digg, there’s no stigma or restriction on thumbing up / submitting every post you create. Providing a good, relevant description and careful categorization is a must, and there may be cases where the type of site you’re running just doesn’t have the relevance to SU’s audience. But, in many cases, regular post submission, at least on the top 50% of your work, can make good sense and drive very nice traffic. SU gets smart about your site, their users and the tagging/categorization system, sending only those visitors who have some interest in your topic to the pages you submit.

#7: Guest Post Strategically

One of the most common pieces of advice I see on growing one’s blog audience and links is to "guest post" (a practice where one blogger creates content for another site and earns readers, recognition and a referring link). This is, undoubtedly, an excellent way to reach a new audience and create value for both parties. However, like many common tactics in link building (blogrolls, generic directories, reciprocal links), it can easily be abused.

The past few years have seen a bevy of low quality guest posting submissions and it’s reached an extent where many bloggers and sites that engage with them will publicly message that they don’t accept guest posts. A must-read piece on this topic comes from Kelly Diels on ProBlogger – Guest Posts: How-to, Where-to, Where-Not-To.

The only other critical piece of advice I have for thinking about and choosing guest post options is to be strategic in your decisions about your use of time and content. If you have an amazing piece of content that could perform well, earn lots of traffic and links, it could be a great move to use it on your own site OR guest post it on someone else’s. To choose correctly, you need to weigh the potential positives and negatives:

• Is the content evergreen (meaning it will remain useful and valuable for a long time)? If so, you may want to favor keeping it on your site, as it can continue to build value and earn links long after publication. If the content is highly temporal, it could work well as a guest post, earning you immediate attention, but not costing you as much in the long run.
• Do you have the content/value to take advantage of an inbound traffic rush? If you guest post on a powerful site this week and 5-10% of those visitors check out your site, will they be inspired to stay, subscribe and read more? If you’ve neglected your own blog and don’t have content as powerful, compelling and interesting there as the guest post you’ve just authored, you could be losing a considerable amount of the potential value.
• Have you guest posted on this site before or have they linked to you frequently? When that’s the case, the value of the link from both a new-audience-exposure and SEO perspective may be diminished. Preaching to the choir has it’s use, but it should probably be done on your own site. You want to branch out, find new sites and audiences to connect with and not get stuck in the same small community. The exception to this rule is when an extremely large, influential site wants you to write for them regularly or semi-regularly. If the NYTimes travel blog is ready to host a 4th article from you, don’t say no.

Finally, if you’re considering guest posting or hosting guest posts, I can heartily recommend My Blog Guest, a great community resource/tool for making contacts on both sides.

#8: Maintain a Smart, Detailed Blogroll

A long time ago, blogrolls were similar to "following" an account on Twitter – if someone interesting linked to you on their blogroll, you’d likely peruse their site and link to them. Today, it’s rare for this reciprocation to take place unless you’ve made your site stand out in some way. Blogrolls, in the traditional sense (long lists of sites on a sidebar) are also less useful from a user’s perspective, particuarly when no description or segmentation is provided.

I’d suggest for those leveraging blogrolls on their own sites and requesting inclusion in others, a more robust, advanced and useful way. For example:

_
An example of a segmented "blogroll" with descriptions

By separating your blogroll into sections/categories and providing descriptions of the sites you include, you can provide more value to those skimming for interesting links and more context for those you mention. The second part of a good blogroll is to be strategic in focus. Listing only the biggest and most-read industry sources/bloggers likely won’t bring you as much potential reciprocation as finding great niche bloggers with less traffic. These sites may indeed see a few referrals or a link from you and check out your site, creating the beginnings of a relationship or even a possible link.

#9: Don’t Ignore Traditional Media

As bloggers, we often think of ourselves as separate from the mainstream media world and worry that resentment may be harbored. But, in my experience, traditional media often wants and needs blogs as sources for inspiration, for quotes on stories and to help understand a new niche or topic they’re writing about. There’s a number of good ways to engage with the press to help your personal blog gain exposure:

• Story Sources: Services like HARO and ProfNet exist to help connect reporters to "experts" or amateurs relevant to the stories they’re writing (good piece on a blogger’s HARO experience here). However, connections aren’t limited to these portals alone – by following reporters/journalists on Twitter and connecting/commenting on their own personal/news blogs, you can often build a relationship that will later result in a citation/link.
• Comment on Mainstream Media Stories: Many bloggers are well aware of the benefits of engaging with their fellow blogs and bloggers by leaving comments, but fail to do so on traditional publications. It can be daunting to see hundreds or thousands of comments on an NYTimes piece, but it also means there’s tens of thousands of visitors perusing those comments, and leaving intelligent, robust, useful replies and references can be a substantive brand-builder and traffic driver.
• Reference their Content in Your Posts: Even mainstream media folks will look at their traffic referrers and those writing about their work, and if you add great value to the conversation, you could be a central part of it next time. Just writing about topics that are getting mainstream media attention in unique, interesting ways can bring links. For example, in October, I wrote about a study on traffic to advertising value that had received lots of press. My critique was then picked up by several other sources, including the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard.

The mainstream press may have financial troubles, but they still generate an extraordinary share of time spent online. Don’t ignore them as an opportunity to grow your site’s reach.

#10: Don’t Buy Links or Link "Advertising"

You’ll undoubtedly see banners, links and advertising like those below:

_

Just because the ads are on Google doesn’t mean it’s not risky

I’d strongly advise you against using these paid sources to boost your blog’s links. They tend to send very low and low quality traffic and are high risk from a search engine ranking perspective. While Google has, recently, been soft on link buying and manipulation, that’s supposedly about to change, as the webspam team gets more resources (via GG’s Head of Webspam at Pubcon). Risk isn’t the only reason – there’s also opportunity cost. When you spend money buying or renting links, you lose out on the potential of those resources to be spent on other ways of earning links the engines will want to count. This post on 8 Ways to Buy Links Without "Buying Links" is a good start.

#11: Attend Local Meetups & Free Events

One of the most obvious and enjoyable ways to earn links and branding for your blog is to find local events and meetups for those in blogging, technology or your particular niche, and attend. It can be overwhelming to go to an event by yourself without knowing anyone first, so leverage Twitter and your blog’s network to find folks who comment, read, run blogs or tweet about your site and build those relationships online before you take them into the real world.

Several upcoming Seattle events via Eventbrite

A few great resources for finding local events include Eventbrite, Meetup.com, LinkedIn Events and Facebook (but beware, FB only shows events you’re connected to through existing friends/groups). Mashable also has a great list of Ways to Find Local Twitter Users in Your Town.

#12: Comment, Engage & Build Relationships

When you’re finding new blogs to connect with and comment on, your first instinct will be to focus on dropping relevant links back to your blog posts, getting your name/link prominent in the comments and driving traffic back to your site. These are all fine things – and they should encourage you to leave valuable, useful comments, which other bloggers appreciate (if you do anything but, your comments are likely to be erased or marked as spam). But, you should also consider the value of commenting regularly and productively simply to build a relationship with the few key bloggers/sites that matter most to you.

These aren’t necessarily the sites with the most traffic or highest metrics, but those whom you’d like to build and have a professional, friendly relationship. That means looking beyond the content to the tone, voice and emotional resonance between yourself and the blog author. If you feel a connection, try formalizing the relationship after a few weeks of chatting online (through comments, Twitter, etc). If you’re good at emotional intelligence, chances are it could become a real friendship and/or productive, professional relationship.

In many ways, these are better than just earning links, because you’ll have enhanced your online reach through another human (or many) who can then provide recommendations, connections and advice. Just be sure you’re willing to put into the relationship in equal proportion (or greater at the start).

#13: Use Plugins & Site Features that will Enhance Your Reach

Wordpress, along with several other popular blog content management systems, offer a great variety of plugins and tools to help market your site, but none of them are automatic. To have an impact, you’ll need to use these features wisely, and not overburden your users with too many options/actions to take.

WP Tweet Button: a plugin with lots of customization for Twitter buttons in Wordpress

Tools that help make sharing content easier, promoting your blog’s reach (and providing social proof – a key element in making others interested in your work), and help you manage, monitor and improve your site are smart choices to consider. A few of my quick favorites include:

• WP Tweet Button – as shown above, it allows you to customize a link to Tweet posts/pages for placement on your site.
• Google Analyticator – an excellent plugin that integrates your Google Analytics traffic data right into your Wordpress admin home, making sure you’re consistently aware of and thinking about traffic and metrics.
• Feedburner Widget – Feedburner itself is a great way to get analytics about your feed; this widget makes it easy to share that link and attract signups (and you can customize the look/feel/messaging). It also enables easy subscription via email; a popular option for many who don’t use RSS.
• Increase Sociability – Allows you to customize a welcome message for visitors from specific social sites; it’s particularly effective with StumbleUpon traffic.

However, I’d be remiss to make so short a list without referring you to some of the excellent, longer lists out there, including SEO Plugins from Michael Gray (which goes way beyond just SEO plugins), 21 of the Best Wordpress Plugins from Marketing Pilgrim and Yoast’s Wordpress Plugins. You almost certainly don’t want all of these, but picking a choice few and testing them out could bring better returns from every post you write.

#14: Include Strategic Links in Your Online "Bio"

A person’s online "bio" follows them around the web like a bad habit. Make yours useful, easy to embed and valuable to your site by strategically embedding links and references. You want to come across as authoritative, interesting, possibly humorous or at least approachable. Here’s mine:

I’ve not only chosen links on SEOmoz itself, but also to other mentions of me online. These help those pages rank well, and help pass link juice to those pages which, in turn, have good links back to my site. It’s a virtuous circle, and whenever I’m interviewed, speaking at an event or merely a contributor to an online article, the bio appears. Likewise, when anyone investigates my profile, they find those links and (hopefully) some of them follow them and possibly reference, too.

Hopefully, if you have some less-SEO-savvy/techy friends running their own blogs, this post can be a valuable resource. Please do contribute your own ideas and suggestions for personal blog link building; we’d love to see them (and feel free to link to posts/examples in your comments).

p.s. It wasn’t my intention to write another "numbered list" post this week, but this one became far less manageable without the numerical notations, so I’ve added them for readability.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Continue reading →

Posted by fabioricotta

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Hi SEOmoz folks,

Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.

The idea is simple:  we chose 3 random keywords, created an internal page, created 3 links to different URLs that have a canonical tag to the main page. You can see this idea illustrated bellow:

So, after choosing the 3 keywords we submitted each one to check if Google has any occurrences of them:

Then we bought a new domain, that has no backlinks and as you can see bellow, Google shows us that this website isn’t in the index:

Creating the Index Page

To start the experiment my coworker downloaded a random template from the Internet with some random content inside, changing only the page title, meta description and H1 tag focusing all them into the main website keyword “jogos online de corrida” (online race games in English). The major change he made into the template was to add a conditional check with PHP to insert the canonical tag if the URL requested had any parameter:

<? if (isset($_GET[keyword]))

{ ?>

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br" />

<? } ?>

For those who know something about PHP language, this code checks if the variable $_GET exists. If this check returns true the code insert the canonical tag line into the HTML.

It’s important to say that we do not mention any of those 3 keywords in the Index Page. So, this page can’t rank for having a keyword mention… instead Google needs to check it’s backlinks.

Internal Page

The next step was to create the internal page. We created it with 3 links in 3 different page positions: one in the header, another one in the content area and the last one in the footer area with the following anchor text: “nanuoretfcvds ksabara1″, “esjstisfdfkf aasjdkwer” e “gisrterssia fdswreasfs”. Each link had different targets:

• http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key1
• http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key2
• http://www.jogosonlinedecorrida.com.br/?keyword=key3

It’s important to say that we used the meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” /> into this internal page, so this page would not rank for those 3 keywords.

Indexing the Content

In order to have the pages indexed by Google my coworker created a Sitemap.XML with the 2 pages (home and internal) and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. It is important to say that we did not share this page in any webpage and did not submit in any bookmarking service.

After 2 weeks, our website was showing the 2 pages when we used the operator “site:”. After one more week Google was showing the 2 pages and the link to their cache.

After this “waiting time” we searched in Google on the 3 keywords that we created and noticed that the main page was appearing for ALL of them as you can see bellow:

So, with this small experiment we noticed that Google was giving to a page 3 anchor text values if we use the canonical tag as a funnel.

Conclusions and Applications

With this small experiment we have a hint on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag and now we can try to create some new experiments (eg.: use a parameter in the logo link to your main page, and then receive the anchor text of the second link – because we know that only the first anchor text counts).

We know that this is a single experiment and we need to see if this works in a real website, because we know that Google understands the page segments and this maybe does not work as we presented in this article. We still need to try and check this.

I can’t end this article until saying congratulations to my coworker Leandro that provided me a huge amount of knowledge with this experiment – thank you.

Hope you liked this article!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Continue reading →

Why Dubai ? Because, Dubai is where you get electronic stuff at cheaper prices compared to the rest of the world. But, that’s not the focus here. When the Samsung Galaxy Tablet was released, it was like saying “This is how the iPad should’ve been made”. Some folks even compared it to the iPad considering [...]

Join Dailybloggr Community on Facebook

Buying a Samsung Galaxy Tablet in Dubai (Review) was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

Continue reading →

Posted by randfish

As marketers, many of us leverage Twitter as a direct traffic tool – sharing URLs via the service to encourage clicks and visits to help increase awareness, branding and possibly drive some direct actions (singups, sales, subscriptions, etc). But, from what I’ve seen and experienced, not many of us spend time thinking about how or taking action to improve the CTR we get from the links we tweet.

Given that I have 21K+ followers, but most of the links I tweet generate 150-250 clicks, my CTR is only averaging 1.34%

As analytics junkies, we’re well aware that we can only improve things that we measure, analyze and test. So let’s look at a process for measuring our tweets, analyzing the data and testing our hypotheses about bettering our click-through-rates. If we do it right, we could increase the value Twitter brings us as a marketing and traffic channel.

First off, we’re going to need some data sets that include each of the following:

• Profile Data
  • # of followers
  • # of following
  • # of tweets
  • # of tweets on avg per day
• Tweet Data (only on tweets containing a unique, trackable URL – e.g. bit.ly/j.mp)
  • # of clicks
  • # of retweets
  • time of day
  • tweet structure (e.g. text, url, text VS url, text VS text, url VS text, url, hashes)

This can be time consuming to grab, but if you know how to use Twitter & Bit.ly’s APIs, you could make a more automated system to monitor this. Once you’ve assembled these, you’ll want to build a spreadsheet something like this:

I’ve made the version I created for my own stats public here on Google Docs to help provide an example. With the help of my Twitter history page and the bit.ly+ system (which allows anyone to see the click stats on any unprotected bit.ly link) I constructed a chart of my last 25 tweets containing URLs where I had personally created the bit.ly link (retweets and tweets where I used links from others would be noisy and unusable for this particular purpose).

Using this data, I can ask some interesting questions and learn the answer, including:

Do My Wordier Tweets Earn Higher CTR?

To answer, we merely need to look at the number of words per tweet compared against CTR. We can then build a graph to visually illustrate the data.

The trendlines (in dashes) are showing me that there’s a slight pattern, and Excel’s correlation function returns a value of -0.262, suggesting that there’s a very subtle correlation between shorter tweets and more clicks. I might try testing this in the future with particularly short tweets, since my average word length is 15.88 with a standard deviation of only 3.88 (meaning most of my tweets are consistently lengthy).

Do My Shorter Tweets Perform Better?

Let’s try asking a similar question as above, but look at the raw length of the tweet. According to Hubspot’s data (as presented by Dan Zarrella), shorter tweets are more likely to be retweeted, so perhaps a simliar relationship exists for CTR.

The results are similar, but a little stronger here. The correlation is -0.335, again suggesting shorter tweets might be getting higher CTRs. My average tweet is 108.92 characters in length (standard deviation of 16.94). Given this datapoint and the above, I’m certainly tempted to try a bit more brevity in my tweets.

Do On/Off Topic Tweets Affect My CTR?

In order to find out whether the topic focus of my tweets has an impact on the click-through-rate, I had to create a numerical value mapped to the degree of "on-topicness," then assign that to each URL. Since I’m in the SEO field, my profile says I’m going to be tweeting about SEO, startups and technology and the majority of my tweets are on these subjects, I decided on a scale like this:

• 0 – On a completely unrelated topic
• 1 – On a topic subtly related to marketing/technology/startups/SEO
• 2 – About tech, marketing or startup subjects, or pseudo-on-topic for SEO
• 3 – Specifically about SEO

I then made the following chart representing this data next to CTR:

The correlation function suggests this is a bit higher: 0.43, suggesting that when I tweet about the topics people expect to hear from me about, a higher percentage of them click those links. That’s not unexpected – in fact, I would have predicted a higher correlation (and who knows, across a larger dataset, it might have been stronger).

Is My CTR Improving Over Time?

This is a pretty simple one to answer.

Sadly, that answer is no. I hit my peak in early October with a few choice tweets and haven’t had much in the high ranges since that time. This is a good lesson in why it’s important for me to be monitoring, testing and working to improve, as I’m clearly not doing that through meer experience.

On a broader scale, we also recently conducted some research analyzing 20+ different Twitter accounts and hundreds of tweeted URLs from them. You can see the raw dataset here looking at ~250 tweeted URLs with CTR data, and several metrics about each of the accounts tweeting them. Our hope was to see whether any of the metrics could help predict a higher vs. lower CTR.

The following chart illustrates our findings:

Basically, no single metric about an individual’s Twitter accout was particularly predictive of higher CTR with the exception of TwitterGrader Rank. However, in this case, a higher numeric rank (meaning a "worse" rank) had a higher corrrelation, suggesting the relationship is awkwardly inverse. We were also bummed to see that Klout scores, which we’d hoped would be predictive of CTR, were barely correlated.

One interesting thing we found – average CTR across all 250+ tweets to be only 1.17% (0.024 standard deviation). Thus, I shouldn’t feel too bad about my 1.34% average CTR.

The research, unfortunately, didn’t lead us to any great conclusions, but we are planning to revisit the problem again in the future with larger datasets and more variables. For now, you can download the full report here. Feel free to share, but please do attribute to SEOmoz if/when you do. 

While these types of analysis can be interesting, it’s not a scalable or practical solution for most marketers. What we need is a tool that can automatically analyze our Twitter accounts, collect more and better metrics, and run over them in an automated fashion. That tool doesn’t exist today, but someone should really build a "Twitter Optimizer." If you’ve got the skills and are feeling up to it, but need financial remuneration, SEOmoz would be happy to contract to have that built – just drop me a line (rand at seomoz dot org).

p.s. Special thanks to Ray Illian for compiling the research and the report above.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Continue reading →