When it comes to search engine optimization for large websites, things get so complicated that you need to bring out all your tactics in all its glory. I find it interesting that optimizing large websites for search engines is a real test of how well you know SEO. How is optimizing large websites different from [...]

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SEO for large websites : The Bottom Up Approach was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

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Posted by Danny Dover

 As people in relationships spend time with each other they start to leverage each others natural strengths to efficiently store information about the world around them. "Honey, what is the name of my Aunt’s employer?" "Babe, what do you call that thing that heats bread?" They rely on each other to store information that is mutually beneficial.  Some believe this process is one of the reasons breakups are so hard. “I feel like when s/he left, s/he took a part of me.” It is common to hear statements similar to this because when it comes to memory, it is more true than many may realize.

While this phenomenon has historically happened between two people offline, it is now happening online between people and technology. How many times have you checked Google for a fact that you once knew? How many times have you Googled for a resource that you have already read? Like it or not, Google is quickly becoming a second brain in much the same way loved ones have done in the past. While this search engine has benefits that humans don’t (ubiquity), it does have some severe limitations that should be examined.

The self declared mission of the people who run Google is to “organize the world’s information…”. While they have done a remarkable job of this online, they have failed to do this offline in the tangible world. To understand these unspoken failures, all you need to do is examine the five major senses humans use to organize the world’s information.

Limitations

Sight

“Who is that guy?” “I recognize that place, where was that scene filmed?” “What is the name of that color?” For most people, sight is the primary sense for experiencing the world. While technology does exist for identifying objects within images (facial recognition algorithms, OCR, color detection, etc…) you can’t utilize these tools directly through Google. This may possibly be the biggest limitation of Google. Be it remembering the name of a person after a date or an entire government agency trying to identify a suspect, identifying someone or something by sight is critical for organizing the world’s information.

Smell

Smell is the closest sense tied to memory. Have you ever walked by a stranger and instantly been flooded with memories of a significant other who happened to wear the same perfume or cologne? It can be a jarring experience. Want to identify that scent? Google can’t help you. While the technology exists for detecting smells and there are databases for identifying smells, a method to easily cross reference and identify a smell online is not available.

Hearing

You are watching How I Met Your Mother and you recognize the voice in the opening sequence. Whose voice is that? You hear an obscure tune as a car blaring loud music drives by your home. What is the name of that song? Like the situation with sight, the technology for identifying sounds exists (Shazam, SoundHound, etc…) but it is not available through Google.  While you can search via verticals for text, video and images, you can’t search for sounds. This is almost certainly a legal limitation rather than a technology one. (After all, Google can identify audio clips in YouTube videos.)

Taste

You are traveling in Greece and you order the most interesting looking item on the menu. When it arrives, it looks like nothing you have ever seen. You bite into it and instantly recognize the flavors but can’t remember the name of the meal as it is hidden by an “unique” texture. Again, Google won’t help you (although a napkin might). The same problem happens more frequently with allergies. Want to make sure a meal a friend made for you doesn’t have an ingredient you are allergic to? Some technology can help but Google isn’t one of them.

Touch

BEEP BEEP BEEP! It is 6:00 AM and your alarm clock is screaming. Eyes still closed and crusty, you reach across your bed and use touch to identify the snooze button on your alarm clock. Later that same day, you reach into your bag and navigate its contents by touch to pull out your cell phone. Although more subtlely tied to memory than the other senses, touch can also help you identify objects.

But why would you need to search for something by touch if the object is already at arms length? Good question… unless you are blind. Many blind people use their sense of touch to catalogue the world. Imagine you are not able to see and you find something new and want to know what it is. A friend might be able to help but Google won’t.

And these major limitations are only the beginning:

Where are you?

In the United States, the most common text message is “where are you”. While other websites (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare) have been getting better at answering this question, Google has largely remained stagnant.

Where did I put that?

You are getting ready for work but can’t for the life of you remember where you put your favorite shirt. This type of situation happens daily. Be it car keys, shoes or your little sister, countless man hours have been spent looking for things. When it comes to finding the location of personal items, again Google can’t help.

So Google has some major limitations, why is that a big deal?

These limits are worth writing a blog post about for two reasons; context and awareness.

The great thing about being alive is that everyone is constantly at the forefront of human progress. Right now we are the most evolved we have ever been. And right now, we are even more evolved than when you read that last sentence. It is very likely that while you have read this post, someone, somewhere has invented something that will make your life better moving forward. Google is a great example of that. The limitations I listed above could be fixed with the creation of new features. That is not the point. The point is that while we are currently living in the most technologically advanced time that has ever existed, we still have a long way to go. The Google of today is not the end-all-be-all, it is only a milepost on a much longer stretch of highway.

The second reason I am writing this post is to promote awareness. Whether you like it or not, Google is becoming an important factor in how you experience the world. Just like a person wearing glasses literally sees the world through predefined frames, humans are seeing the Internet through the limits of Google.

Think about that.

If you were a fish living in a fish bowl, would you know the bowl existed? You would certainly know there was an edge to your environment (the glass) but having been enclosed in a bowl throughout your entire existence, you wouldn’t be able to “organize your world’s information” beyond what you could sense. Google is not sensing the world like we do. It can’t see, smell, hear, taste or touch. Yet at the same time, it is largely defining how we experience the Internet. As the Internet becomes an increasingly essential part of our world, the search engine’s limitations become our limitations. These limitations whether noticed or not are limiting your potential to experience the world.

Update 11/4/10 – 9:20AM:

Hey everyone! I want to address some of the comments below. I stick by my argument that Google’s limitations are limiting our potential to view the world but judging by the comments, it looks like I didn’t explain my word choice well enough.

I hold Google to the standard they set for themselves. The company’s mission is to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." When I refer to limits as failures I am doing so in the context of their self declared mission. Google does amazing things with technology but it has failed to do what it set out to do. In this way, these major limitations are failures of their mission.

Although no one brought this up (yet!), I want to note that this post could have easily been about Microsoft. I chose to single out Google simply because they are the dominate market leader. Sitting at my desk right now, I have three devices that have Google set as the default search engine. In my life at least, Google is almost ubiquitous.

Below grasshopper commented: "But as with any utility – and Google is just that, a utility – it’s important to remember to switch it off. "

I like that comment as it illustrates a point I was touching on but didn’t fully hit. (Forgive me as I am taking your comment slightly out of context ;-p) Just like a utility, you can’t actually turn it off. Like gas in your house, you can "turn if off" but this just restricts your access. It doesn’t actually remove the gas from the lines under and around your house. Grasshopper continued "Go for a walk outside, talk with your friends and family face-to-face, etc." This is where the problem of ubiquity comes into play. Odds are you will be going on a walk but taking your Internet-enabled cell phone with you. As the drastic growth of mobile searches shows, even on a walk you are not experiencing the world without Google. (This is not meant to be an attack on your comment grasshopper, rather your word choice got me thinking and I was inspired to make another point ;-p)

If you have any other related limitations that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

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Posted by randfish

Earlier this year we asked the community to take our SEO Industry Survey. We had originally hoped to get at least 3,000 responses and were completely blown away when over 10,000 people ended up taking the survey! Of course, it never hurts to have an iPad as the grand prize, but I’m still very excited about the extent of this report. As a comparison, another excellent survey in our industry earlier this year from eConsultancy and SEMPO generated ~1,500 responses (results are detailed in this SELand article).

Our survey’s goal was to gather information about SEO in 2010 and share it publicly. We asked questions around:

• Who are the people in the SEO community?
• How do they learn about SEO and sharpen their skills?
• How are companies embracing search marketing?
• Which tools and tactics do people in the industry use to support their SEO and social media efforts?

After some detailed number crunching by our good friend Will Critchlow from Distilled, we’re happy to present to you the results from the data.

Get the 2010 Industry Results Here

Some of the cool things you’ll see include:

• What percent of SEOs say they buy links, report spam and how many overlap?
• Salary ranges across countries, experience levels and job descriptions
• Demographics of SEO – we might need to work on our male/female ratio
• and lots more – just go read it!

We’ve also created a spiffy infographic to help visualize the survey results:

For those who’d like to delve into the data more deeply, and extract new views on the information from the 10K+ respones, we’ve made the full data dump available in CSV form: download here. We’d love to see any interesting/unique analyses on this information, and we hope it’s useful to those organizations and companies seeking to learn more about the SEO market.

Winners!

We can’t forget to mention the people who won gifts for participating in the survey. The winners were notified back in June and they’ve all received their prizes. Here are the winners:

Grand Prize: 32GB Wi-Fi iPad:
Sam Ilowitz

First Prize: 120min Flip Mino HD Camera with custom SEOmoz artwork:
Jared Reed
Jay Estis
J. Smeekens

Second Prize: $35 gift certificates to the SEOmoz Zazzle Store:
Gareth Allen
Jody Lonergan
Anton Korzhuk
Jason Tan
Robert Palmer
Sebastien Mégraud
Lindsay Copeland
Joakim Eriksson
Nicholas Foo
Brian Hutchison

It’s been a tremendous pleasure and honor to be part of such a powerful and growing industry, and this survey highlights the depth, breadth and uniqueness of those who do SEO professionally. Thanks so much for participating – we hope to make this a biennial (or possibly even annual) tradition.

p.s. We’ve also got the questions in individual results format on this detail page. Feel free to use any of the images and data in your reports, presentations, analyses, slide decks, etc. but if you use them online, we’d appreciate a link (nofollow is fine, but remember it leaks PageRank)

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Posted by randfish

Earlier this year we asked the community to take our SEO Industry Survey. We had originally hoped to get at least 3,000 responses and were completely blown away when over 10,000 people ended up taking the survey! Of course, it never hurts to have an iPad as the grand prize, but I’m still very excited about the extent of this report. As a comparison, another excellent survey in our industry earlier this year from eConsultancy and SEMPO generated ~1,500 responses (results are detailed in this SELand article).

Our survey’s goal was to gather information about SEO in 2010 and share it publicly. We asked questions around:

• Who are the people in the SEO community?
• How do they learn about SEO and sharpen their skills?
• How are companies embracing search marketing?
• Which tools and tactics do people in the industry use to support their SEO and social media efforts?

After some detailed number crunching by our good friend Will Critchlow from Distilled, we’re happy to present to you the results from the data.

Get the 2010 Industry Results Here

Some of the cool things you’ll see include:

• What percent of SEOs say they buy links, report spam and how many overlap?
• Salary ranges across countries, experience levels and job descriptions
• Demographics of SEO – we might need to work on our male/female ratio
• and lots more – just go read it!

We’ve also created a spiffy infographic to help visualize the survey results:

For those who’d like to delve into the data more deeply, and extract new views on the information from the 10K+ respones, we’ve made the full data dump available in CSV form: download here. We’d love to see any interesting/unique analyses on this information, and we hope it’s useful to those organizations and companies seeking to learn more about the SEO market.

Winners!

We can’t forget to mention the people who won gifts for participating in the survey. The winners were notified back in June and they’ve all received their prizes. Here are the winners:

Grand Prize: 32GB Wi-Fi iPad:
Sam Ilowitz

First Prize: 120min Flip Mino HD Camera with custom SEOmoz artwork:
Jared Reed
Jay Estis
J. Smeekens

Second Prize: $35 gift certificates to the SEOmoz Zazzle Store:
Gareth Allen
Jody Lonergan
Anton Korzhuk
Jason Tan
Robert Palmer
Sebastien Mégraud
Lindsay Copeland
Joakim Eriksson
Nicholas Foo
Brian Hutchison

It’s been a tremendous pleasure and honor to be part of such a powerful and growing industry, and this survey highlights the depth, breadth and uniqueness of those who do SEO professionally. Thanks so much for participating – we hope to make this a biennial (or possibly even annual) tradition.

p.s. We’ve also got the questions in individual results format on this detail page. Feel free to use any of the images and data in your reports, presentations, analyses, slide decks, etc. but if you use them online, we’d appreciate a link (nofollow is fine, but remember it leaks PageRank)

Do you like this post? Yes No

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Posted by laura

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.

The race for governor positions across the U.S. is on, and in California it has been a hotly debated race between Republican ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Democratic mediocre-record-producing Jerry Brown. I’m going to vote for a California governor this Tuesday, and while I was doing my research on the candidates, I can’t help but to notice how they’re doing in search & social. So I poked around in some data, and here’s what I’ve found about what people want to know about our California candidates and how well they’re addressing their audiences through search & social channels online.

PEOPLE LOVE MEG 2X MORE ON FACEBOOK AND JERRY 4X MORE ON TWITTER

While Meg Whitman has a little more than double the number of Facebook Likes than Jerry Brown (201K to 96K respectively), Brown’s Twitter following is enormous, more than 4x more than Whitman’s.

But why? Looking at the Twitter streams from both candidates, both tweet a lot about the event they’re at or going to and both congratulate the Giants on their first World Series game wins (Go Giants!).  Both have under 1,000 tweets.

But one thing I did notice is that they both humanize differently.  Meg Whitman talks about the pumpkin patch she visited or about stopping at Andersen’s for their famous pea soup.  Brown sends out personal thank you’s in droves.  The big difference in the humanization of these tweet styles is that talking about what you did (visiting pumpkin patches & restaurants) is talking about yourself, while sending personal thank you’s is more along the lines of talking about your audience.  People like that.  But could that be what makes the difference between a quarter million and over a million followers? Is there more to learn from the content that Jerry Brown tweets that gets him more followers?  Is his audience just more Twitter friendly (but not really on Facebook)?  And/or are these thank you’s really doing the trick?

Both Whitman and Brown promote their Twitter pages from their Facebook pages (Brown also promotes his Facebook page from his Twitter page). There are just as many searches for Whitman’s Twitter account as Brown’s and Brown’s Facebook account as Whitman’s, so Whitman’s double Facebook Likes and Brown’s quadruple Twitter followers are not a result of demand.

So then there’s this: According to this 2009 Brand study by Razorfish (pdf), the top reason people follow a brand on Facebook or Twitter, after exclusive deals or offers (the number one reason), is because they’re already an advocate.  Which seems to be appropriate for this example.  So how do current Whitman or Brown advocates find their candidates’ Facebook pages?  Usually from their own promotional materials, including their websites.

Let’s look at the websites. Whitman’s site has social sharing buttons on the home page, while Brown’s site highlights signing in through a social network for myjerrybrown.org instead. There’s no social sharing icons other than his Facebook Like button lower on the page. But he’s somehow killing it with Twitter followers.

Whitman, who hardly has the followers Brown has, does have all of the social share buttons on the home page (including text message sand RSS feeds).  Both sites have the same Facebook Like module in the right rail of the site.  Both sites have social sharing buttons for Facebook (and others) at the bottom of pages on the site.

Here’s the biggest difference I see in the social aspects of the two sites though:

1. Whitman’s social sharing module is not only on the home page, it’s on every page of the site (as a sidebar).  It’s not something you can miss.

2. Whitman also has social sharing buttons on every video and photo.  Brown’s videos either play inline or are hosted all on one page with Facebook Like & Twitter share buttons at the bottom (for all videos on the page), and his photos are hosted on Flickr. This inhibits opportunities for sharing some of this content.

Can that make the difference between 96,000 and 200,000 likes on Facebook? It certainly isn’t hurting.  What I dont know for this study is how the candidates have been promoting their social networks through other mediums like print, radio, TV, etc.  This may hold a key to why Brown’s Twitter or Whitman’s Facebook pages are so successful.

WHITMAN & BROWN BOTH SUCK AT CROSS CHANNEL OPTIMIZATION

On YouTube, both Whitman and Brown run channels (Whitman with 404K upload views and Brown with 1.1M upload views), and have plenty of videos promoting their causes and their public appearances and smearing their opponents (although it seems Whitman is doing more smearing of Brown, and the public or other political groups are doing more smearing of Whitman).

These videos have a lot of views, and just by sitting there, will get more. They’re being shared, they’re bing promoted on the site, and they’re (potentially) coming up in search results.  Here’s the problem.

1. Out of the top 5 viewed commercials and top (1) promotional videos for each candidate, only one of the videos promotes their Facebook or Twitter accounts – a Whitman commercial shows it in very small type for about a half second at the end of an ad (I had to rewind it twice to see what it was).
2. Seven out of the twelve videos give viewers a website URL.  From a "views" standpoint, the 5 videos that didnt promote any websites missed an engagement opportunity of sending 89,381 viewers (on 3 videos) to Whitman’s website, and 242,179 viewers (on 2 videos) to Brown’s website. Except that Jerry Brown has URLs listed underneath each of his videos, so viewers of the Jerry Brown videos are encouraged to engage, even though URLs aren’t always in the videos themselves.

But 10 out of these 12 videos that I looked at are originally TV commercials.  According to the latest Nielsen stats, 60% of people watch TV while on the computer. This is a huge cross-channel marketing loss for both candidates. This is California *and* both candidates are in the Bay Area. No Twitter handles on your TV ads?  Who do you guys think you’re advertising to?

What’s just as distressing to an SEO like me, is that both candidates have absolutely horrible YouTube video titles.  YouTube videos are indexed and can (and do) often appear on the first page search results, compelling clickthrough because of the eye-catching video icon that appears among a sea of text in search results.  So titling your YouTube videos with the proper keywords is very important – for context, ranking and clickthrough.  Here are the titles of the top 5 viewed commercials on each candidate’s YouTube pages.

Meg Whitman’s top-viewed commercials on YouTube:

1. Again
2. Jerry Brown vs. The Truth
3. I’m Ready
4. Meg Whitman – Tough Business
5. Meg Whitman – Different Kind

Jerry Brown’s top-viewed commercials on YouTube:

1. Whitman: "Why I Came to California"
2. Echo
3. Sarah Palin Attacks!
4. Twins
5. JB401

Some of Whitman’s video titles aren’t too terrible, like "Jerry Brown vs. The Truth".  That title actually includes the candidate keyword and another relevant keyword "truth".  The titles with her name in it at least have her name.  But let’s look at the glaringly awful one in Brown’s list: JB401. I went to the keyword research tool to make sure there isn’t something I’m missing – that "JB401" isnt actually a popular search term for something in Jerry Brown’s campaign that I’m not privy to.  There are 12 searches last month on JB401 – so that kills that idea.  Here’s the video:

The video is about cutting waste, tax cuts, schools, jobs, bringing power to the local level… It addresses what people are searching for (in the next section), but no one would know from this video title. No one would care about clicking on JB401 when they’re looking for what Brown would do about taxes. Huge video optimization failure.

WHAT CALIFORNIANS REALLY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THEIR CANDIDATES: HOUSEKEEPERS, MOONBEAMS AND LINDA RONDSTAT 

When I look at specific search terms that are popular for each of the candidates using Google’s keyword tool, I can see that there are more searches for Whitman than Brown (also shown with trends in Google Insights): For the last month of data, Meg Whitman was included in 60,500 Google searches, while Jerry Brown was included in 40,500 searches.

Sifting deeper through the data, here are the top political issues that people are searching around each candidate individually, and the approximate number of searches there were last month for their name + the issue:

Meg Whitman:

1. immigration (590)
2. abortion (590)
3. prop 8 (260)
4. education (210)
5. gun control (93)

Jerry Brown

1. immigration (480)
2. taxes (210)
3. education (170)
4. marijuana (170)
5. prop 8 (140)

What’s most surprising (and disappointing) to me is the low search volumes.  Other than that, California searchers want to know about their views on immigration, education and prop 8.  Specifically for Brown they want to know about taxes and marijuana, and specifically for Whitman they want to know about abortion and gun control. Interesting indeed…

Stepping outside of the political issues, here’s the other juicy stuff people are searching for around the two candidates (with higher search volumes than the political issues in most cases):

Meg Whitman:

1. ebay (1,600)
2. housekeeper (880)
3. poizner (880)
4. voting (720)
5. marriage (480)

Whitman is the former CEO of eBay, she was recently in a bit of a firestorm for firing her undocumented housekeeper, Poizner was Whitman’s GOP opponent who lost to her and now tepidly endorses her, she has a sparse and spotty voting record, and people either want to know if she’s married or what she thinks about gay marriage.

Some other searches include: net worth, mormon, leadership, sons, goldman sachs, and spending.

Jerry Brown:

1. attorney general (1,000)
2. clinton (260)
3. marriage (260)
4. linda rondstat (210)
5. moonbeam (170)

Brown is currently attorney general, he has had on-again off-again disputes with Bill Clinton for decades, people either want to know if Brown is married or where he stands on gay marriage, he once dated Linda Rondstat, and he was given the nickname "Moonbeam" by a Chicago columnist in ’76 for the young, nontraditional crowd he attracted.

Some other searches include: record, acorn, unions, calpers and leon black.

WHO’S WINNING THE SEARCH RANKINGS RACE?

Well, let’s look at who’s actually ranking in search results for the terms that people are searching on.

Whitman has more first page rankings for searches around her name than Brown with two #1 spots, two #2 spots and six first page spots altogether for these terms.  Brown has only one #1 spot and four first page rankings for popular searches around his name.

Both candidates highest rankings on these lists are mostly for the political issues like education (for which they both rank #1), marijuana and gun control. Whitman is missing the boat by not ranking for the scandal around the housekeeper.  Her site does not show up in rankings, and most of the news stores that do show up are negative, many of which are the voice of the housekeeper accusing Whitman.  Where Whitman’s site doesn’t rank at all for that search, Jerry Brown’s site ranks #22.

Brown’s big misstep isn’t quite as bad.  The moonbeam nickname may be good or bad for Brown, depending on how you look at it.  For those who are searching for the the origination or meaning of Brown’s nickname, Brown is in the 150th position in SERPS (search results pages).  Brown could take control of this message and do a better job of explaining the moonbeam nickname on his own site, rather than letting searchers take the viewpoint of whatever site or article they may come across in SERPS that may sway them to like Brown more or to consider him a loopy hippy.  Whitman’s site ranks higher for that phrase but only slightly at #122.  Additionally, Brown could do a better job getting on the first page of search results for more political issues that matter to people like prop 8 and immigration.

But let’s take this one step further, to the meat and potatoes.  So what if Meg and Jerry are ranking in the #1 spot for searches for their name and education?  That doesnt meant they’re getting campaign contributions or votes.  The real question is: Are they able to draw these searchers in and convert them?  I dont have access to their analytics to be able to dig into their conversions, but we can look at what the searcher persona workflow might look like: Does the page in search results address the searcher need? Does it look compelling? Does the landing page answer the question or confuse the searcher? Are there calls to action above the fold?

Well, let’s see.

Here’s that top-ranked search result for [meg whitman education].

Now keep in mind what the searcher is looking for (likely Meg Whitman’s stance on education & what she’d do about the problem here in California). The title does contain the word "Education", but it’s mixed into a long title that, when skimming a page full of search results, could easily be overlooked.  As a rule, titles should start with the primary topic and not be diluted with a bunch of other text – they should be direct, to-the-point, and easy to read/skim.

If the searcher reads the summary, it may be compelling. It cites a stat rather than hinting that there is content on this page regarding Whitman’s stance or plan though, which would be the most compelling text to have here.  The URL is somewhat long and arduous to skim, but does indicate that this is indeed a page on education on Whitman’s site. Overall the search result display gets an "eh".

So let’s say the searcher clicks through.  Here’s what they find above the fold:

There is no doubt this page is about education and Meg wants to fix it.  This does address what the searcher was looking for and what they might expect to find from clicking through on that search result. The italic text on the right is hard to read even at 100% screen size, and none of the paragraph text in this screenshot is indexable – it’s all image text.  Most of the content is below the fold, if anyone realizes to go there. The only above-the-fold call to action is to print the page, which, at this point doesn’t seem like what most people are going to want to do.

The rest of the page below the fold has two paragraphs of text, but the entire thing is in Flash.  So here we have a landing page for one of the top political issues that people want to know more info from Meg Whitman, and it’s a half image, half Flash page.  If you’re an SEO, you may be feeling ill right now (unless you’re a Brown supporter, but hold your horses, he’s up next).  Google actually is indexing the text in the Flash content, so there is some contextual content on this page for a search engine to "see".  But most importantly, where is the call to action?  Maybe I’m pumped up! Maybe I want what Meg wants! Maybe I want to learn more, maybe I want to join her parade, maybe I want to donate.  Maybe I want to know how she feels about prop 8, immigration, or other top issues.  How do I get there and why am I not led by a link right now, in the right place, at the right time? There are no front-and-center calls to action. What’s even less noticeable is that there are three pages to this education subject, indicated by a small 1 | 2 | 3 in the top right above the print icon. The page navigation isn’t at the bottom, in fact I hadn’t realized this was page navigation until my third visit to this page. The paginated pages do have unique URLs but with no title, meta or canonical tag optimization (which means the education topic now has three landing pages on  the site), and are also in Flash with no calls to action. The social sharing buttons are on the side of every page, which could potentially be considered a call to action, sort of, kind of untargeted and vague.  Overall Whitman is missing the boat.

So is Jerry Brown doing any better?

Here is that top-ranked page for searches for [jerry brown education]

This is a much cleaner and more direct title. It says exactly what the searcher was looking for, is easier to skim, and isn’t bogged down with too much to read or anything that the searcher wasn’t particularly looking for.  The snippet underneath speaks directly to what we assume is the intent of the searcher – what is stance or his plan?  And the URL couldn’t be more simple.  We know we’re going to the Jerry Brown site’s education page, and there’s not a lot of extra mumble-jumble in the URL that makes us work to make that determination.  This search result display gets a high mark.

This page will likely get the click. So let’s see what happens once we’re inside. Will our searcher find what they want? What they expect? Will they have a chance to convert? Here is the landing page:

The first impression is that the page is a bit text heavy. Where are the education subtopics that I can skim to?  But the title is clear – the searcher is in the right place and this page is what the searcher is expecting to find.  There is an important call to action right at the top of the page in the right rail, asking the visitor to join Jerry (submit email), followed by social sign in buttons for myjerrybrown.org, a volunteer link and a spread the word link.  All of this followed by social sharing buttons, and we’re still above the fold.

Further down the page is better sectioned content, along with several links to download a pdf of Brown’s education plan. The entire plan is also on the page, and the end of the page prompts visitors to Like on Facebook, share on Twitter, or translate.

This is mostly well done, although calls to action could be more prevalent again at the bottom of the page. If they’ve already read that far they’re likely passionate about it.  Grab them before they go somewhere else.  Like Whitman’s page, there are also no prominent pushes to learn more about the other political issues like prop 8, immigration, etc.  Although this information can be found in the top nav dropdowns in both sites, it is good practice to prompt people to click to those to relevant areas of the site from where they’re at, not make them look for it in the navigation (oftentimes they may not have intent to click further into the site unless you put that option right in front of them).

SO WHO IS WINNING THIS RACE?

Overall, my humble assessment is that both of these candidates could use a good search & social cleanup.

But Brown does a good job tweeting and a decent job at cross-channel promotion. His personalized touch in his tweets is a win for his followers and good Twitter etiquette. Having links between his Twitter site, Facebook site, website, in 4 out of 6 of the videos I reviewed and links underneath the videos on YouTube is good thinking ahead by the Brown camp, and great practice for engagement.

Whitman does a decent job in attempting to control some of the messaging around Jerry Borwn. Her YouTube ads addressing Brown, her JerryFails.com site, and her PPC ads for Jerry Brown searches like [jerry brown] and [jerry brown record] show that she is not out for visibility just on her own name, but to steal some of the spotlight from her opponent when possible as well.

BROWN WINS, I GUESS.

But both do a mediocre job overall. It seems their internet offerings aren’t much more impressive than their gubernatorial offerings.  So if I *had* to pick a winner in this online visibility for governor race, I’d probably pick Brown by a hair, since he’s gotten more Twitter followers, more YouTube channel views, and has done a decent job of cross-channel promotion.  I wonder if 1.1 million Twitter followers is indicative of the outcome of the vote on Tuesday too?

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Posted by laura

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.

The race for governor positions across the U.S. is on, and in California it has been a hotly debated race between Republican ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Democratic mediocre-record-producing Jerry Brown. I’m going to vote for a California governor this Tuesday, and while I was doing my research on the candidates, I can’t help but to notice how they’re doing in search & social. So I poked around in some data, and here’s what I’ve found about what people want to know about our California candidates and how well they’re addressing their audiences through search & social channels online.

PEOPLE LOVE MEG 2X MORE ON FACEBOOK AND JERRY 4X MORE ON TWITTER

While Meg Whitman has a little more than double the number of Facebook Likes than Jerry Brown (201K to 96K respectively), Brown’s Twitter following is enormous, more than 4x more than Whitman’s.

But why? Looking at the Twitter streams from both candidates, both tweet a lot about the event they’re at or going to and both congratulate the Giants on their first World Series game wins (Go Giants!).  Both have under 1,000 tweets.

But one thing I did notice is that they both humanize differently.  Meg Whitman talks about the pumpkin patch she visited or about stopping at Andersen’s for their famous pea soup.  Brown sends out personal thank you’s in droves.  The big difference in the humanization of these tweet styles is that talking about what you did (visiting pumpkin patches & restaurants) is talking about yourself, while sending personal thank you’s is more along the lines of talking about your audience.  People like that.  But could that be what makes the difference between a quarter million and over a million followers? Is there more to learn from the content that Jerry Brown tweets that gets him more followers?  Is his audience just more Twitter friendly (but not really on Facebook)?  And/or are these thank you’s really doing the trick?

Both Whitman and Brown promote their Twitter pages from their Facebook pages (Brown also promotes his Facebook page from his Twitter page). There are just as many searches for Whitman’s Twitter account as Brown’s and Brown’s Facebook account as Whitman’s, so Whitman’s double Facebook Likes and Brown’s quadruple Twitter followers are not a result of demand.

So then there’s this: According to this 2009 Brand study by Razorfish (pdf), the top reason people follow a brand on Facebook or Twitter, after exclusive deals or offers (the number one reason), is because they’re already an advocate.  Which seems to be appropriate for this example.  So how do current Whitman or Brown advocates find their candidates’ Facebook pages?  Usually from their own promotional materials, including their websites.

Let’s look at the websites. Whitman’s site has social sharing buttons on the home page, while Brown’s site highlights signing in through a social network for myjerrybrown.org instead. There’s no social sharing icons other than his Facebook Like button lower on the page. But he’s somehow killing it with Twitter followers.

Whitman, who hardly has the followers Brown has, does have all of the social share buttons on the home page (including text message sand RSS feeds).  Both sites have the same Facebook Like module in the right rail of the site.  Both sites have social sharing buttons for Facebook (and others) at the bottom of pages on the site.

Here’s the biggest difference I see in the social aspects of the two sites though:

1. Whitman’s social sharing module is not only on the home page, it’s on every page of the site (as a sidebar).  It’s not something you can miss.

2. Whitman also has social sharing buttons on every video and photo.  Brown’s videos either play inline or are hosted all on one page with Facebook Like & Twitter share buttons at the bottom (for all videos on the page), and his photos are hosted on Flickr. This inhibits opportunities for sharing some of this content.

Can that make the difference between 96,000 and 200,000 likes on Facebook? It certainly isn’t hurting.  What I dont know for this study is how the candidates have been promoting their social networks through other mediums like print, radio, TV, etc.  This may hold a key to why Brown’s Twitter or Whitman’s Facebook pages are so successful.

WHITMAN & BROWN BOTH SUCK AT CROSS CHANNEL OPTIMIZATION

On YouTube, both Whitman and Brown run channels (Whitman with 404K upload views and Brown with 1.1M upload views), and have plenty of videos promoting their causes and their public appearances and smearing their opponents (although it seems Whitman is doing more smearing of Brown, and the public or other political groups are doing more smearing of Whitman).

These videos have a lot of views, and just by sitting there, will get more. They’re being shared, they’re bing promoted on the site, and they’re (potentially) coming up in search results.  Here’s the problem.

1. Out of the top 5 viewed commercials and top (1) promotional videos for each candidate, only one of the videos promotes their Facebook or Twitter accounts – a Whitman commercial shows it in very small type for about a half second at the end of an ad (I had to rewind it twice to see what it was).
2. Seven out of the twelve videos give viewers a website URL.  From a "views" standpoint, the 5 videos that didnt promote any websites missed an engagement opportunity of sending 89,381 viewers (on 3 videos) to Whitman’s website, and 242,179 viewers (on 2 videos) to Brown’s website. Except that Jerry Brown has URLs listed underneath each of his videos, so viewers of the Jerry Brown videos are encouraged to engage, even though URLs aren’t always in the videos themselves.

But 10 out of these 12 videos that I looked at are originally TV commercials.  According to the latest Nielsen stats, 60% of people watch TV while on the computer. This is a huge cross-channel marketing loss for both candidates. This is California *and* both candidates are in the Bay Area. No Twitter handles on your TV ads?  Who do you guys think you’re advertising to?

What’s just as distressing to an SEO like me, is that both candidates have absolutely horrible YouTube video titles.  YouTube videos are indexed and can (and do) often appear on the first page search results, compelling clickthrough because of the eye-catching video icon that appears among a sea of text in search results.  So titling your YouTube videos with the proper keywords is very important – for context, ranking and clickthrough.  Here are the titles of the top 5 viewed commercials on each candidate’s YouTube pages.

Meg Whitman’s top-viewed commercials on YouTube:

1. Again
2. Jerry Brown vs. The Truth
3. I’m Ready
4. Meg Whitman – Tough Business
5. Meg Whitman – Different Kind

Jerry Brown’s top-viewed commercials on YouTube:

1. Whitman: "Why I Came to California"
2. Echo
3. Sarah Palin Attacks!
4. Twins
5. JB401

Some of Whitman’s video titles aren’t too terrible, like "Jerry Brown vs. The Truth".  That title actually includes the candidate keyword and another relevant keyword "truth".  The titles with her name in it at least have her name.  But let’s look at the glaringly awful one in Brown’s list: JB401. I went to the keyword research tool to make sure there isn’t something I’m missing – that "JB401" isnt actually a popular search term for something in Jerry Brown’s campaign that I’m not privy to.  There are 12 searches last month on JB401 – so that kills that idea.  Here’s the video:

The video is about cutting waste, tax cuts, schools, jobs, bringing power to the local level… It addresses what people are searching for (in the next section), but no one would know from this video title. No one would care about clicking on JB401 when they’re looking for what Brown would do about taxes. Huge video optimization failure.

WHAT CALIFORNIANS REALLY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THEIR CANDIDATES: HOUSEKEEPERS, MONNBEAMS AND LINDA RONDSTAT 

When I look at specific search terms that are popular for each of the candidates using Google’s keyword tool, I can see that there are more searches for Whitman than Brown (also shown with trends in Google Insights): For the last month of data, Meg Whitman was included in 60,500 Google searches, while Jerry Brown was included in 40,500 searches.

Sifting deeper through the data, here are the top political issues that people are searching around each candidate individually, and the approximate number of searches there were last month for their name + the issue:

Meg Whitman:

1. immigration (590)
2. abortion (590)
3. prop 8 (260)
4. education (210)
5. gun control (93)

Jerry Brown

1. immigration (480)
2. taxes (210)
3. education (170)
4. marijuana (170)
5. prop 8 (140)

What’s most surprising (and disappointing) to me is the low search volumes.  Other than that, California searchers want to know about their views on immigration, education and prop 8.  Specifically for Brown they want to know about taxes and marijuana, and specifically for Whitman they want to know about abortion and gun control. Interesting indeed…

Stepping outside of the political issues, here’s the other juicy stuff people are searching for around the two candidates (with higher search volumes than the political issues in most cases):

Meg Whitman:

1. ebay (1,600)
2. housekeeper (880)
3. poizner (880)
4. voting (720)
5. marriage (480)

Whitman is the former CEO of eBay, she was recently in a bit of a firestorm for firing her undocumented housekeeper, Poizner was Whitman’s GOP opponent who lost to her and now tepidly endorses her, she has a sparse and spotty voting record, and people either want to know if she’s married or what she thinks about gay marriage.

Some other searches include: net worth, mormon, leadership, sons, goldman sachs, and spending.

Jerry Brown:

1. attorney general (1,000)
2. clinton (260)
3. marriage (260)
4. linda rondstat (210)
5. moonbeam (170)

Brown is currently attorney general, he has had on-again off-again disputes with Bill Clinton for decades, people either want to know if Brown is married or where he stands on gay marriage, he once dated Linda Rondstat, and he was given the nickname "Moonbeam" by a Chicago columnist in ’76 for the young, nontraditional crowd he attracted.

Some other searches include: record, acorn, unions, calpers and leon black.

WHO’S WINNING THE SEARCH RANKINGS RACE?

Well, let’s look at who’s actually ranking in search results for the terms that people are searching on.

Whitman has more first page rankings for searches around her name than Brown with two #1 spots, two #2 spots and six first page spots altogether for these terms.  Brown has only one #1 spot and four first page rankings for popular searches around his name.

Both candidates highest rankings on these lists are mostly for the political issues like education (for which they both rank #1), marijuana and gun control. Whitman is missing the boat by not ranking for the scandal around the housekeeper.  Her site does not show up in rankings, and most of the news stores that do show up are negative, many of which are the voice of the housekeeper accusing Whitman.  Where Whitman’s site doesn’t rank at all for that search, Jerry Brown’s site ranks #22.

Brown’s big misstep isn’t quite as bad.  The moonbeam nickname may be good or bad for Brown, depending on how you look at it.  For those who are searching for the the origination or meaning of Brown’s nickname, Brown is in the 150th position in SERPS (search results pages).  Brown could take control of this message and do a better job of explaining the moonbeam nickname on his own site, rather than letting searchers take the viewpoint of whatever site or article they may come across in SERPS that may sway them to like Brown more or to consider him a loopy hippy.  Whitman’s site ranks higher for that phrase but only slightly at #122.  Additionally, Brown could do a better job getting on the first page of search results for more political issues that matter to people like prop 8 and immigration.

But let’s take this one step further, to the meat and potatoes.  So what if Meg and Jerry are ranking in the #1 spot for searches for their name and education?  That doesnt meant they’re getting campaign contributions or votes.  The real question is: Are they able to draw these searchers in and convert them?  I dont have access to their analytics to be able to dig into their conversions, but we can look at what the searcher persona workflow might look like: Does the page in search results address the searcher need? Does it look compelling? Does the landing page answer the question or confuse the searcher? Are there calls to action above the fold?

Well, let’s see.

Here’s that top-ranked search result for [meg whitman education].

Now keep in mind what the searcher is looking for (likely Meg Whitman’s stance on education & what she’d do about the problem here in California). The title does contain the word "Education", but it’s mixed into a long title that, when skimming a page full of search results, could easily be overlooked.  As a rule, titles should start with the primary topic and not be diluted with a bunch of other text – they should be direct, to-the-point, and easy to read/skim.

If the searcher reads the summary, it may be compelling. It cites a stat rather than hinting that there is content on this page regarding Whitman’s stance or plan though, which would be the most compelling text to have here.  The URL is somewhat long and arduous to skim, but does indicate that this is indeed a page on education on Whitman’s site. Overall the search result display gets an "eh".

So let’s say the searcher clicks through.  Here’s what they find above the fold:

There is no doubt this page is about education and Meg wants to fix it.  This does address what the searcher was looking for and what they might expect to find from clicking through on that search result. The italic text on the right is hard to read even at 100% screen size, and none of the paragraph text in this screenshot is indexable – it’s all image text.  Most of the content is below the fold, if anyone realizes to go there. The only above-the-fold call to action is to print the page, which, at this point doesn’t seem like what most people are going to want to do.

The rest of the page below the fold has two paragraphs of text, but the entire thing is in Flash.  So here we have a landing page for one of the top political issues that people want to know more info from Meg Whitman, and it’s a half image, half Flash page.  If you’re an SEO, you may be feeling ill right now (unless you’re a Brown supporter, but hold your horses, he’s up next).  Google actually is indexing the text in the Flash content, so there is some contextual content on this page for a search engine to "see".  But most importantly, where is the call to action?  Maybe I’m pumped up! Maybe I want what Meg wants! Maybe I want to learn more, maybe I want to join her parade, maybe I want to donate.  Maybe I want to know how she feels about prop 8, immigration, or other top issues.  How do I get there and why am I not led by a link right now, in the right place, at the right time? There are no front-and-center calls to action. What’s even less noticeable is that there are three pages to this education subject, indicated by a small 1 | 2 | 3 in the top right above the print icon. The page navigation isn’t at the bottom, in fact I hadn’t realized this was page navigation until my third visit to this page. The paginated pages do have unique URLs but with no title, meta or canonical tag optimization (which means the education topic now has three landing pages on  the site), and are also in Flash with no calls to action. The social sharing buttons are on the side of every page, which could potentially be considered a call to action, sort of, kind of untargeted and vague.  Overall Whitman is missing the boat.

So is Jerry Brown doing any better?

Here is that top-ranked page for searches for [jerry brown education]

This is a much cleaner and more direct title. It says exactly what the searcher was looking for, is easier to skim, and isn’t bogged down with too much to read or anything that the searcher wasn’t particularly looking for.  The snippet underneath speaks directly to what we assume is the intent of the searcher – what is stance or his plan?  And the URL couldn’t be more simple.  We know we’re going to the Jerry Brown site’s education page, and there’s not a lot of extra mumble-jumble in the URL that makes us work to make that determination.  This search result display gets a high mark.

This page will likely get the click. So let’s see what happens once we’re inside. Will our searcher find what they want? What they expect? Will they have a chance to convert? Here is the landing page:

The first impression is that the page is a bit text heavy. Where are the education subtopics that I can skim to?  But the title is clear – the searcher is in the right place and this page is what the searcher is expecting to find.  There is an important call to action right at the top of the page in the right rail, asking the visitor to join Jerry (submit email), followed by social sign in buttons for myjerrybrown.org, a volunteer link and a spread the word link.  All of this followed by social sharing buttons, and we’re still above the fold.

Further down the page is better sectioned content, along with several links to download a pdf of Brown’s education plan. The entire plan is also on the page, and the end of the page prompts visitors to Like on Facebook, share on Twitter, or translate.

This is mostly well done, although calls to action could be more prevalent again at the bottom of the page. If they’ve already read that far they’re likely passionate about it.  Grab them before they go somewhere else.  Like Whitman’s page, there are also no prominent pushes to learn more about the other political issues like prop 8, immigration, etc.  Although this information can be found in the top nav dropdowns in both sites, it is good practice to prompt people to click to those to relevant areas of the site from where they’re at, not make them look for it in the navigation (oftentimes they may not have intent to click further into the site unless you put that option right in front of them).

SO WHO IS WINNING THIS RACE?

Overall, my humble assessment is that both of these candidates could use a good search & social cleanup.

But Brown does a good job tweeting and a decent job at cross-channel promotion. His personalized touch in his tweets is a win for his followers and good Twitter etiquette. Having links between his Twitter site, Facebook site, website, in 4 out of 6 of the videos I reviewed and links underneath the videos on YouTube is good thinking ahead by the Brown camp, and great practice for engagement.

Whitman does a decent job in attempting to control some of the messaging around Jerry Borwn. Her YouTube ads addressing Brown, her JerryFails.com site, and her PPC ads for Jerry Brown searches like [jerry brown] and [jerry brown record] show that she is not out for visibility just on her own name, but to steal some of the spotlight from her opponent when possible as well.

BROWN WINS, I GUESS.

But both do a mediocre job overall. It seems their internet offerings aren’t much more impressive than their gubernatorial offerings.  So if I *had* to pick a winner in this online visibility for governor race, I’d probably pick Brown by a hair, since he’s gotten more Twitter followers, more YouTube channel views, and has done a decent job of cross-channel promotion.  I wonder if 1.1 million Twitter followers is indicative of the outcome of the vote on Tuesday too?

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Posted by Sam Crocker

Having access to data and large data sets is something any SEO worth his salt craves. Sure, managing a massive dataset or database can be a bit of a hassle, but having good information is key and there are a handful of uses for other people’s/sites’ data sets that are readily available for purchase online. Big budget linkbuilding isn’t the only way to spend your SEO budget these days!

Let’s take a look at five examples of datasets that you can easily and readily purchase and how you might go about using them.

Geocities

The true motivation for this article was a chat with Tom… and the fact that you can now get Geocities (yes, seriously, the whole thing) in the form of a 1 tb torrent (thanks Hackernews). How much is it going to cost you? Just your email address.

Screenshot of GeoCities–izer version of SEOmoz

What would you do with Geocities, you ask? The sky’s the limit with this one really! I’m not saying you want to use any of the great tickers and beautiful layout/seisure inducing colours for which Geocities is now famous.

However, you may very well want to use the huge volume of content that could quite easily be respun for your own purposes for a start? Or, use the epic designs for mapping out your new site- up to you!

Keyword Datasets

Why pay for keywords? Well, for starters, because sometimes you may find you have a client that has exhausted the entire set of data available through the adwords API (yes, this has seriously happened before). If the site is strong enough and you find you’re still able to rank reasonably for long-tail terms post-MayDay there’s no harm in creating some new content to target the long-tail. This isn’t to suggest that you should buy keyphrases and not do the research yourself, but discussed, more data is almost always better than less.

Out of Words? – Stock Image Provided by Shutterstock

And, most importantly- just because the data isn’t in the API doesn’t mean there isn’t any search volume for it!

Some of the outfits out there selling keywords and keyphrases are:

• SEM Rush (AdWords, Google Words, "hidden" keywords)
• Hitwise also offers a range of products as well as one-off reports that will include a great deal of this information
• WordStream can hook you up with access to a few trillion keyphrases as well – access to their API runs from $300-$2,500 per month depending upon how many units you’re looking for (pricing details).
• It’s not yet up in it’s final form but Rich Baxter is beta-testing a pretty darned good Keyword tool you may want to look at.
• Finally, KeywordSpy is something I’d be interested in checking out.

This sort of thing won’t come cheap, but it can be extremely valuable to the larger sites.

80 Legs Crawl Packages

Some of you may be familiar with using 80 legs as a tool to crawl and scrape your way through the interwebs. It’s a tool that I’ve not spent nearly enough time with as I didn’t find it quite as intuitive to use as Mozenda. However, the nice thing about 80 legs is that they have compensated for this a bit by offering packaged-up crawls.

The vast majority of the packages cost $350 per month (with the exception of the ebay motors crawl for $150/month) though the data you could pull off these is extremely valuable and saves you the trouble of doing any of the crawling yourself (or if your IP has been banned you naughty SEOs).

Again, these sets could be used for anything from price-comparison to market analysis and right on down to content creation and keyphrase research. If you’re one of the fortunate few working in the space for which these are offered you should definitely have a look.

Twitter Census

So, the Twitter Census dataset is just an example of the variety of datasets you can buy from InfoChimps though the general concept of owning one year’s worth of URLs, hashtags, and smiley usage seems like it could be used a number of ways. Either, you could create an infographic worthy of a link from the likes of Mashable, TechCrunch, etc.

Or, you could use the data to monitor keyphrase usage, common abbreviations, or any other sort of trend in social interaction (could be a great source of keyphrases as well as the search engines begin to take signals and include social directly in the SERPs. This set is currently placed at $300.

Linkscape

Rand was being a bit coy about this one and at time of press I wasn’t able to get a serious price out of them but there’s a price for everything right? Any serious bidders should probably get in touch with the SEOmoz team directly…

Along these lines, there are a number of other datasets that do not have a price set but I’m sure you could get your hands on with enough money and asking the right people. These would include: Backtype API data, Wordtracker, or Amazon’s entire product catalogue. It all comes down to asking the right people, but ultimately anyone with a brain for business and a load of data would sell you their info if you know how to ask for it.

Bonus SWAG

Don’t you just love it when you can get your hands on some awesome free stuff that you never knew you wanted in the first place? Well, thankfully, there are a few datasets that I came across that I thought were worth sharing and could give you some value for free.

Free Stuff! Stock Image from Shutterstock

Feel free to take a gander at these datasets and try to make use of the data! Can you say "infographic ammunition"?

The entire dataset from the New York Stock Exchange from 1970-current (Open, Close, High, Low, Volume).
Massive sets of US Census Data.
And for those of us based over in the UK – huge volumes of UK Government data right at your fingertips.

Other Huge Datasets to get stuck into:

Project Gutenberg for over 6,000 full books available online. These book lists at the very least could be of interest.
Any number of the Google Labs Datasets. My personal favourite of which is the "Broadband Penetration in Europe"
The Freebase data dump which happens to include 26gb of the world’s information from the likes of Wikipedia, Freebase and a handful of other datasets.
Any number of epic datasets from Elastic Web’s Public Datasets not to be missed! This includes Wikipedia, IMDB, Stack Overflow, etc.
 

Final Pro-Tip

One thing that you may have noticed is a byproduct of providing large datasets to people is that they tend to be solid gold for linkbait. We could focus an entire post around this but if you’ve got access to great data and you’re not offering it out to your users/curious SEOs what are you thinking?! Publish the data, make it free to download, and require a link back for attribution for anyone who wants to use it- simples!

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Facebook pages are without doubt the most used ( and underused ) social media tool today. They’re easy to set up and easy to manage. For the same reason, they’re a little over done too..as all you need to set up a page for yourself is a name and five minutes of time. Today, there [...]

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9 Tips to create engaging facebook communities & pages was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

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Facebook pages are without doubt the most used ( and underused ) social media tool today. They’re easy to set up and easy to manage. For the same reason, they’re a little over done too..as all you need to set up a page for yourself is a name and five minutes of time. Today, there [...]

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9 Tips to create engaging facebook communities & pages was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

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Posted by gfiorelli1

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.

The ultimate SEO factor: the human factor.

I was lucky to attend the ProSEO Training Days by Distilled/SEOmoz in London on the 25th/26th of October. It was a wonderful occasion to see so many things recapped, that I have read in blogs, forum and chats; to learn some new things about SEO and to finally meet the people I talk with (too much?) online.

When Jen asked in a tweet if anybody was going to write a YOUmoz post about the event, I literally felt her eyes looking at me: being one of the biggest contributors to the long tail of SEOmoz maybe it was my obligation to write something about the London event.

So here I am. BUT I won’t write anything about the sessions themselves (all interesting for one reason or another). Therefore, if you are looking to read something about what Rand said regarding the Overcoming Twitter cannibalization of the Link Graph, or the Will’s tips about Sexing up your reports, better you skip this post and go elsewhere (you have just to Google "ProSEO Distilled").

Nope, I am going to write about what I firmly believe it was the biggest – even not officially affirmed – best rule for us SEOs preached at ProSEO: be human.

The Human Factor – 1: None is an Island

Wiep Knol reminded us how networking is one of three keys for obtaining links. And networking essentially means, “act like a human being”.

John Donne said once that none is an island, therefore none is unreachable and Webmasters and Influencers are human like you, which means that for sure there is something you both like and are enthusiast about.

Human factor – 2: Be enthusiastically genuine

Again, the human factor came out in the session by Caitlin Krumdieck (“Lessons from Sales”). One of her slides was urging us to be genuine, to be good listeners and passionate. Isn’t this again a call to be human? Be yourself with your clients and make them passionate about your ideas, make them believe yours ideas, as they were theirs; pick up the phone and talk to them.

And do the same with all the people who work with you: the web designers, because they can make beautiful art and be SEO respectful at the same, and the devs, because SEO can be the perfect excuse to experiment with the most interesting trends in programming (as said by Leonie Wharton and Andy Davies in “Top 10 tips Design for SEO”).

Human factor – 3: Be Overly Curious

“Humanity” as an essential factor for SEO was then evident in many of the speakers.

Let’s take Ben Hendrickson. What can make someone wanting to understand how the search engines work the way Ben does want? Human curiosity. The same curiosity that makes kids breaking things to see how they are done and – after – try to rebuild them. The same curiosity that made Newton asking why that apple fall on his head and Einstein wondering why a person sitting on a running train is perceiving things differently than another man looking at him from the station.

Curiosity killed the cat, someone between you is maybe thinking, but is curiosity what made us advance in knowledge. I know that I don’t know, Socrates said: this is the reason why we struggle to understand and to experiment, as Richard Baxter with his keyword tool (still in beta) or Martin MacDonald with his experiment about the Mayday Update.

Be human and let your curiosity free, this way you will be better SEOs and offer better solutions to you clients (or to your boss).

Human factor – 4: Creativity

You can Create demand (Rand Fishkin).

This phrase Rand said almost in a rush during his turn in the face-off against Will Chrichlow touched a sensible chord in me, and made me understand that what we were finally talking about for two days was essentially the Human Factor.

The ability to create things is probably what really distinguishes us as Humans, and to stand out in marketing it is what makes a product dominate over all the others .

And to stand out is essentially an art, in the sense of creation of beautiful or significant things. Aren’t beautiful or significant things what we as SEO call content? Content that will be the base of our inbound marketing?

The conclusion: SEO is not about Search Engines, SEO is about human beings.

Yes! It may seem a contraddiction to say that SEO is all about humans; but it is not.

In order to be better SEOs we must be able to copernically revert the way we think. When we do SEO, actually we work on how people search, wander, desire, and learn on the Internet. And that can also explain why the trend is now over the Social Signs.

Only if we SEOs will be able to think out of the box and to be outstanding, then we will be able to be those Linchpins businesses are looking for.

And this is the most important lesson I’ve learnt at ProSEO.

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