External linking doesn’t sound like it’s that difficult of a situation but for many SEOs there’s an ongoing debate about how you should do external linking on your website. This week Cyrus, our web strategist, goes over two very different methods of handling external linking on your website. While there are benefits and problems with each strategy, we want to know what method you use and why! Feel free to leave you comments below and discuss what method you use.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. I am the web strategist here at SEOmoz. Today we’re going to talk about external linking, linking to other websites. A lot of people wonder if this helps or hurts your SEO, and it has been a debate that has been going on ever since SEO started. So today we want to look at the two different schools of thought and see what we can find out.

Strategy one, let’s pretend you have a site about red boots, and there is this great resource about amazing red boots. You have to decide if you should link to it or not on your page. Some of the arguments for not linking to it . . . oh, there we go. That’s a good marker. Whiteboard Friday fail there. So, you might want to just keep your link juice internal instead of linking to that page. Keep everything within your own site so that you are not passing any value to this page because you really want to rank high for red boots. You also don’t want visitors to leave your site. You went to a lot of work to get that visitor buying those red boots on your site. Why would you want to send them someplace else? Kind of makes sense. You also don’t want to help your competition. If you link to them, you could elevate them in the rankings for these amazing red boots, and then people are never going to find you. By the same token, it might hurt your rankings. If you are linking out to all these other great sources, you might be telling Google, hey, these are better resources than my page about red boots. So you might fall down in the SERPs.

This is a school of thought. We see it a lot. We see people mention your brand and you read the article and they don’t link to you at all. They don’t link out. Some people think it is very legitimate. There is one piece of information we have that casts a little bit of doubt of whether this is a legitimate exercise or not, and that is the correlation data between external links and higher rankings. The 2011 correlation data showed that there was a 0.04 correlation between the number of external links on a page and higher rankings. Now, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but taken in aggregate with all the other 200 ranking factors, it matters. It doesn’t prove that a lot of links on your page are really going to help your rankings. But one thing it does disprove is this one – that adding external links to your page is actually going to hurt your rankings, within reason. If you don’t take this to extreme, we can pretty much cross that one out. So, that is one theory of thought.

Now the other strategy, the strategy which I think is probably a little bit more friendly strategy, is you’re a page on red boots, you have all these great resources, and you chose to link out to them without fear that it’s going to hurt your rankings or that you’re going to be helping your competitors too much. The biggest benefit in my mind of this technique is its automatic outreach. We spend a lot of time as SEOs writing emails saying, "Hey, will you link to me? I wrote this great resource." Just by putting a link out to somebody, they see that in their analytics. They see that traffic. It is kind of like tweeting about somebody. They know that you linked to them.

So, if I write an article on, actual example, SEO copywriting, and I link out to Copy Blogger because they are a great resource, Copy Blogger actually saw that I linked to them. They not only tweeted about my article, but they linked back to me in their weekly roundup. So by linking out I actually got a link back. Probably not going to happen over here. Here you might get a ton of links. Every link that you put out is actually an opportunity for outreach, and it is as simple as putting that in your editor, and, of course, adds value to your content.

If you want to be an authority on a subject, it makes it sort of look like an authority when you are referencing other materials. If you read a book, an academic book without a bibliography or citing any references, you might kind of wonder where they got their information. So it kind of helps you to look better in that respect.

Now this is controversial. It might add contextual signals to your content. Google is reading your page, and the other search engines too, and they’re trying to figure out what your page is about. If you are linking to a page around the same topic, some people suspect that may tell Google, oh yes, this page is about red boots. You can sort of think of it in the spam context. If you have a page about red boots, but you are linking to Viagra, Google’s going to say, "No, this page is not about red boots." If you are linking to a page about shoes, tons of shoes, yeah, that might help. We don’t think it is a big signal, but some people think it is significant.

The final reason that this strategy may work, you see a lot of successful SEOs do it. It appears this might be a good strategy. The thing you have to be careful about with this strategy is your anchor text. If you are trying to rank for red boots and you link out using that red boots anchor text, that is probably not going to help you. You have to be a little creative with that. So, red boots, this is a great resource, tons of shoes, colorful footwear. Those are the sort of anchor text you want to use.

I am not sure which method is right. I know I prefer this one, but a lot of people actually prefer this one. What do you chose? Do you have any thoughts about which method is better? I’d like you to share your comments in the comments below and find out what everybody thinks about this.

That’s all we have today. Thanks everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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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.

PayWithaTweet (hereby known as PWaT) is a service that enables web publishers to give visitors content in exchange for a Tweet or Facebook share. In this post, I will share my experience with PWaT, tweet and CTR data, and how you can use this tool to go viral and influence search engine results.

What is PayWithaTweet?

The creators of PWaT have made a great video explaining the concept and some of its uses:

The Experiment: Tweet for an Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet

I created an Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet during one of our Portent ‘Hack Days.’ I wanted to distribute the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet far and wide – and PayWithATweet was something I always wanted to experiment with.

The Set Up

After creating my Google Analytics Cheat Sheet, I uploaded it to WordPress and created the PWaT button.

When you use PWaT, you get to write the message that is tweeted when visitors download your file.

I did some quick keyword research (turns out "Cheat Sheet" is more popular than "Cheatsheet"). I also thought Portent’s strong brand in the internet marketing community would entice people to click through, so including Portent in the tweet was important.

I then did hashtag research: #Measure is a very popular web analytics hashtag, and I believed the #measure community would find the cheat sheet interesting and useful. So I needed to write a message that included all of these elements in only a few characters.

I set the PWaT Tweet Text to "Get the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet from Portent – #measure – http://bit.ly/mLBPht", and created a simple landing page. (My wise and generous boss Ian later added a screencap and made it better.) Then on Friday morning, I tweeted out the link, and asked some of my colleagues to do the same.

The Results

The Numbers

Because Twitter is a real-time medium, I took measurements at various times to watch the tweets spread.

I used bit.ly tracking to compile these metrics. You can see the bit.ly numbers yourself at the link’s bit.ly information page – https://bitly.com/mLBPht+. (If you see any differences between the numbers in various graphics and references in this post, it’s due to the time the numbers were taken.)

As of 5 PM on Saturday, 83 people have downloaded the cheat sheet for a tweet. There are four double tweets, and five of the tweets were from colleagues at Portent I asked to Tweet. This puts the organic Tweet count at 74 Tweets. The bit.ly link received 258 clicks, so 28.7% of the people clicking on the bit.ly decided to download the cheat sheet and Pay With a Tweet.

The landing page was probably the weakest part of the experiment. (The Kanye West reference in the first paragraph was an unsuccessful attempt at writing like Groupon.) I imagine had I created a stronger landing page and a stronger message, all of these metrics would be better. I’ll come back to lessons learned in the "insights" section.

The Search Engine Impact

Major search engines index Twitter, and these social shares appear to be a ranking factor in both social search and traditional search.

Jen Lopez of SEOmoz has shown tweets have a substantial effect on search in her well known "beginner’s guide" case study.

I was curious if we would see the same thing, so I looked at the search engine rankings of two terms – "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" and "Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet".

In Google (signed out, personalization off, but from both office and home machines), the post ranked almost immediately for "Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet." (It’s apparently the only piece of content on the web optimized for that phrase.) However the SERP for "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" was dominated by Ian’s last Google Analytics Cheat Sheet and pages linking to it.

On the first day (Friday), when the bulk of the tweets were occurring in real time, I didn’t seen ay modified conventional results. I did see some Tweets being pulled in through ‘social circle’ search functionality.

However, on Saturday afternoon, I found that the landing page was now ranking in position eight for the term "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet."

Fascinated by the result, I used the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis Tool to analyze the "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet" SERP:

By Sunday, the Cheat Sheet had received over 85 tweets. Now the page was appearing in position six for "Google Analytics Cheat Sheet."

And again, according to the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis tool, the page had the lowest domain and page authority in the SERP. The page has, to my knowledge, no inbound external links. Tweets are the page’s only signs of quality and relevance.

Neither domain authority nor page authority is high enough for the page to rank for that phrase. While it’s hard to control for personalization, I had signed out and added the "pws=0" string to the URL. I tried it on a variety of browsers – including some I don’t use – and I received the same result.

With the standard SEO disclaimer (correlation does not equal causation, what works here may not work for you, this is not science nor does it claim to be), it seems that Twitter thru PayWithaTweet can influence Google search results.

At the time of this writing, the page is not ranking in Bing for ‘Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet’ or ‘Google Analytics Cheat Sheet’. (In fact, the page isn’t indexed at all in Bing.)

Insights for Future PayWithaTweet Projects

When to Use PayWithaTweet

If you have content you can give away to a Twitter or Facebook-using audience, PWaT is a great promotional option. Virtual goods, eBooks, mp3s, or coupon codes are great things to give away.

Justin Briggs had more ideas about what to do with PWaT:

Given these changes in search engine rank, it makes sense to do a PWaT promotion around high-traffic seasonal terms. For example, if you sell Mother’s Day Flowers, a PWaT promotion for 5% off could help you rank for the highly competitive term "Mothers Days Flowers".

Keep in mind people can delete their tweet or share after they download the file. And in the case of a coupon code, there’s nothing that would stop someone from sharing a coupon code with their friends, tweeting it themselves, or submitting it to a coupon site.

As always, you’re playing with fire. Play carefully.

Start with a Big Audience

My PWaT experiment didn’t really take off until Ian tweeted it to his 7,394 followers. You need to start your PWaT with a big Twitter audience.

If you don’t have a big Twitter audience, you need to get someone that does to Tweet the initial link. This may be a good time to use ad.ly’s sponsored Tweets.

Include a Popular Hashtag in Your Tweet

I included the #measure hashtag in the PWaT message. The right hashtag gets your message in front of a large number of the right people. Use hashtags.org to find the most active hashstags in your niche.

Make a Great Landing Page

Landing pages are really important to the success of your PayWithaTweet initiative. In my experiment with PWaT, this is probably the thing I did the worst – I imagine had I improved the landing page, we could’ve gotten more than 125 tweets.

Your landing page has to entice people to download the content and share it with their friends, while not giving the piece away for free. As they say, people don’t buy the cow when they can get the milk for free.

It’s also important to find a way to show social proof – how many other people are grabbing your giveaway for a tweet. Using Twitter’s Search Widget set to grab your PWaT tweets and showing them on the landing page is a great way to do this.

PayWithaTweet Uses an iFrame – Make Sure Your Publishing Methods Supports Embedding an iFrame

The PWaT button appears in an iFrame. There’s no other way to implement it (to my knowledge). If you use a CMS that strips out iFrames (like WordPress), be prepared for this. We used the iFrame WordPress Plugin, which worked like a charm.

Use the Science of Retweets to Optimize Your Message

Social media experts (most notably Dan Zarella) have done a great deal of research on what kinds of messages get retweeted. Use this research in writing your PWaT message for maximum social reach.

• Use words and phrases like "New" "Please retweet" "How To" "Check Out", and other terms that draw more retweets
• Use Colons – People seem to like to tweets with colons over tweets with semi-colons or other punctuation
• Noon to 6 PM seem to be the golden hours for Retweeting
• Mondays and Fridays are the best days for Retweets, so launch your PWaT content on those days

Thanks for reading, and I’ll answer any questions in the comments.

(I’d also like to thank my colleagues at Portent who helped with this project – Michael for editing the cheatsheet, Anna for figuring out how to embed iFrames in WordPress, Ian, Doug, Josh, and Aaron for tweeting, and of course my bosses, Ian, Tracy, and Elizabeth, for letting me do this.)

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You’ve tamed your Twitter spam, isolated Grandma on Facebook, and finally become Mayor of the coffee shop you pretend to work at while you’re really playing Angry Birds. Then, along comes Google+, and now you’re circling people like an angry John Madden.

As search marketers, there’s value in social media – I can trace real revenue to it, and I’m not the only one. The first 30 minutes are incredibly valuable – it’s the next 7 hours that are the problem. I understand both extremes – I once spent 24 straight hours on Twitter, and I’ve quit social media cold-turkey for 30 days twice.

So, here are a few tips for adding Google+ to the mix without losing what little work-day you have left:

Mind Your Circles

When I first joined Google+, I joked that my circles looked something like this:

The visual simplicity and cute animations make the real power of circles easy to miss, and it’s something Facebook and Twitter don’t do very well (at least without 3rd-party apps). Circles are an essential way to not only manage who you’re following, but to manage your time.

When you’re short on time, you don’t have to follow what everyone is saying – focus on a core circle or two. Circles can go a lot deeper than relationships, too (and they can overlap). Consider circling people by:

• Job/Industry
• Interests
• Activity level
• Likelihood to engage
• Country or time-zone

The list goes on, but the key is to think in terms of how you can best use your time. If you log on at 2am in the US, see what your UK friends are up to. If you’re only on for 5 minutes, check the people who are interested in whatever you’re working on at that moment (for inspiration). If you really need to get a link out, see what the people most interested in that niche are up to.

Flow with the Stream

Eventually, you have to accept that you can’t keep up with everything. Google+ is just out of its wrapper, and yet 15 minutes would barely let me skim the last hour of activity, let alone the links and comments. For reference, the bar on the right is a condensed version of my unexpanded stream from just the last hour.

This is more philosophical than tactical, but you have to let it go. The real-time stream is just that – jump in, swim forward, and don’t worry too much about what’s behind you. If it’s important, it’ll get repeated.

Social media is so real-time that it can even alienate people to rewind too much. I’ve had people comment on something I said the day before on Twitter, and it completely confused me. With Google+ and Facebook, the conversation structure is easier to manage, but past a point we move on. Right or wrong, that’s the nature of the beast.

Engage Your Base

This tip can tie into your circles, but it applies to any social media platform. When you’re short on time, engage the people most likely to reply or reciprocate. They may be your friends, your fans, or just generous personalities who you happen to get along with.

This isn’t about opportunism – it’s about relevance. If you’ve only got 15 minutes (which is probably split into 5-minute chunks), check in on the people whose content and interaction you value. You have to pick and choose – 5 minutes will barely get you through one hilarious cat video and half the comments.

Be Highly Visible

Ultimately, social media is all about perception. You don’t have to be on it all day – you just want to seem like you’re always nearby (but not too nearby, because then you’re obviously goofing off).

Back in graduate school, I had a roommate who was always in his office – he regularly got there at 8am, closed the door, and didn’t come out until 8pm. Meanwhile, I liked a little variety, so I’d work at home, in the lab, and in my office. In between, I roamed the halls and talked to a lot of people. Granted, I also liked to procrastinate, but I valued the social aspect of school.

One day, someone commented that I was always around, but they never saw my roommate. Here he was putting in 12 hours days in the office, while I usually spent 4-6 hours/day in the office or lab. Was it fair? No, but it taught me an important lesson – perception is everything.

Being visible in social media is easy – engage. In fact, make the first 5 minutes of your 15 minutes all about engagement. Reply to people, [+1] their posts, and generally make yourself seen. Lurkers die lonely.

Give First, Then Ask

So, you’ve spent the first 5 minutes making your presence known. The next 5 minutes, in my opinion, should be all about giving. Share other people’s posts and links, and [+1] what you like. If you run out of time, that’s fine. Giving back builds up dividends, and you need to do it every day. That way, when it’s your turn to share a link, you’ve already got friends lined up.

There are a lot of ways to handle social media, and I don’t think any single style is right, but I do think that virtually everyone should try to give a lot more than they take. This isn’t just altruism – reciprocity is a very powerful thing.

Bonus Tip: Try Trunk.ly

We’re desperately afraid to miss anything on social media. Practically speaking, I’ve found that fear overblown – most things can be missed, and the important stuff will keep appearing in your stream. For tracking your links, though, I highly recommend Trunk.ly. It not only captures the links you post on Twitter and Facebook, but your friends’ links as well:

Yes, that is a link to a Smurfberry Crunch Ad from 1982 – STOP JUDGING ME! The best thing about Trunk.ly is that it aggregates recent links from your friends. While it doesn’t support Google+ yet, I expect it to soon. If anyone knows of similar tools that do support Google+, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Double Bonus Fun!

This probably has no value other than general mischief-making, but I made a Photoshop version of the Google Circle that you can easily edit (or possibly even convert into other shapes). It was created in Adobe CS5 for Windows, but hopefully it’s readable by other versions. You can use it to create such useful diagrams as:

I honestly have no idea how this can be used for good, but I made it and so I thought I’d share. Here’s the link to download the Google+ Circle Photoshop file (it’s only 100KB).

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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.

OK, so I’ve worked-on or managed well over 100 SEO campaigns over the last few years and a common trend I’ve noticed is that many small business clients don’t really understand how choosing the right keywords affects and defines an SEO campaign and what it takes to deliver results.

Let us start off with an example. Say you’re a landscaping company in Central Jersey where the bulk of your business comes from Landscape Construction (walls, patios, driveways, etc). What keywords do you want to rank for?

Landscaping can cover many things: Landscaping, Landscaper, Landscapers, Landscape Design, Landscape Construction, Landscape Maintenance, Lawn Care, Plantings (Bushes/Shrub/Trees/Flowers), Nurseries, Hardscapes (Patios/Pool Decks/Driveways/Walkways/Stairs/Walls), Water Features/Fountains, Recreation (Golf green/tee/Bocce/Horseshoes/etc), Drainage, and on and on and on.

Now, unless you have a huge budget and a team of people working for you, it’s unlikely that you can try to rank for all of these terms. And just because your company can do all them, doesn’t mean you need to rank for all of them if you specialize in a particular area. Since each of these words are not geo-targeted with a location (such as New Jersey Landscaper) it means you are searching nationally. Doing a search in Google for Landscapers brought back 11,000,000 search results. That’s 11 million web pages you have to compete with.

Can it be done? Yes, but there are factors you have to consider if you expect your SEO to deliver this.

• There are 11 million web pages to compete with.
• It’s likely that the top ranking sites are optimizing their sites in some way or another.
• The sites that are already ranking probably have had a website for a long time now.
• They’ve probably started optimizing long before you did, so they have a head start.
• They are likely known brands in the industry and will get preference in national searches.
• You’re competing verse more than just landscaping companies. This may include How-To sites, manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers, landscape architects, home goods companies, and more.
• They probably have tons of natural links. That means people are linking to them without being asked.
• A ton of natural links means they have great link diversity.
• These sites are usually very large with a ton of content. Optimized or not, it still counts.
• They may be trusted sources, or have gained links from trusted sources (such as CNN, Wikipedia, and the Library of Congress).

So, before you even choose your keyword term, you should decide on your target area. It can be a town, city, county, region, state, or another geographic name. By geo-targeting your keyword term with a location you narrow down your customer base to who is likely to buy from you and decrease the number of competitors to deal with. This ultimately means faster results and lower costs.

Keyword Research

Let’s look at some keyword research to get an idea of what we’re in for. Right now I just want to show how different keywords terms and different locations affect the difficulty of the SEO campaign. Google provides the first three columns of results. The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool provides the difficulty percentages.

NOTE: Google Search Results gives the total search results, intitle and inanchor gives the search results with keywords in the titles and anchor text and shows your likely competition. SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Score shows the competitiveness of the keyword.

You can see by this information that Landscapers get more search results and is more competitive than Landscape Construction. Even though landscape construction gets fewer search results, it would likely provide better traffic results and conversion rates since it is more specific to what our example company does, which is landscape construction.

Once you add on "NJ" you really cut down on ‘search noise’ and have a better idea of who your audience is. It also decreases the difficulty by a good amount. If you swap "NJ" for "Somerset County" in NJ, you lower the difficulty again. Each time you narrow down your focus you can expect faster results and lower costs.

A keyword difficulty percentage of 26-50 means it’s moderately competitive. A keyword difficulty percentage over 50 means it’s highly competitive. The higher the percentage and more competitive the keyword, the more it is going to cost and will take to achieve results. Although they can provide a lot of traffic to your website when you rank high for those keywords, getting there is a challenge and will take some time. You will have to wait much longer before you see a return on investment (ROI). Many small businesses don’t really have time to wait for large SEO campaigns to develop. It’s a better strategy start with a smaller SEO campaign and upgrade as you go.

It’s a good idea to choose one competitive keyword and then try to rank well for less competitive keywords related to that category and geography.

The Benefits of Starting Small

It’s not uncommon for a client to say, "I don’t want to limit my business to a specific area." SEO people understand this and try to accommodate where possible, but it’s not always practical. Here are issues you have to deal with if you choose too large an area:

• It will take longer to see results
• It will take longer for the client to get a return on investment (ROI)
• You’ll have less overall web visibility

You will see better results if you start by ranking locally and then expand to more competitive markets. Begin by ranking well for your town, then County, then Central Jersey. Once you rank well for Central Jersey it’s much easier to gain rankings for NJ than if you started with NJ initially. This enables you to keep your strong search results for your less competitive (and more localized) keywords providing you more reach and web visibility.

If you choose to start statewide first you won’t rank as well (or at all) for all those local searches. And if most people who search for your product or service are searching on a local level, such as they do with landscaping, you may be missing out on high quality leads.

The same goes for the keyword term itself. By optimizing for less competitive, but similar terms (landscape stone wall construction, landscape construction water drainage, etc), you make it easier to rank for the more difficult term landscape construction.

Consider this analogy: SEO is like preparing for a marathon. You need to compete in shorter races before you can compete in the marathon. It takes time to build these campaigns. It may take months; it may take years.

Switching Keyword Terms

When you start an SEO campaign, it’s important that you know what you want to rank for. Choose a keyword term that is specific to your business. If you start an SEO campaign with one keyword term in mind, and then change your term to something different, you may be wasting all the effort and money that was spent on your campaign already.

Take our landscape construction company. If, in six months, they tell you that they mostly do landscape maintenance rather than landscape construction and want to change the focus of the campaign, it will have wasted much of your previous efforts. Here’s why:

• The set of keywords will be different, so your SEO person will have to do all new keyword research.
• Your website has been optimized for "landscape construction" when it should have been optimized for "landscape maintenance".
• Any content written for landscape construction may be useless. All new content will have to reordered and rewritten.
• Site architecture and hierarchy may have to be changed.
• All the internal and external links that were built are using the wrong anchors.
• Website analytics and traffic data may be meaningless.

Each of these is time consuming and costly. Whatever results you achieved in those six months will likely take another six months to achieve with the new set of keywords, if their difficultly is equivalent. For keywords that are more competitive it will take even longer to see similar results. Looking at the numbers below, that is exactly the case for landscaping company. Landscape maintenance is much more competitive on the state and national level than landscape construction.

NOTE: Google Search Results gives the total search results, intitle and inanchor gives the search results with keywords in the titles and anchor text and shows your likely competition. SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Score shows the competitiveness of the keyword.

Changing Geography

Any affects changing your keyword terms might have is basically the same affects you can expect if you changed your geography qualifier. The affects will be even more dramatic if the new geography is more difficult.

If you choose a less competitive (and a more localized) geography, the issues are easier to overcome, depending on how the SEO campaign was being executed. Changing NJ to Somerset County NJ will take the work you’ve already did for NJ and it count towards Somerset County NJ. From that point on it shouldn’t take long to see good results because there has already been work done that is relative to the first campaign (although not exactly the same) and it is less competitive. The biggest downfall to this is that you waited six months before you got on track, so your return on investment (ROI) has been delayed.

If you change from NJ to NY, it could be considered a whole different campaign, especially if the new geography is more difficult to rank for. Remember, changing your geography is the same as changing your keyword term.

The only time you should really change your set of keywords is if you realized that you chose the wrong keywords from the start. It makes no sense staying with something because the rankings and traffic are good, but it doesn’t provide you with any increased business or it brings the wrong type of customer to your website. Only you can tell your SEO person what your business does specifically and what your goals are. Once they have that information they can research the right keywords and work on your campaign. This is why knowing what your business does and what you want to get out of SEO is so important; it will help you choose the correct keywords and geography at the start. Don’t waste time and money trying to figure it out.

Adding another Keyword Term or Geography

Ok, so you’ve had an SEO campaign running for about a year and it’s showing results for Landscape Construction NJ and other terms like Landscape Contractor NJ,and showing up in local search results as well. Now that that’s done, you can move onto other words. Wait… What? DONE? No, it’s not done.

Without continuing an active SEO campaign you allow your competitors to catch up and overtake your search results. This, along with a drop off of relative links being indexed by search engines can work against you. Adding a different set of keyword terms to your list without upgrading and spending more for SEO means that you’re splitting the attention of your SEO person.

A new set of keywords means new research, re-optimizing your website to include the new keywords, new content and new pages, and many more links. If the new keywords are different enough, it could take longer to see the same type of results you saw earlier, especially if the difficultly is equivalent. This is because you’ve divided up your SEO person’s time between the old set of keywords and the new set of keywords.

The proper way to accomplish this is to upgrade your plan to include the new set of keywords. This way your SEO person can increase the amount of time spent working on your campaign. They can spend the proper amount of time researching, strategizing, and executing your new set of keywords while increasing your reach and web visibility for your initial set of keywords.

Conclusion

Make sure you have the right expectations of what SEO can provide for you. There is no doubt that SEO is a long-term investment that will pay for itself and more over its lifetime. Don’t waste time or money SEOing for the wrong keywords; know you business and what your goals are. Be realistic about the geographies you are trying to rank for. Popular areas will be more competitive; expect to pay higher prices for these competitive SEO campaigns. It shouldn’t take longer than a month to see improvements, but SEO takes time. The harder the campaign it, the longer it will be before you get a return on your investment.

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Before SEOmoz was a business, it was a blog. In fact, blogging is at the heart of everything this company stands for. A blog is so much more than a pageview generator. It speaks in your voice, provides a gateway to your community, acts as your moral center and facilitates communication with the rest of the world.

And done right, it’s an unbeatable marketing tool.

As Blogpulse reports over 165 million identified blogs on the internet, it’s safe to say that very few are "done right." I asked my wife, a terrific graphic designer, if she would create an infographic combining SEO and blog design. You probably know someone with a blog who can benefit from this information. Bookmark it and use it as a reference. It presents classic fundamentals as well as tips based on cutting edge research.

 Embed this image:

<div style="width:604px;"><div><a target="_blank" href="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/fj56nh8tijrmp6cg87fe.jpg" ><img width="600" height="988" alt="Blog Design for Killer SEO Infographic" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/DesignBlogForKillerSEO_600.jpg" style="border: #cccccc 1px solid; padding: 1px;" /></a></div><div style="text-align:right; font-size:11px; margin-right: 5px;">Created by <a href="http://www.shepardportfolio.com/" >Dawn Shepard</a> for <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/blog-design-for-seo" >SEOmoz</a></div></div>

1. Beauty Counts

With all due respect to Arngren.net, the overall design of your site is the first thing visitors see and it significantly influences bounce rate, pageviews and conversions. People who get scared by the idea of professional design often pay the price with a fast, cheap and mass-produced layout.

Professional design doesn’t have to include the word expensive. For a "trifecta" of quality inexpensive design, I often use the following:

• A professional template from ThemeForrest. Price: $10-35
• Contract a logo from 99designs. Price: $295
• Customize your colors with ideas from Adobe’s Kuler. Price: Free

Whatever design resource you choose, the goal is to set yourself apart while enticing your visitors to stay.

2. Search Box

It should go without saying that every site needs a prominent search box. Not only does it provide a better experience for your visitors, but you can also mine the data for keyword discovery and user behavior.

Your search box can be the most valuable element of your layout.

Most blogging platforms come pre-equipped with a search box function. Google Custom Search is a stellar option used by SEOmoz.

3. RSS is Alive

Every time a major website kills off its RSS feed, the blogosphere writes its obituary. In truth, adoption of RSS feeds has expanded every year, as shown by these surprising statistics from BuiltWith.com.

RSS feeds not only encourage repeat visits, but the visitors are likely your best converters, brand evangelists, and self-motivated link builders.

4. Breadcrumbs

Maybe because we call them “crumbs,” people forget how important they are. Breadcrumbs perform several essential functions including:

• Helping users to navigate
• Helping Search Engines to Categorize Content
• Increasing Crawling and Indexation

If you’re stuck for breadcrumb ideas that don’t suck, check out these ideas for inspiration..

5. Navigation

Many development meetings and major wars have been fought over the “right” way to structure a website’s information architecture through navigation. Solve the problem by keeping it simple with these two basic rules for useful and optimized navigation.

• Strive for a flat site architecture by minimizing the number of “clicks” it takes to reach your content.

• Remember that almost any dropdown or flyout navigation requiring JavaScript or other complex programming can be substituted with a simple CSS substitution. Check out Stu Nicholls huge list of CSS navigation menus for inspiration.

Although Google has gotten better at crawling Javascript links, classic HTML/CSS links work most consistently for both users and passing link juice. 

6. Images

One of the things I’ve noticed about the recent Google Panda updates is that many of the sites hardest hit contain tons of auto-generated content that lack unique images. Think EzineArticles or consider this screenshot from wiseGeek about Red Pandas. 

The stock image on the left appears on several other pages across the site, isn’t contained within the main body of text, isn’t topical and contains no alt text.

Danny Dover made a great video worth checking out about optimizing images. The best thing you can do is include rich media every chance you get.

7. Keep It Above the Fold

StatCounter Global Stats reports that the average browser height is 768 pixels. By placing your best content above this line, you ensure visitors see it without scrolling and increase the chance that search engines will crawl both your content and links. We’ve seen evidence that Google places less emphasis on content further down the page and sometimes seems to ignore it altogether.

Test whether content falls above the 768 pixel height using this this tool from Google Labs.

8. Link to Your Best Content

Take a look at any given page on Wikipedia. Although I wouldn’t recommend going to this extreme, Wikipedia is master of internal linking. Too often people write brilliant blog posts, then fail to ever link to it again. Eventually the post falls out of visibility as it becomes lost in a backlog of archives.

The best practice is to place links within the body of your text when it is relevant and helpful to the reader. Other, somewhat less effective ways to link to your best content include:

• Popular Posts Widgets
• Tag Clouds
• Category Pages

9. Don’t Overdo Links

Links may be good, but too many dilute link juice and may cause crawling issues. Without sufficient PageRank, Google only crawls so many links per page. How many is too many? It varies, but 100 is a good rule of thumb as explained here by Dr. Pete.

If you do have a lot of links, place your important ones in the body of text. These carry more weight, and search engines may devalue links found in the header, sidebar and footer.

10. Watch Your Ad Space

One of the most interesting findings from the 2011 Ranking Factors was the negative correlation between rankings and Google AdSense metrics. This in itself isn’t proof that ad spaces hurt your rankings, but couple this with the fact that a large number of sites hit by the recent Google Panda updates contained a large number of prominent ads above the fold, and you begin to see the damaging potential if overdone.

Including ads on your blog is fine and even encouraged as the most legitimate way to monetize your content. Regardless, don’t let ads overshadow your original content in either placement or raw pixel area.

11. Encourage Comments

At SEOmoz, we love comments! They provide one of the best, most prolific forms of UGC (User Generated Content) that we know of. Content generated by comments not only helps you to rank for long tail keyword traffic, but websites with lots of user interaction tend to perform better with search engines.

A blog without comments is just plain lonely and sad.

12. Sharing for Everyone

The statistics are staggering. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook users share 4 billion pieces of digital content everyday on Facebook. This includes photos, videos, blog posts and news stories.

Sharing now produces 10% of all Internet traffic. While way behind search, this number continues to grow. New services like Google+ only add to the mix. Test different locations on your blog to find where sharing buttons make the most sense. Don’t neglect them as the landscape changes fast.

13. Test for Speed

There’s nothing worse than a blog that loads agonizingly slow. A recent study by Geoff Kenyon showed average page load speed to be 2.9 seconds and his findings appear right on the money. Page load times not only affect user experience, but slow sites can see a rankings dip as well.

Watch this video to see how Wikipedia loads compared to Amazon. Can your site beat these times?

Created by Webpagetest.org 

Unless you have the Domain Authority of Amazon, take steps to optimize your site for speed.

14. Crawl and Validate

Once your site is built, you’ll be amazed at how many errors lurk unseen beneath the surface.

“No matter how perfect you or your developers are, there’s always problems at launch – broken links, improper redirects, missing titles, pages lacking rel=canonical tags… files blocked by robots.txt, etc.”
                                          -Rand Fishkin from Launching a New Website

Use free tools like Xenu’s Link Sleuth or paid applications like the SEOmoz Web App to check for common SEO problems. Be sure to test your site in different browsers using services such as the Adobe Browser Lab or Browser Shots.

15. Pick a Powerhouse Platform

You’ll find a lot of these tips will be a lot easier to implement by choosing the blogging software and platform most appropriate to your needs. While services such as Blogger and Blogspot have fallen out of fashion, other platforms are constantly innovating. Some of our most reliable and recommended include:

• WordPress
• Posterous
• Tumblr

The infographic above contains a complete list of recommended platforms, along with the domain authority of each one.

Nothing in the world beats the satisfaction of a successful blog. These are only a few of the more important ways to optimize your platform and experience. Feel free to share your best tips in the comments below and let’s get blogging!

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When I started in the SEO field (circa 2003), the job responsibilities weren’t easy, but the list was relatively small. Over the next 5 years, those responsibilities increased, but it was primarily in tactical and knowledge sorts of ways. A 2003 vs. 2008 rundown might look something like:

(Notes on image above: There’s some over-simplification in this list, and some items cross the artificial 2003 barrier a bit)

The last 2.5 years, however, have made for some fairly substantive changes. We’re facing large-scale, industry-shifting trends that have upset the classic model for search engine optimization, including:

• Google’s Vince update and others like it where search engines are biasing toward brands over smaller, lesser-known sites.
• Panda and the focus on user behavior, trust and authority of sites based on their look/feel/content style/etc. has changed what it means to do SEO, just as the Florida update did at the end of 2003.
• The shift in web user behavior toward social media – more than 20% of our time spent online is spent on social.
• Fragmentation of the social media market: LinkedIn just passed MySpace to become the #2 social network in the US, and Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, StumbleUpon (and soon, Google+, IMO) all have 10million+ active users. FourSquare also just passed that mark.
• The powerful increase in content creation as a marketing tool for businesses. 57% of companies in Hubspot’s recent survey run an active blog!
• An overwhelming increase in mobile and, thus, local search/web usage leads to portals like Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Citysearch, UrbanSpoon, FourSquare, etc. offering massive potential value to local businesses and service providers.
• The recession in 2008 caused a massive change in how businesses think about employment – human resources are nearly the last thing companies will add to their costs, and while that’s generating amazing profits, it’s having a rough impact on employment. As a part of this trend, SEOs have been asked to shoulder many new and heavy burdens.

Thus, we’re faced with a picture where the responsibilities of SEOs looks more like this:

(Note: Some of these are due to changes in SEO itself, and others due to the additional expectations placed on those performing SEO)

If you’re in the SEO field, this shift is both a positive and a negative. If you can keep up with the workload, manage all the metrics, reporting, data and platforms AND perform effectively in all of these spheres, you’re likely able to charge outsized fees (or earn a much higher salary). If you remain tactical and niche, you’re either going to be undervalued or you’ll need to find ways to make that specialization and the ROI you can earn visible to your clients/managers.

The job of an "SEO" is so much more than what we think of and talk about as the basics of classic "Search Engine Optimization" that it almost feels as though we deserve a new title… and probably a raise

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Google announced the +1 button in March much to the enthusiasm and confusion of webmasters and SEOs the world over. "What’s the point?", people asked. "Why should I +1 a site? Should I implement it on my site?"

It seems the answer now is clear, with the launch of the Google+ "social experiment" last week that has kept me from getting work done as Google continues innovating and brilliantly drawing me back to Plus everytime that little notification indicator turns red.

I’m not here to talk about that though, because we’ve put together a bit of data for you today about +1 integration and social sharing statistics. This post originally was conceived by Tom Critchlow and I before Google+ was launched, so it has gone through some iterations.

We wanted to get outside of our typical SEO circles though and see how the general public is adopting the button. To keep things interesting, I also gathered some well-trafficked SEO sites and their social numbers. What I have done is gathered the Technorati Top 100 sites and their RSS feeds. Then I pulled their 20 most recent blog posts (both before and after Plus was announced) and grabbed their +1, Twitter, and Facebook share data thanks to an awesome script by Tom Anthony.

The data got interesting pretty quick. Here are our findings.

Technorati Top 100 Stats

Since we were interested to find the rate of +1 adoption by the Technorati Top 100, we pulled the numbers before Google+ was launched and after. I removed the Gawker sites since their RSS feed is all-encompassing and skewed the numbers terribly. Here are the numbers for the other 95 Technorati sites:

The numbers changed thus: Pre Google+, only 22 had implemented the +1 button. After the launch of Google+, that number increased to 25. 22 of the sites had +1s, but 8 of those sites did not have the +1 button implemented! These were predominately technology sites, which is no surprise, but also two LA Times blogs (The Opinionator and L.A. NOW) as well as entertainment site TMZ. Takeaway: If you own or have a client who owns a technology, opinion, or entertainment site, you should implement the +1 button.

Average +1s per article, Pre and Post Plus Launch

As you can see, the average number of +1s per article for the Top 100 almost doubled. The number of +1s per SEO article also increased by about 30%. It is not surprising that SEO sites have more +1s than the Technorati Top 100 on average, but the increase is especially interesting given the next two charts.

Average Facebook Shares per Article and Ratio of Plus to FB Shares

Here are the average shares from the Technorati sites as well as SEO sites:

We must note that the Facebook share numbers went down for the Technorati sites, but increased for the SEO sites. One possible explanation for the SEO sites is that SEOs were sharing Google+ news on Facebook, but this is simply a hunch and not proven. Here is the most interesting statistic I found, the ratio of +1s to Facebook shares on the Technorati sites:

The number was cut almost in half. Perhaps we could guess preliminarily that the launch of Google+ has adversely affected the amount of information shared on Facebook? With the rise of the number of +1s and the decrease in Facebook shares, as shown by the last graph, I think this could be a safe assumption, at least with this limited data set. This graph might also support this hypothesis:

This graph shows that before Google+ was launched, there were 2 Facebook shares for every tweet given to articles on the Technorati Top 100. Post Google+ the ratio is almost even, with tweets being more prevalent than Facebook shares!

What do we do with this data now?

There are certainly some takeaways from the data presented. There are certain niches where it makes sense for us as SEOs to encourage our clients to implement certain sharing features. On other sites, especially in dodgier or more regulated industries, social share buttons do not make as much sense. One of the most interesting bits of information that came out of the data was the number of sites that have +1s, but do not have the button implemented on their site.

• 10 Technorati sites without the button have +1s; and
• all of the SEO sites I looked at have +1s, even though only 2/3 have implemented the button.

Based off these discoveries, I’d recommend that if you have an SEO site, it should have a +1 button. Even if +1s do not count for rankings at this point, they are displayed in the SERPs and therefore probably help with click-through rates. If +1s are used for rankings in the future, which I am not convinced of but still remains a possibility, then you will be one step ahead of the curve. Also, if you or a client has a site in one of these niches, you should probably have a +1 button on your site:

• Technology
• Opinion (Political or other)
• Celebrity gossip

This discovery is also interesting because it means that people +1d these from the SERPs, which is something we all wondered how we would do, and more importantly if people would do it. It appears that people do. I think this discovery reinforces that we as webmasters/SEOs (we are often both, after all) need to find ways to track social engagement around our sites. If we see engagement, we need to encourage it. Google has recently helped us accomplish this goal by adding +1 tracking to Analytics.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Oh, and you can Follow @dohertyjf if you want.

Happy Optimizing!

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 A site can be a lot like a mullet: business in front, party in the back. How do you muss it all up and keep a site in style? Any given website naturally attracts a broad set of visitors, and herding that diverse audience onto the right pages is a huge undertaking (as you know, it’s something to consider when doing site infrastructure SEO, etc.). This funneling gets even more difficult when there are some pages of a site that are pure linkbait, completely divorced from relevance to the rest of the site. This week, Rand discusses site infrastructure – how and when to homogenize a site, and when to keep things separated. Let us know your thoughts and strategies in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about mixing your viral content with your business content. Now, what we mean by this is really you have some content on your website that is primarily meant for your business, for your customers, for people who are researching your products or your services, and then you have this other content on your website that is often more marketing focused. It is designed to drive new traffic, to get links in, to get social shares, to have all these good things happen around your website. That’s a big part of what content marketing and all of organic and inbound marketing is about.

So, I want you to imagine that you are this guy – Mr. Pest Control. Now, Mr. Pest Control has a great variety. He offers services, he has products. You can buy little bug traps from him. You can call him up and he will come to your place of business or residence and help you with your bug problems. Mr. Pest Control is a pretty awesome guy, and he has a great website. But he is trying to decide, boy, you know, I have these two kinds of content. I have this content, in orange here, the Bug Catcher 3X7B, which is a phenomenal bug catcher. I just scratched that bug. Let’s just scratch him again. See, we’re trying to eliminate bugs. You can see it is a square box with four prongs, so that must do a great job of catching bugs. My illustrations aside, this content is really designed for like, "Oh, I am looking to learn about this product. I want to see how this service works." It is customer focused. It is not the kind of thing that is usually going to generate a lot of links. Yeah, someone might find that page and hopefully he has done a great job of making it a very compelling page. It has good pictures and images, better than the ones I have done here, good content. So, people might link to it.

But what he does have is things like, oh, you know, I am running this blog and I write about things that are interesting to me as a pest control guy, including things like Top 10 Cities with Bad Bug Problems in Hotels. There are hotels, there are some bugs, and they are invading the hotel. It’s kind of adorable. My illustrations, you know, they get the point across. These two buildings don’t have any windows. That’s a little sad. Maybe they’re, I don’t know, penitentiaries or something.

But, in any case, this type of content and this type of content are really two separate things. So, Mr. Pest Control might think to himself, oh, I know what I am going to do. I am going to have two different websites, or I am going to have a different design. I will just do a WordPress installation and throw them on there. Mixing the two in smart ways is a hard thing to do, and a lot of people get it wrong. That is why this Whiteboard Friday is here to help.

So some less ideal things that you can do, some things that I would really recommend or bias against. Separate subdomains or separate domains. If he goes with blog.MrPest.com, let’s say MrPest.com is his domain, eh, not great. I would kind of tell Mr. Pest, "If you can, get it over there to that subfolder." Mr. Pest’s blog? No. Just out. One of the things that people do is they think to themselves, well, you know, it is important to get external links. So if I have this separate domain, I will just build up the link authority to Mr. Pest’s blog.com, and then all I have to do is link from MrPestBlog to MrPest, and that will pass all my link juice. What they forget is that does not give you a whole lot of domain diversity, right? I don’t want to have a situation where I have one domain with lots of other links pointing to it and then that’s the only link to my main site. That’s a terrible idea. This is not going to earn you rankings. It’s not going to get you the traffic you want. All the good metrics and signals are going to exist on this site, not this one. That sucks. You don’t want that. Same story with separate design and navigation. If the orange content, which remember is our business content here, has, oh, you know, there is the left side bar and it has this nice bug logo across the top, but then you get to the blog and it’s a different logo or a different layout and different navigation style and the blog content sits in here. It is really off putting. The problem is that people will start to feel like, "Oh, I like the blog, but I don’t like this business content." When they switch context between the two, either way, business customers would come over and look at the blog or blog people who come over and look at the business content, it is not compelling in a branding sort of style to suggest to them, "Hey, I am in the same place. I am on the same site. It is written with the same voice. It is the same people. I can trust it. If I enjoy the blog, I am going to like the business content. If I like the business content, the blog might be interesting for me." You want to cross-pollinate and really have one site, not these two separate systems.

Finally, obviously manipulative cross-linking. So many times I see this where people are like, "Oh, I’ve got my blog, so I am just going to pepper in these anchor text rich links here and here, and they are going to point back over to these pages on the business side." No. What are you thinking? And it is always one way, right? It always points from the viral-type of content over to the business content. This (A) it is obvious to Google. It is obvious to users what you are trying to do. People are going to like your blog less, which defeats the purpose of having it in a lot of ways. People are not going to be coming over to the business content from there. Nobody clicks these links and really follows them unless they are hyper relevant and high quality, in which case maybe they should exist for some reason. So, as an example, like, oh, in the Top 10 Cities with Bad Bugs Hotel, I will talk about the fact that the Waldorf Astoria in New York has eliminated their bug problem and maybe in parenthesis note, "Thanks in part at least to our 3X7B," shameless plug. It’s sort of cute. It is appropriate. It makes sense. You’re recognizing that this nice hotel actually did really use their product. That’s cool. That’s a fine way to do it. But to have a list of anchor text rich links on every site on every page linking over to the pages, you’re trying to push too hard and you’re clearly manipulating for SEO purposes, not to help users.

So, let’s talk about some good things to do. Do you see how I made that switch, Casey? Are you proud of me? Aw, he’s so proud, because normally I might go like this and then I get off the screen, and it is terrible. The mechanics behind Whiteboard Friday are remarkable.

So, more ideal kinds of things. Keep it on the same domain. Use subfolders. MrPest.com/blog. Awesome. Great. Good job. You could go with MrPest.com/articles if they are less frequent. MrPest.com/resources if you’ve got other content. MrPest.com/marketplace, if you’ve got some postings that other people can submit content to and there are different participants in that realm. Q&A, right? Whatever kinds of content you’ve got, it’s fine. I would really recommend the subfolder. Same design with a well integrated UI so that when I am going across, I am not getting the sense, as a human being, not just as a search engine, right, we’re not just optimizing for search engines. Remember the search engines are trying to achieve what humans want. So we have to make it good for humans, because search engines are getting so sophisticated that it is not enough to just optimize for the crawler.

Same voice. You want that brand consistency. If I feel like, "Man, I really, really enjoyed this article. You know, this content in here was just phenomenal. But I went over here and read the Bug Catcher 3X7B, and where was that humor? Where was that good-natured, friendly openness that I felt when I read this article?" Or on the other side, "Where was that sort of brilliant snarkiness that this article brings? It is nowhere in there. It is like it is completely different." Meld those two voices. This doesn’t have to feel exactly like it, but it shouldn’t feel like a different company wrote the two pieces of content. That’s when you are going to get into branding problems and cross brand issues.

Link across intelligently. By intelligently, I don’t just mean the examples I was talking about before where, oh, okay, this hotel mentions the 3X7B, so I am going to link over there. But I mean link both ways. If this article is saying, "Hey this is something used by some of the world’s finest hotels," that might be a link that points over to the blog post and gets people out of the pure context out of, like, oh, okay, I am just buying and shopping, but oh, cool, they have this content that kind of engages me, entertains me, and educates me. Building that trust with your audience, my god, that’s so much more effective at selling whatever you are trying to sell or capturing an email address or improving the browse rate, getting people to look at more pages. Whatever your goal is, that consistency is going to make a big, big difference.

One of the last recommendations I’ve got is to not just stick to business content and blog content. Hopefully, you can see down here. So, the business content, these pages in orange and the blog content are great. But if you’re going to actually mix it up a little bit and have some of that evergreen content as well, things like a permanent resource on, hey, this is the how to for DIY basement elimination of bugs or how to check for bedbugs in hotel rooms. Here is the step-by-step process with video, pictures, images, graphics, that kind of stuff. Those evergreen resources that sit across that also earn inbound links that show the search engines and show the rest of your audience, hey, it’s not just the blog that’s good here. They have some legitimate evergreen content, some product content. Hopefully, you have a few things that people are really interested in. Maybe you have some super cool new invention or you have a video where you literally take apart a bug trap and you show people how it works. Fun stuff like this, so that people aren’t just collecting and linking to one part of your site. You don’t want to create that bias of we have an information site and we have a blog. Even in the sense of where people go and what people link to, not just in the sense of where it is located on the domain.

All right, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am looking forward to some great comments and questions. If you have sites that have that separation between informational and blog content and you’ve got questions about how we can help out or how we might optimize those, please feel free to put them in the comments. Look forward to reading them. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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As you may have heard, Google recently launched a new feature called Search by Image. While experimenting with the feature, I identified three scenarios where search by image has a distinct advantage over traditional approaches for finding link opportunities.

First, some background. To explain it simply, you can now use images (either a URL of an image, or one you upload) as your search term. The goal is to point you to websites that are related to and/or contain information about the image. More background can be found at the Google blog.

1. Get Background on Industry Influencers and Linkerati

As Rand often discusses, identifying people’s interests and using them to create connections are a great way to get on influential people’s radar. If done right, this will also result in exposure and links.

Some of the most influential people in the SEO space are also the best at personal branding. Ross Hudgens recently wrote a YOUmoz post on how to make your brand more consistent on and offline. Ross is someone who I’ve been reading and been influenced by a lot lately, and he’s also very consistent about using the same picture of himself, so I figured I’d use him for our first example.

When I tested the new Google Search By Image feature using his profile picture, I found many of the image results are attached to comments Ross has left:

Searching by Image, I quickly learned that Ross is active on several blogs about personal philosophy and self improvement. This is something I could use to connect with him on in the future.

Search By Image offers a distinct advantage because it provides a more filtered and targeted result set than simply wading through the backlink profile on RossHudgens.com.  

2. Identify Link Opportunities by Searching for Popular Guest Posters  

In the SEO community, Ann Smarty is the person who is the most synonymous with guest posting. Not just because of her site MyBlogGuest.com, but also because she’s a prolific guest poster herself. Ann has many projects she promotes in addition to My Blog Guest, including ViralMom.com and SexySocialMedia.com.

Ann’s also someone who’s great at maintaining a consistent personal brand, so this makes searching by her profile image a great place to look for guest post opportunities:

This screenshot shows a couple different blogs that Ann has guest posted on that we could investigate and potentially approach about guest blogging there as well. And that’s just scratching the surface!

Since Ann has multiple websites she promotes, Search by Image again provides an advantage over wading through backlink profiles because it allows us to find guest post opportunities that link to different sites.

3. Find Coverage That Didn’t Result in a Link

Another way you can use Search By Image is to mine for press coverage and participation in offline activities that didn’t result in a link. Searching by brand logos and "stock" CEO photos are a great way to find pages where a company or employee is getting highlighted.

For this example, I looked at the Fortune 500 and tried to pick a company in an industry that didn’t seem too social or internet savvy, but would probably have a traditional PR presence. I went with Caterpillar and discovered the current CEO is Douglas Oberhelman. A quick (traditional) image search showed one photo that appeared again and again, so I figured that would be the best one to use to Search By Image.

My search resulted in a number of places that an SEO at Caterpillar could ask to get a link from. The two I pointed out above are places Mr. Oberhelman has spoken, which should be on the easier side to get links from given the existing relationship. In fact, the page that highlights him as conference chair has "www.caterpillar.com" with blue text and underlined, but it isn’t a working link!

Search by Image has a distinct advantage over other research tools because it can identify significant coverage of your client or company that doesn’t already include a link.

Bonus reason #4: Visually Similar Images Results Can Be Pretty Funny  

Humor is always a nice way to break up a day of research: 

No wonder this feature isn’t already part of Open Site Explorer!

All jokes aside, give these techniques a try and let me know what you find in the comments. You can also give me a shout at the Internet Exposure blog or via our Twitter at @iexposure.

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The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned that the underlying cause was Google losing access to its special Twitter data feed.

The source of the disagreement is unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Realtime Search disappeared – all of it, not just the part that relied on Twitter. This included Realtime results from Google News, Blog Search links, Facebook fan page updates and more.

No Realtime results? What if it took the world hours, instead of minutes, to learn about the tweet below?

To gain perspective on what’s at stake, consider the example of journalists and protesters staying abreast of current events during the recent government upheavals in the Middle East.

Yes, this s#&t matters.

For the past two years Google used Twitter not only to power Realtime results, but also for faster indexation of content and, we believe, to calculate Author Authority for use in their ranking algorithm. Google says they plan on reinstating Realtime with the power of Google+. But the network will have to grow significantly before this works.

In the absence of the Twitter Firehose, can tweets still influence rankings? What about Google+?

Test 1: Firehose On

Last week, before this happened, we had the pleasure of working with Shari Goetsch of SeeYourImpact.org on a social media campaign for their terrific nonprofit organization. SeeYourImpact is a hardworking and unique charity that SEOmoz has worked with in the past.

The goal of this campaign was to create buzz around a single, previously unindexed URL on the target website using only Twitter. A tweet was created and followers of SeeYourImpact were encouraged to retweet as much as possible.
 

Within a few short hours of the campaign kickoff, the URL was tweeted 300+ times. As a secondary effect, the URL also received a handful of additional Facebook likes and LinkedIn shares.

By early afternoon the page ranked #2 in Google for its targeted phrase, “Assist a Mom.” The URL reached #1 status by day’s end. As of this writing it remains the number one ranked page for this target keyword phrase.

The Twitter effect was in full power.

Test 2: Firehose Off

After Google announced that they no longer used direct Twitter data, Rand created a previously unindexed webpage and tweeted it to his followers.

Within 10 minutes, Google picked up a tweet scraper, but not the original post.

After an hour we realized a mistake. We had inadvertently included a meta NOINDEX tag in the head of the webpage. Doh!

After quick removal of the tag, it took Bing a full 6 hours to index the original URL, but still no Google. Not until 8 hours after the original tweet did Google index our URL. Eventually it ranked #1 for its targeted keyword phrase.

Even with our mistake, Google appeared significantly slower than it used to.

Test 3: Twtter vs. Google+

Twitter

The next day we created two unique pages to test the ranking power of Twitter vs. Google+. Rand then shared one page on Twitter and the other on Google+.

This time, the Twitter URL performed much better and faster in the SERPs. Within 13 minutes it ranked #1 for its keyword phrase "Euclidean Taeniasis of Galapagos".

Rand noted that the ranking coincided very neatly with our URL’s appearance in Topsy, which may be where Google found it. It makes sense that the Topsy 100 is crawled and indexed much more frequently than Rand’s Twitter profile.

Even more revealing was how tweets not only helped indexation, but also appeared to boost rankings. The first hour the page appeared in search results, it ranked 10th for the phrase Euclidean Perry and number 8 for EuxliswN Darwin. In the time it took for the number of tweets to double, the rankings rose from 8 and 7 respectively.

Tweets still help with indexation, although maybe not as fast as they used to. And tweets appear to boost rankings, although the exact degree is unclear.

Caveat: We noticed the URL was shared through several Linkedin accounts. Many people, including Rand, have their Twitter profile set up to automatically post to LinkedIn whenever they share. We believe this had a minimal influence on the experiment, but can’t be discarded.

Google+

Rand shared the second page through his Google+ profile. He likewise encouraged folks to share it through Google+, but not through Twitter, Facebook, direct linking, etc. Within minutes the post was shared dozens of times.

Two hours later, this test URL ranked #1 for it’s keyword phrase in Google search results – this time without a single Twitter scraper in the results.

A check of shared count shows it was tweeted 0 times, although there were 4 Google Buzzes that appeared. Is this the effect of the +1 button?

Two hours is a long time to wait for real time results. If Google wishes to replace Twitter with Google+ in a meaningful way, they have a long road ahead of them.

At this time, I haven’t found direct evidence of improved rankings with Google+ beyond basic indexation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the phenomenon existed.

Twitter is Still Relevant: 4 Takeaways

Even without the Twitter firehose, it seems the Twitter effect still finds ways of maneuvering into Google’s search results.

1. Aggregators & Scrapers Play an SEO Role

Without Topsy and the countless Twitter scrapers, it’s unknown how fast our pages would have been indexed. The aggregators and the scrapers contain two features which undoubtedly helped our URLs to rank in each Twitter experiment:

• Optimized Title Tags for the target phrase, i.e.
  <title>SeeYourImpact.org » Assist a mom, change the world – english | Twitmunin</title>

• A prominent followed link to the target URL near the top of the page.

2. Retweet – Retweet, Repeat

The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility it obtains with the social media aggregators referenced above.

With Topsy, for example, a URL that makes it into their top 100 list achieves much more visibility than a single tweet.
 

3. Social Authority = Ranking Potential?

“Who” tweets your content used to be just as important, or more so, than the number of people retweeting your content. Can Google still calculate this in any meaningful way?

It’s interesting to note that Google still shows Twitter sharing data in personalized search results, as seen below.

Whether this sharing data translates into author rank remains to be seen.

4. Traditional SEO Still Rules – For Now

Lately, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who are genuinely confused about the new role of social factors in search engine optimization. We in the SEO industry have contributed to this with our wall-to-wall coverage of Facebook likes, Google+ and articles like this one about Twitter. Ian Laurie wrote an excellent article on the topic. This attention has caused some people to believe that social media has displaced traditional SEO. This is far from the truth. Let me be clear:

Social media doesn’t replace traditional SEO. It helps it.

Each of these tests contained a URL optimized for the targeted keyword phrase and the target page was optimized for the keyword, including the URL, title tag and on-page text. All of these factors undoubtedly helped it to rank.

Traditional SEO practices including content creation, external link building and on-page factors still lay the foundation for long-term ranking success. Take a look at Rand’s SEO Pyramid below, where social media rests atop the other bases. Although the social aspect may be larger today than depicted in the past, we need to be careful not to flip the entire pyramid on its head.

SEO Pyramid created by Rand Fishkin for SEOmoz

Tweets or Google shares alone don’t yet equate to long term ranking nirvana. Employing a synergistic combination of social media and technical SEO savvy provides the best recipe for success.

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