Posted by Danny Dover

 This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for Search Engine Optimisation and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.

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Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite Search Engine Optimisation diagram. You can read more about the Search Engine Optimisation Pyramid here.

Step 1: Requirements Gathering

Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? Search Engine Optimisation? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.

Step 2: Locating Potential Resources

You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.

Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match

In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company’s written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.

Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track

Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.

Remember, from both an Search Engine Optimisation and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.

Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!

Content Customs – Unique and high quality Search Engine Optimisation writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of Search Engine Optimisation articles per week

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information. Be sure to check out our new Sponsored post option.

Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for WordPress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for WordPress Review.

Scribe Search Engine Optimisation – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe Search Engine Optimisation Review.

KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.

TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.
photo credit: Seattle Miles (offline until Tuesday)

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an Search Engine Optimisation Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors July 2010

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Advertisers:

1. Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
3. BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.
4. Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!
5. Page1Hosting – Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
6. Directory Journal – List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs – Unique and high quality Search Engine Optimisation writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of Search Engine Optimisation articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards – For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an Search Engine Optimisation Audit for your website, look at my Search Engine Optimisation Consulting Services
10. KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe Search Engine Optimisation Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and Search Engine Optimisation merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on Search Engine Optimisation for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for Search Engine Optimisations who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I’ll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 – Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin – Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users – deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for Search Engine Optimisation, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller’s Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand’s humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online – there’d be a few boxes headed for the Search Engine Optimisationmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced – it’s light and airy, it’s up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in "the cloud") and it even calls out the "sexiness" of the application.

When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they’re more likely to:

• Link
• Share
• Contribute Content
• Participate
• Remain Loyal
• Invest in the Experience
• Browse more Pages

All of these have either first or second-order impacts on Search Engine Optimisation in a positive way.

#2 – The Scroll-Triggered Call-to-Action

Sometimes, you don’t want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action… At least, not until you’re fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That’s where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.

Browse any article on the New York Times website and you’ll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you’ve reached the bottom of the current piece:

It’s great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.

In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:

This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid’s flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.

Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for Search Engine Optimisation are far greater in quantity than just what’s been shared above).

#3 – User Badges

If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?

For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet from Concept Feedback authored a brilliant piece analyzing this precise behavior and exposing some terrific examples.

We’ve noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it’s spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering Search Engine Optimisation:

The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It’s the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts – fans won’t just wear them to bed; they’ll actually show off your brand.

#4 – The Animated HTML Multiheader

I wrote about the multiheader a long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point, Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I’ve screencaptured them elegantly "swooshing" in and out of the headline position:

The advantage is two-fold – more content on the homepage that’s accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it’s a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.

BTW – Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner’s 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you’re seriously missing out.

#5 – Sexy, Embeddable Infographics

Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it’s a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you’re off to the link acquisition races.

Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it’s creation):

And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:

As with badges, the "beauty rule" applies – the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.

#6 – Designing Around Illustration (with CSS)

It used to be that I’d see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their Search Engine Optimisation, too.

Google’s "text only" cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot – we’ve come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn’t make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below… errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that’s the one!)

For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:

Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an Search Engine Optimisation ask?

#7 – Creative Content Formats Unleashed

Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you’ve seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.

A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:

Above: Grain and Gram Gentleman’s Journal

Above: Sanctuary T Shop (who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)

Above: Heart Directed (a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an Search Engine Optimisation example itself)

It’s a great time to be on the web, thinking about Search Engine Optimisation, design and the brilliant things that can happen when they overlap strategically. Here’s to hoping that more of us who invest in organic search traffic will bolster that task with the power amazing design can bring. It’s not just more links – it’s greater engagement and a higher liklihood that sharing of all kinds will occur. However the search engines evolve, you can be sure this is the type of behavior they’ll seek to reward.

p.s. If design inspires you, I’d recommend checking out Drawar and Six Revisions list of 10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration

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Search Engine Optimisationmoz has mentioned it before in their link building videos that badges and widgets are a great way to get links, but can they really help you get to the top for very competitive terms?  I believe so and have some proof to demonstrate it.  Most badges I have seen are some type of image that is hyperlinked to the owner’s web site.  I’m sure everyone would agree that there is some value in image links, but probably not a whole lot.  The big question is how can you turn this into a phenomenal ranking boosting tool?  It’s easy and I will show you how one company has been successful at it for a couple of years now.  This article may create a lot of discussion, but the numbers speak for themselves.

A normal badge would look something like this:

The company I am using in my example is called Authorize.net.  They are an Internet gateway service used by online stores for credit card processing.  What they have done is created a badge merchants can place on their web site showing their customers that they are a valid merchant.  The badge is called a verification seal.  The difference in what they have done is they added a text link below their badge.  I’m sure a lot of merchants are smart enough to remove this promotional code when they download it, but many do not.  According to Open Site Explorer, over 10,000 root domain names have not done so.

Their badge looks like this, which “online payments” is a hyperlink pointing to their home page and the badge itself is pointing to a page that verifies the merchant:

They say the best kind of links are in the content and Google is great at determining this while giving very little value to links of this nature.  This may be very true, but it is definitely working for this group.  If anything, you should consider implementing it if you can make it work for you.  If you are thinking this may only work temporarily, let me say this.  Authorize.net did not have great rankings 3 or 4 yrs ago.  I started watching them implement this and over time their rankings started to climb.  A year or two ago they moved to the top on a few very competitive keywords and haven’t dropped since.

Lets look at the numbers shall we?

Click to Enlarge

Obviously this doesn’t work for every web site due to the inherited requirements, such as having a badge people want to link to.  However, the ones that can take advantage of this could really exploit it.  Even Search Engine Optimisationmoz could do something like this as well with their badges.  There may be a question of professionalism for some, but definitely a nice topic to debate on.  Please share your thoughts.

Curtis Stevens is the founder of Gotmerchant.com, a credit card processing service provider.  They help merchants accept credit cards or switch processors if they’re not happy with their current provider.  They also specialize in a few unique products such as the Casio cash register or a wireless credit card machine.

photo credit: Foto Blog SMR

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an Search Engine Optimisation Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Badges & Widgets Can Take Your Rankings to the Top!

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Advertisers:

1. Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
3. BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.
4. Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!
5. Page1Hosting – Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
6. Directory Journal – List your website in our growing web directory today.
7. Content Customs – Unique and high quality Search Engine Optimisation writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of Search Engine Optimisation articles per week
8. Glass Whiteboards – For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an Search Engine Optimisation Audit for your website, look at my Search Engine Optimisation Consulting Services
10. KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe Search Engine Optimisation Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

Posted by JoannaLord

We have a lot of changes going on at Search Engine Optimisationmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes.

You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives that you usually discover the data that can change your current course of action. So this post is going to tackle an approach to analytics that is often overlooked and (thanks to Google and their silly naming convention decisions) is rarely used to its fullest capacity. Get excited folks we are going to talk about benchmarking {Woohoo! Insert audience applause here}.

All of you excel spreadsheet lovers out there know plenty of ways to extract data and pinpoint specific red flags or recent successes. In fact, most people use analytics to simply analyze the current state of their account. While this is certainly a priority, it really is one dimensional. Instead of stopping there, why not go further? Why not better understand where your data was, and how you are measuring up? In fact, why not use this data to help inform your internal decisions as a company? It’s like an analytical epiphany—“using past and current data to help guide you moving forward.” Glorious.

While many of the analytics platforms out there have given us a number of ways to compare historical data to current data, we are still limited to two distinct time ranges (for the most part). It’s great to see those two ranges stack up against each other, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. Without going further you miss the "interaction" between those two distinct time ranges.

Benchmarking your data is a great way to discover more about this, often overlooked, gray area. Benchmarking simply means you set a standard at which you compare something else to. When used for data mining, it means you plot two distinct variables (time ranges, metrics, dimensions, etc.) over a period of time and then use these “benchmarks” to infer conclusions when making decisions.

You can then see  a more complete picture of your site’s momentum. In my opinion, understanding your site’s momentum is one of the most powerful metrics an analyst can calculate. If you can say with authority that you know how your site is doing and how it will likely be doing in the next week, month, few months, etc., you are in an ideal place. With data like that you can take more calculated risks.

*First, I want to throw out a disclaimer—a little over a year ago Google decided to integrate “Benchmarking” into their Visitors tab in GA. This just made things confusing in my opinion. The GA feature actually shows your site in comparison to a {very very very limited} industry pool of similarly {not really} sized sites. There is a lot wrong with the assumptions of this feature, but for our purposes here, when I say “benchmarking” I mean the act of plotting two distinct variables over time to extract insight…not the {ridiculous-I-can’t-believe-they-took-it-out-of-beta} GA feature.

The "benchmarking" feature in GA on Search Engine Optimisationmoz

Okay now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can benchmark your data to hopefully gather some insight into your site’s performance.

Know your bottom-line (and your "high-line" –yes, I just made that word up)

This is probably the most common approach to benchmarking. It’s a pretty simple way to analyze the current state of your account. You should know your extremes for every metric. For example if you are a company that sells a seasonally successful product, you should know what your lowest conversion rate is for the year, as well as your peak conversion performance. In understanding the extremes you can make better assumptions on how your off season stats are trending. While not the most accurate approach to data mining, benchmarking the extremes of your account enables you to speak intelligently, at any given moment, on how your site is currently performing.

Know your ratios & relationships

Am I the only one that always reads “ratio” as “radio”? I digress. Knowing your metric ratios and how they relate to each other, is a great way to quickly detect when things are headed south. Often, as analysts, we don’t realize something has gone wrong until we see sales are down. While that is an effective method of pinpointing mistakes, it certainly isn’t ideal. Wouldn’t it be nice to quickly identify issues as they actually become issues? Crazy, I know. Well this is exactly what benchmarking the ratios of your site’s metrics can do. At Search Engine Optimisationmoz, we use ratio/relationship benchmarking to keep our traffic stats in check. We don’t just plot out how many visitors each section of the site brings in out of the total visitors; we compare those percentages against each other. This gives us a ballpark value to guide us. An example; “the X part of the site brings in roughly twice as much as Y, which brings in about 1/3 of the traffic as Z.”

The great part about this method of benchmarking is you can easily turn it into a visual representation of the different pieces of the pie, and isolate out when things start to shift. Below is an actual example Rand pulled together earlier this week (yes he does that sort of thing for fun! A true data-head!). In this chart we have graphed out the top trafficked pages on our site, and then plotted them against each other to show how they are performing in relation to each other.

Also see a larger, detailed version

You can see the significant drop in the blue segment (our Tools page), which was due to a redirect mistake we made (oops…Rand talks more about that here). By visually representing these sections, we can easily identify shifts in the relationships, which can guide us on where we should focus our attentions (aka fix our silly Search Engine Optimisation mistake ASAP!).

Know the norm

Okay I know, I know…I talked a whole lot of trash above on the GA benchmarking feature, and here I am talking about “knowing the norm,” but approaching data analysis this way can be insightful. Knowing and using industry standards in benchmarking can efficiently identify low hanging fruit.

However, the actual GA benchmarking tab is a poor example of this. Keep in mind that sites have to opt into the benchmarking, so (a.) this feature might not even have your industry represented and (b.) you have no way of knowing how many sites these “standards” are calculated on. Also keep in mind there are only three buckets for website “size” in this feature—small, medium, and large. WTF right? Yeah, since when do all websites fit into those three sizes? What am I ordering a latte over here?

With that said, it’s worth knowing the vital metric standards for your industry. If you see that similar sites to your own have a bounce rate of around 40% and you are chilling around 65%, while all the other metrics look closer in range, then you can assume this metric is where you should direct your optimization efforts. This approach isn’t as scalable or as accurate as other benchmarking methods, but it’s definitely worth a mention, if only for peace of mind.

Know the limits

While benchmarking is incredibly effective for things like trending, projecting, and exploring the data, it’s important to know the limits of the process. It is meant to be a discovery process, not a scientific formula. Just like anything else you take away from the data, it is just an insight, not a guarantee. You are making assumptions based on past performances, and performances change. So one word of caution to all of you data-heads out there—benchmarking is a great tool to add to your bag of tricks, but it is only one of many you should be using. Don’t get so caught up in forming relationships between the metrics and dimensions of your site that you lose perspective on the independent variables themselves.

In conclusion

Get in there. I mean it, seriously. I know we are all crazy busy, but that shouldn’t translate into a two minute GA log-in, a quick glance at the vital metrics and a few automated reports. Our analytics are meant to be explored. Benchmarking is one of those processes that may take an extra hour or two, but discoveries made during those few hours can be instrumental in guiding your company’s decisions.

Confession: At Search Engine Optimisationmoz we haven’t always been the best with analytics and tracking, but in the past half a year we have refocused our energies on truly knowing what our users are doing, how our site is performing, and finding opportunities within the data. It’s time consuming, and tricky, and what you discover is not always fun to find out, but it has certainly helped us redirect resources where they are needed.

Over the next few months we are rolling out all sorts of good stuff, {the Chrome toolbar launch was just a teaser my friends }. We are using processes like benchmarking to better prepare us for these changes. Taking on new challenges as a company is an awesome thing, but doing it with a little data to steer you, makes the ride even more fun.

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