We all use our cell phones (and those of us lucky enough, tablets) to figure out where we are and what’s around us while we’re on the go. While GPS is a godsend, location isn’t the only thing you need to find when you’re out. Facebook, Google, the SEO Blog… (I know a lot of you are watching this on a train, plane, or… well, I hope you’re not watching this in your automobile!) – whatever you look for at home, you’re likely looking for it while you’re away from your desktop as well.

Fortunately, most of the bigger sites out there have mobile versions of their pages so we don’t have to pinch and squint to be be able to read anything. However, most organizations aren’t willing or able to dedicate the time and resources towards maintaining multiple mobile versions of their site. How are you ever going to be able to optimize your mobile web presence when you don’t have one?! Fret not! On this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus from SEOmoz’s very own SEO team gives some pointers on how to keep sites optimized for cell phones and tablets without breaking the bank or the brain. You’ll find that we used an extremely relevant device to bring you today’s WBF, so check it out! Also, read over the transcript for links and let us know any secrets you’ve discovered in the comments below.

Video Transcription

Hi, SEOmoz fans. My name’s Cyrus. I am on the SEO team here at SEOmoz. Today we’re going to be talking about SEO for mobile devices. Mobile devices are becoming huge obviously. It really hit home this year when I realized that 60% of the staff here has an iPad. That’s amazing. Just in the last few months the amount of usage and the amount of searching we’re doing using mobile devices has grown incredibly. We’re using iPads so much that today we thought we’d try something special and actually film the Whiteboard Friday on an iPad. So it’s kind of something new for us. Hopefully, you can search for the Whiteboard Friday on your iPad, watch it on your iPad, and it is recorded on your iPad.

1. Why Mobile SEO is Hard

One of the challenges of doing mobile SEO is it’s really hard. Mobile applications are great.
You know, things like Rotten Tomatoes, Urban Table (Urban Spoon + Open Table) they
have great apps. But for most people, 80% to 90% of us, doing these mobile sites are really
hard because what you end up with is three different sites really that you’re trying to optimize
for. You have your regular website, you have a mobile optimized version of your website,
and then you have an app. That’s really hard to maintain. It’s expensive. It’s time consuming.
It uses a lot of engineering resources. It is hard to maintain just one website, let alone three
different versions of your website. If you do it wrong, sometimes you end up with duplicate
content issues, which causes a lot of problems.

For most people, it is just too much, especially the people who are going to benefit most from
mobile SEO. These are the local people, the mom and pop restaurants, the mechanic. They
don’t really have a lot of budget. If your clients fit in this demographic, it’s really hard to
justify spending money on all these different mobile versions of your site. But just because
we can’t do different mobile versions – do what the big boys do – that doesn’t mean that we
can’t optimize for mobile and take some really actionable steps to improve our mobile SEO
experience. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take advantage of the low-hanging fruit,
the opportunities that already exist.

2. Take Advantage of Your Own Data

The most important thing, the first thing that you want to do is mine your own data. Take
advantage of the statistics you already have. Can you tell me right now, on your major
website, what percentage of your visitors this month came from mobile devices? Most SEOs
don’t know that, but that’s something you should be checking every single month. Now what
we do here at SEOmoz is, very simply, we create a Google Analytics advanced segment, and
it is just one setting in the advanced segments. You just click mobile equals yes. You call that
profile mobile. You check it once a month. You’re going to get incredible information about
what your mobile visitors are doing.

What you’ll find is that it is a lot different than what your desktop users are doing. The
keywords are going to be different. The bounce rate is going to be different. Landing pages
are going to be different. You really get some good information into the behavior of your
mobile users. One of the most important things to check for within that profile is the different
devices that are visiting your site. You can see if one device has a particularly high bounce
rate or their time on site is really small, then that’s the device that you can look at. Here at
SEOmoz, we found that we do really poorly on BlackBerries. Not sure exactly why, if the
site is not rendering right or if BlackBerry users just aren’t our demographic. But that is
something that we can look into and focus just on that.

We can also focus on just the landing pages that the mobile visitors are using. Instead of
spending all of our resources doing an entire site, we can focus on just those pages that our
mobile visitors are using. It is incredibly more effective and it improves the experience for
your desktop user and your mobile users as well. So, that’s that. You can use emulators to test
those pages out and make sure they are really working for everyone.

3. Act Global, Think Local

Now, the next point, when you think mobile, it is so important to think local. Google released
a study that showed that 95% of mobile searchers search local info. So a lot of those
searches have local intent. Again, talking about those restaurants, local shopping experiences,
garages. What does that mean if they are searching for local intent? The pages that they
are looking for are contact information, phone numbers, directions to your place. These are
the areas that you want to make sure work really well on mobile devices. Personally, it is
very frustrating looking for a restaurant here in Seattle and you go to their contact page and
you can’t find their address, it’s really small, or that page just doesn’t work well on a mobile
device. If you make sure those pages work well, you’re really doing yourself a favor.

Secondly, if you can’t afford these mobile apps, because mobile apps are great, right? They
integrate GPS, location awareness. They can dial a number for you if they are integrated.
But if you can’t afford that, there is no harm in taking advantage of third party applications.
Instead of listing your address on your Contact Us page, link to a Google Map because
Google does a very good job of giving directions, dialing phone numbers, and having your
contact information there. If you are a restaurant, use applications like OpenTable that can
make the reservation for you. Instead of spending the money yourself on these applications,
take advantage of the third party apps. Generally, we don’t like sending traffic off your site,
but in this case if it is really going to help your business out, it is a good idea to invest.

When we’re thinking local, we need to think about Google Places because they are almost
one and the same. Those local searches are going to be much more focused on Google Maps
coming up. So, if you’re optimized for the Google Maps, if you have your good business
profile information there, you have a lot of reviews, and you’re doing a good job here, you’re
going to do a good job getting those mobile visits. Along with that, you want to make sure
your other local SEO is up to date. Getting included in review sites like Yelp, OpenTable,
Angie’s List, those are all going to help those local references.

4. Go Social

So even if you’re not local, one thing that everybody can keep in mind, and as an addition
to thinking local, think social. Can you guess what the number one search phrase is
on mobile devices? Facebook. I think Facebook is also the number one searched term
on desktop devices, but on mobile, it blows it away. People are using Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn. Their social applications are huge on mobile devices.

As a side note, I have also read that something like 90% to 95% of people when they are
using their mobile phones use them in the restroom. That was very surprising to me. I am not
a bathroom mobile device person. I guess they’re replacing magazines. But getting away from
the point there.

The point is, if your content, if your website content is being shared on these social sites,
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, all the other social sites, you are much more likely to get
those referral visits. So if you are doing a good job in terms of social, you’re going to get
those referral visits, and we see from our own analytics here at SEOmoz, we get a huge
amount of referrals from Twitter and Facebook, and those visits predominantly go to our
blog. They have a much different profile of content that they’re visiting than users using
desktops. So we want to make sure they are having a good experience.
In addition to that, you want to make sure your content is easy to share, because when those
people are coming from these social sites on their mobile devices, they are much more likely
to share the content again back to these social sites. So make sure you have your Facebook
buttons, your Twitter buttons, your LinkedIn, whatever social sites that you want to use.

Taking care of these low-hanging fruits, these are something that you can just spend a few
hours a month on instead of building out these huge apps, and you’re going to get a lot of
wins out of it. That’s it. Thank you very much. 

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

This week, Tom Critchlow from Distilled, talks about the suggestions he has given to SEOmoz to improve our Google Analytics setup.  These suggestions are as easy as adding events to specific user actions or as complex as adding all your domains into one Google Analytics account.  Tom discusses why he thinks that these improvements will help SEOmoz and why you should be thinking about using some of these improvements in your setup.  Below the video you will find some code snippets that we used to setup our Google Analytics account that should help you in your setup.  

If you feel you need further assistance please feel free to write us in the comments and we will look at pointing you in the right direction or writing a new post to help you in your setup.

Custom Variable

You only need to insert one line of code to track these custom variables and it’s list below.  The tricky part is getting those variables filled in when using something like PHP or Rudy.  If your not comfortable with a programming language it could be a hurdle for you to overcome..

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar,INDEX, NAME, VALUE, OPT_SCOPE']); 

SEOmoz Code:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 5,'User-Type','admin', 2]);

See this blog post for more information on setting up Google Analytics Custom Variables – Custom Vairable Setup 

E-commerce Tracking

E-commerce has a longer section of code that needs to be installed on your receipt page or page where your users are sent when the transaction is complete.  You can view the setup for e-commerce tracking from google at the following page – E-Commerce Tracking.

Site Speed

Site speed is a very easy setup and only includes adding one line of code to track how long it takes your pages to load.  Just add _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']); after you load the _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); and you will start to see page speed data in your new Google Analytics profile.  Tom wrote a post on Google Site Speed in Google Analytics.

Events

Events is a straight forward way to track the way that your users interact with your website.  All you have to do is all a simple on-click event to the button that you are tracking and now you can see anytime people are click on that button.  See this post that was written by myself last year for more information on how to use Google Analytics Events to monitor your CTAs.

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

 For both personal knowledge and client satisfaction, it’s really important to be able to track SEO progress quantitatively as well as qualitatively. One of the benefits and detriments of the field of SEO is that there is a lot of data out there, which helps make SEO tracking easier but at the same time can be overwhelming to even advanced SEOs. In a lot of ways, it’s just a matter of choosing which data to use. For instance, just as you wouldn’t use a katana to spread chevre, you wouldn’t use the PR of a homepage to track a domain’s success in search results. In a two part series beginning today, Rand is going to go over the definitions of some of the most popular metrics available right now, as well as the best ways to use metrics in your SEO analysis. Check back next Friday for part 2!

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 Last week, Rand discussed the importance of correlation data in general and how you can use it for SEO research. It’s a lot easier to get things done if you know which tasks are high priority and which are low, and correlation data can help. This week, Rand finishes off this two-part series on correlation data by discussing some specific observations we’ve made about correlations between SEO tactics and their effects on rankings. There are some very interesting conclusions, so check it out! Also let us know in the comments below if you’ve been able to draw any correlations of your own.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week the second in our two-parter on correlation data for SEO and social media analysis. I’m really excited about this one. We’re going to be talking about very specifically a few of the really interesting things that we’ve observed from correlation data.

Last week, if you recall, we talked about a lot of the basics of correlation data. I showed some simple examples why it’s useful both in aggregate and when studying some of your own stuff.

Today I’m going to be talking about some of those big aggregate average numbers collected from thousands of points of data to see what predicts better rankings over all. I want to be really clear, just to reiterate from last week. Remember that correlation is not causation.

One of my favorite examples, the one I like to use a lot is the one with dolphins. So, dolphins swim in pods, and some of the ones that swim in the front of the pods have different characteristics than ones that swim at the end of the pods, just like things in the search results have different features at the front of the search results – the top of the search results position 1, 2, 3 – than the things that are further down on the search results, 5, 10, 15, 20. Right?

So, we look at an analysis of what makes for front of the pod swimmers in both scenarios. With dolphins, it’s things like, well, they have larger dorsal fins and they’ve got stronger flippers. They also have more damage. They’ve got like scars and pieces of glass or something like that, like cuts and scrapes in their flippers.

So two of those things, the bigger dorsal fins and the stronger flippers, that probably is causal. That’s what’s causing them to be front of the pod swimmers. But the damage is that really, it has a high correlation, it’s got a good correlation with swimming at the front of the pod. Does that mean that more damage means you’ll swim at the front of the pod? If we were to bash up a dolphin’s fins who’s swimming at the end of the pod, would he suddenly move to the front?

No. Right, it’s correlation not causation. It’s features that predict what people will look like up there. So when we are looking at things that are rankings, just remember this is correlation, not causation. Some of the features here might be things like damaged flippers, not stronger fins. So keep that in mind as we’re looking at this.

That said, let’s talk about some of these cool things. Number one, one of the things that we saw last June, we did a big analysis of Google versus Bing and the different ranking factors, looking at correlation across 11,000 search results in both. We had a very, very small standard error so that we can be very sure that these correlation numbers go across probably all the search results at the time.

We looked at things like number of linking root domains and the keyword in the title, the keyword in the domain name, document length. We looked at the length of the title and mozRank and PageRank and dozens of other features. What we found was that Google and Bing are not so different. In fact, on a lot of the SEO basics, the things that you would do for Google or for Bing are the same that you would do for the other engine.

That’s really cool to learn because it means that we don’t have to develop one site that’s trying to rank well in Google and one site that’s trying to rank well in Bing. We do different things for different ones of them. No, in fact, these engines are really, really similar. Then, of course, we found out in January of this year that Google had been running these experiments because they thought Bing’s rankings looked too close to Google rankings. They were worried, and so they did this click stream, honey pot, and, of course, discovered that Bing was essentially measuring through Internet Explorer where people click after they perform search on any engine, including Google. Google got upset about this.

Nevertheless, I think that says, oh well, our analysis that these two engines are pretty similar, kind of verified by some other data including Google people thinking, hey, wait a minute these are looking really, really similar, right?

We get this big takeaway that, unlike the late ’90s or even the early 2000s when SEOs used to build different websites targeting different search engines because they wanted different things, today we can really build one. That’s a great takeaway. God, it saves us a ton of time and worry.

Number two, Facebook shares are highly correlated with Google rankings. This was one of our takeaways very, very recently, in March of this year, so just about a month ago, maybe a little less, depending when this Whiteboard Friday airs. You can see here that Facebook shares, in fact, were our single highest correlated, number one. Highest correlated metric with ranking higher, predicting that you would rank higher in Google among all the things that we measured.

We measured about 150 different factors, everything from keyword usage on the page to link metrics, to things like tweets and that kind of stuff. Those Facebook shares just seem to have an incredibly good correlation. A correlation so high, especially in, remember this 0.29 on a scale of 0 to 1 would not be that high. In a really simple system, where there’s only one or two metrics that predict, 0.29 would be probably kind of low. But in a system where there’s supposedly 200 plus unique ranking factors – probably much more than 200 plus at this point – but in a system with that much complexity to see one metric that predicts such a high correlation is extremely rare. In fact, we’ve only seen a few metrics that are up in that 0.29, 0.3 range ever in the history of looking at correlation data.

We can kind of say, huh, seems like Google must be using these Facebook shares. Not necessarily directly. They might be getting more data from Facebook, but there’s something going on there. Of course, Google themselves and Bing as well admitted in an interview with Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land that yes, we use data from Facebook and from Twitter directly in our web rankings to help with our algorithmic search. Facebook shares, you can see that correlation. You’ve got to be thinking, as an SEO, how do I get me some of those Facebook shares on my pages?

Number three, we looked at, one of the weirdest things to come out of our March 2011 data was the fact that no-follow links seemed to have a positive correlation with rankings. One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

You kind of think about it. You scratch your head, like, "What? Wait, does Google want me to have no-follow links?" When you think that way, just remember correlation, not causation. So, it’s not necessarily that Google’s saying, "Oh, well, this website doesn’t have a lot of no-follow links so let’s rank them lower." That seems kind of crazy to me. I don’t think that ‘s the case. Possible but I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

So, to have only followed links is weird. No wonder . . . I don’t what it is exactly. We don’t know what it is exactly that Google’s measuring here, but I’m sure they’re looking at this, not at this but at metrics that say, huh, this website does not interact in its ecosystem. One of the things that predicts those is no-follow links, and that’s why you see that negative correlation.

Lots and lots of cool stuff, interesting data that we can take away from correlations even though we know it’s not causal. We can say to ourselves, huh, this probably means, right? This probably means, oh, I’d better be interacting in the environment, and I shouldn’t worry about getting no- follow links. This is not going to hurt me. In fact it might actually predict that I’m doing more good things on the Web.

In this case, right, it’s saying, oh, you know what, Facebook likes have a much lower correlation, because liking something on Facebook, clicking that thumbs up button is so much easier than sharing and actually posting to your wall. I know the like textually posts to your wall, but it doesn’t show up in top news. It only shows up in recent updates. So sharing, oh, that’s a good behavior to start encouraging. Maybe I should be encouraging more shares than likes on my pages. Having this, the Google and Bing data says, oh, I can build one website and do a lot of the key basics that are going to be the same for all of them.

This type of data is incredibly useful. We love doing it. We plan on doing a ton more. If you’ve got requests for things that you would like to see us do, please put them in the comments and we will be happy to try to measure them in the future.

Hope this data is interesting for you. Hope lots of you start doing more correlation analyses, rigorous data analyses of this type. I think it will be assume if we, as a community, start to make a lot of our insight and our intuition a little more scientifically based, math based. I’m very excited for it.

All right, everyone. Thanks for watching these two Whiteboard Fridays. We will see you again next week. Take care.

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

 One of the most helpful aids in doing SEO is knowing what factors actually affect your rankings. It seems obvious on its face, but not everyone prioritizes their SEO work with the knowledge of how changes to a site and link profile actually affect the SERPs. It’s important to at least have some heuristics to use in pursuit of higher rankings, and while it’s not always easy, it is possible to correlate optimization techniques with positive (or negative) movement in SERPs.

SEOmoz tries to establish these correlations in our bi-annual Search Engine Ranking Factors project by running tests and consulting with professional SEOs; for instance, in 2009, we discovered that keyword-focused anchor text from external links was highly correlated with positive rankings (we’re currently working on a new iteration of the report for 2011, so keep your eyes peeled!). As you probably know, and as Rand spends a little time explaining in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, correlation is not causation. That being said, correlations are still important and useful information! In today’s post, Rand begins a two-part series on how to use correlation data in your SEO and social media research.

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 In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.

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Hi, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO.
Today, I’m going to try to tackle answering the hard SEO questions. I
don’t have them all on this list, so feel free to ask me other ones below
in the comments. These are the ones that I came up with, so I’m going to
try my best to answer these for you.

Number one. I get this one a lot and it’s kind of awkward. Why don’t you
rank number one for SEO? Right? If I’m in SEO and I’m trying to sell my
services to somebody, why do I not rank number one for the service that I
claim to do? This one is kind of awkward, actually. Right? I probably
should rank number one for one. Awkward turtle, if you’ve ever seen this.
It’s awkward. Okay. The reason, and we’ve talked about this internally at
SEOmoz, the reason we think we don’t rank number one for it is that the
name SEOmoz is being combined when searching to see it, as opposed to Aaron
Wall’s website, SEO Book, has two words that search engines know about, SEO
and book. So he gets credit for both of those every time he gets a link
saying SEO Book, right? Whereas with SEOmoz, we only get credit for the
word SEOmoz.

There’s some other things that go into this as well. QDF algorithm. QDF
is query deserves freshness algorithm, which means new information we’ll
sometimes write at the top. We see this with some smaller companies.
There’s a lot of geolocation stuff that goes on. We’ll rank better in the
United States than we do in the UK, things like that. Frankly, what it
comes down to is that we do not have the best website optimized for just
the term SEO. We’re trying to rank for other things. SEO tools, we’re
trying to rank for learning SEO, that kind of thing. My way to answer this
to potential clients and other people is just be completely honest with
them. Like, "Yeah, we put a lot of thought in this and smart question.
Here’s the reason that we think it was." It was just the stuff that I
covered.

Number two. How can you do SEO if you don’t actually work for a search
engine? This one is similar to the one above. I do not work for Google.
I do not work for Bing. I have never read any of the code that they’ve
written to do their search engine algorithms. But I have put a lot of
thought, and more importantly, and actually the only important part is that
I have practiced this a lot. I have created a lot of websites, and I’ve
changed variables on them to figure out what helps rank better. I’ve also
relied on people who are much smarter than myself, so other SEOs in the
industry. I have kept abreast of the news. So there’s Search Engine Land,
for example. There’s lots of news things where they talk to people who do
work at Google and Bing and get their information about what they’re trying
to spread. I also learn from conferences, and I learn from other people
who are successful at SEO and are willing to share their tactics or their
strategies with me. In those ways, I have been able to learn SEO even
though I don’t work at the search engines.

Number three. Is Company XYZ a Google killer? This comes up, I’d say,
once every other month. So is it Wolfram Alpha or is it Bing or is it
Facebook? Are any of these companies Google killers? The answer I usually
give is, "I don’t know, but probably not." Google’s extremely good at what
it does, being a search engine. Right? The thing that I think eventually
will kill Google will be something that looks absolutely nothing like
Google at all. It’ll be a completely different way of searching the
Internet or maybe searching something else. Right? Maybe more like Star
Trek or Star Wars, where you just talk into thin air and then an answer
comes to you on some beautiful girl on a screen that came out of nothing.
I’m hoping for that to happen soon actually. But what will kill Google? I
don’t know, but I bet it will not look like anything we’ve seen today, my
best guess.

Facebook does have an edge being able to make search results that are very,
very customized to your friends. If I’m looking for what’s the best TV,
I’m going to care about what Best Buy has to say, which is how Google
currently works, right, with these leaders in the industry. But I also
care about what my friends think. Maybe a better example is clothes,
right? What is the best shirt for me to buy? Target might be able to tell
me something or Abercrombie & Fitch or somebody else, but what I really
probably care about is the other people in my social network, what they
think. Facebook has an example there, but we’ll see if they’re a Google
killer. My guess is probably not.

Number four. This one’s tough. Why don’t I just buy links? A lot of
times it’s a lot easier and, quite frankly, buying links in some cases does
work. But when you’re doing that, you’re betting against the very, very
small people at the search engines who are working on algorithms to detect
paid links. So while it can work in some cases, my advice is not to do it
just because it is not a good long-term strategy. I’d much rather use that
same money and buy content or pay writers or pay people who are likely be
able to create links for themselves. This, I just feel, is a much better
long-term strategy. This is what we usually recommend at SEOmoz is not to
buy links but instead put it into other strategies that will work better
long term.

Number five. Danny, will you marry me? No. But if you have a hotter
sister, let me know.

Number six. How do I increase my PageRank? This one I usually break into
two areas. First, I break down PageRank. The PageRank that we normally
see in PageRank toolbar, I just don’t think it’s very helpful at all. The
exception to that is if it’s zero. If it’s zero, it means you have a
penalty or you haven’t been crawled yet. In both those cases, you need to
figure out what’s going on. The other part is how do I increase my
PageRank? If the person asking this question is just really relying on the
fact that PageRank is still important, the way to do it is to get more
links. If they’re going to ask a silly question, it’s okay to give them a
silly answer. The way to increase PageRank, even though in my opinion it’s
not important, is to gain more links.

That’s all the time I got here. I appreciate all of you paying attention.
I will talk to you next week. Thank you very much. Bye.

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

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 Sure, you know SEO like you know the back of your hand. You know how to linkbuild, and you know how to do keyword research. Of course you’ve got a lot of SEO knowledge – you’ve been watching these Whiteboard Fridays every week, right? =P Well, now it’s time to get crackin’! Unfortunately, it feels like you never have enough time to get done all the things you know you should do. Maybe the people in charge aren’t willing to do the things you know they need to do to get positive results, or maybe you can’t implement all the changes you’d like to in the short time you have because you’re too busy building an encyclopaedic report for your client. There’s a lot of ways to make SEO not happen for your client’s site, but this week, Tom Critchlow from Distilled will show you how to avoid stagnation and keep the SEO ball rolling!

Video Transcription

Coming soon…

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 Over the past couple of weeks Rand has been discussing the metrics available for link research and how to use them appropriately for different research situations. While these metrics and strategies can certainly aid in link research, they’re not the only considerations. This week, Rand discusses some of the pitfalls that SEOs can fall into, and how to avoid these pitfalls by thinking editorially about the links you build. It helps to research the types of sites that rank well despite complete neglect of on-page optimization, and which sites actively participate in their relevant internet communites. Can you think of any pitfalls you’ve fallen into or now know to avoid? Share in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about the pitfalls of doing SEO backlink analysis.

A lot of people in the SEO field have this idea that, hey, the first thing that I should do when I am trying to do some link building is see who is ranking in the top ten. I’ll do a search for my keyword, and I’ll check who is ranking #1, #2, #3, who is on that first page of results, and I am going to look at who is linking to them and try to reverse their backlinks and get a lot of those links for my site, because if they are helping them rank, they must also help me rank.

There are some real dangers, some big pitfalls to this type of link analysis. The first of which is it is very hard to know if links are coming into this whether they are actually helping the site or not and whether the links that you are seeing are the ones that are having the most impact. It’s also really tough to know whether these sites, particularly a lot of the ones at the top of the results for fairly competitive queries, even if they have been there for three to six months or nine months or a year, whether they are using manipulative tactics, then in the future are going to be discounted or lose value.

So, what I want you to do is when you do this, yes, definitely go U-sources, right, Majestic, Yahoo Site Explorer, Open Site Explorer can all show you some of the links that are pointing to these pages that rank really well. But once you have that data, you need to ask yourself who is linking to this and follow some rules. Use this. Imagine me, here I am, look, I am a stick figure. I seem to have lost some weight. I’ve also turned slightly purple or mauve, but imagine me standing there like, "Wait!’ Before you try to get this link, use the smell test." Don’t assume that every link is helping that URL rank there. Be very cautious.

I would encourage you not to use any tactics that don’t have some editorial endorsement behind them. If you are seeing link wheels or churn-style article marketing, that really nasty stuff where someone just publishes a ton of the same article and it is linking back again and again and again, if you are seeing reciprocal link directories on those pages that just have long, long lists of links and they’re trading links back and forth, if you see the "submit your site for to 3000 search engines" kind of listings, all that junky, adds no value, no human being actually says this is a good website, those links in the short term can help some people rank well. But in the long term, they are not going to do anything for you editorial wise. They are not going to send good traffic. They are not going to be an implicit endorsement for your site. They don’t follow any of the good principles of inbound marketing. Therefore, search engines don’t really want to count them. Remember, there are going to be a bunch of Ph.D.s working at Google and at Bing trying to discount those links.

If you need to rank in the short term and you are a churn and burn spammer and you don’t have a really good site and you are just trying to play in the short run, fine, go ahead. But if you are thinking long term and you have a brand website and you are really trying to build up that credibility, you want links that are editorial endorsements.

Then I would also caution you against some common SEO wisdom, which is that, don’t ignore some link sources just because they might not be follow links. There are a lot of good links and good editorial endorsements that do come through no-follow. So, you’ll often see that, hey, this Wikipedia page is the most common one, but a lot of blog comments that the person might have left or some good posts that they put up, some good editorial articles that they’ve written for other people, maybe those links are no-followed because people are worried about search engine spam and SEO spam and that kind of stuff. But, you know what, a lot of those types of endorsements will send good visits. They are editorial. They can pass value, either first-order effect maybe or second-order effect, which is almost certainly the case.

I also check any of those links that are pointing to those top-ranking pages, go make sure that those pages rank well for their keywords. You find a page that is linking to the number one listing and you think, wow, that’s a great place to get a link. I don’t know, it’s going to cost me money or it’s going to cost me a bunch of time or I’m going to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it or I need to recommend some content or build some content to be able to get this link. Before you do that, jump through the earlier, easier hoop of figuring out, does that page that is linking here rank well? What about the other pages it links to? Do they rank? If they rank well for their keywords, maybe this is a good legitimate page that Google is counting. Maybe it is worth whatever effort that I need to put into it. If not, mm, questionable. I’d worry about that.

The second thing that I urge you to do when you are doing competitive link research is don’t just pay attention to the links themselves. Those matter. They’re important. You should. But be ready to think outside the box.

Check this out. One of the things that I love to do is not just look at the number one listing, the people who have the perfectly optimized title tag, perfectly optimized meta description, perfectly optimized root domain name, exact match keyword domain. Those folks often tend to be spammy, especially if they’ve got, like, two hyphens in there and a dot info and that kind of stuff, even keyword match, as opposed to the big brands. If you see a big brand ranking and they’re, oh, hey, I know them. I’ve heard of them. They’re a reputable company. Huh, they don’t seem to be doing a whole lot of SEO. The whole listing is barely optimized for the keyword. I wonder how they’re ranking so well. That’s, that’s where you want to earn those links. Who links to those guys? That’s what I would be checking out.

When I do searches and I see that someone is ranking well but has not done a whole lot of on page, doesn’t appear to have done a ton of off page manual link building or link spamming or any of those kinds of things, those are the links that I would be very much checking out.

Then, I also really like to do this. So, this is essentially finding those brands that I think are really good. The brands that are listed in there. Seeing rather than just who is linking to them, who is mentioning them? Who is talking about them? What are the important sources that are citing them? Not necessarily with a link or a follow link. You can search for the brand name minus site colon their domain name (-site:domain name) and click that search and that will bring up a bunch of listings of places that talk about that brand. The most important places, in fact, in order, in Google’s opinion, of who is talking about that brand. It could be profile pages, social profile pages they’ve got, maybe you should get those social profiles. It could be tools that they’ve built, or bloggers they’ve reached out to, or news articles, or journalists, or forums that are discussing them. All of those places are great places to start doing some inbound marketing. You want to participate in those forums. You want to contact those journalists. You want to get the content written that’s going to attract those same types of links. Who mentions them is a really big step.

If you follow this, the link analysis that you’re going to be doing for your SEO is going to be worth a ton more than if you just reverse the backlinks and try to get every one of them, and it is likely going to carry you through in the long term when a lot of these short-term manipulative tactics fall by the wayside.

All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you again next week. Take care.

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