Posted by randfishEarlier this month, Google launched personalized resultsby default for all users. SEOs should have already read Danny Sullivan's analysisof the shift (which is quite excellent) and I also suggest checking out David Harry's Guideon the topic. Sadly, despite some good advice, it appears that a lot of folks are still worried that this is somehow the "end of SEO" or demands a "completely new look at SEO practices." Let's do a brief analysis:What's the Impact for SEOs?Rank Checking is Less Universally AccurateWhile not the biggest tragedy, it's certainly a bit frustrating to know that rank tracking (manually or with tools) may provide somewhat less authoritative data than before. Though, to be honest, rank tracking has always been about establishing a baseline, not about exact results (see previouspostson this). Still, if you've been using this data to see how you fluctuate in the "normal" (non-personalized or geo-targeted) results, it's still solid for that purpose and may actually help you determine if you're gaining or losing in the new, personalized world (if you get more traffic but rankings stay the same, personalized might be helping; if you gain rankings but don't proportionally benefit in search traffic, it may be hurting)._The Rich Get (Even) RicherThose at the top of the results, who "own" the queries around their niches are likely to benefit disproportionately as mid and long tail queries that would once have shown more alternative sources will now bring up those "previously visited" sites even if their traditional relevance and popularity scores wouldn't have earned them a top position. This will likely contribute to some lowered diversity in the results, but may help fight against low quality re-publishers and content aggregators in favor of trusted brands._User Experience & Branding Boost SEO (Even More)It's always been critical to make users love your site, but now the direct SEO impact can be felt even more strongly. Sites and brands that "suck at SEO" may even find themselves performing better if their users love them and the pages are, at least, accessible to engines. I'm buying Steve Krug's new book - Rocket Surgery Made Easy- ASAP either way :-)_Buying Traffic May Now Help Organic ResultsIf Google really is using signals from all sources of data, the paid results and their impact on search and visit history might now give a boost (indirectly) to positioning in the organic results. In fact, it could be that even services like Google AdSense or other paid advertising that leads a visitor who's logged in to their Google account and using the toolbar (or other detectable methods of tracking) will "count" towards the personalization metrics. I expect lots of SEOs to start testing and reporting on this soon._What Should We Do Differently in our Campaigns?Get More Visitors (Any Way We Can)Depending on how Google is counting visits and traffic (which they haven't and probably won't ever fully disclose), any way you can drag a visitor to your site and give them a good experience is likely to positively contribute to your chances of ranking better in personalized results._Improve Brand Loyalty SEOs haven't classically focused on brand metrics and branding as a marketing practice, but it's long past due. The benefits of building a strong brand are evident everywhere in the consumer (and B2B) marketplace. Now Google's giving us one more reason (and a more direct one at that) to start earning visitors' love and, in turn, be rewarded by higher rankings. _More Tightly Integrate Metrics w/ Rank TrackingAgain, this has been a wise move long before personalization, but with the expansion comes renewed need for weaving together the 3rd-party tracking of rankings with the traffic metrics from your analytics to provide a full picture of how your site is performing in the search engines._The big takeaway here is that these action items aren't particularly groundbreaking. We should have been doing all of these as responsible, effective Internet marketers anyway.Is this a Major, Tectonic Shift in SEO?No. I'm maintaining my previous stancethat unless a shift from Google fundamentally changes the classic SEO process:Make pages accessible Target with keywords that searchers employ Build content that users will find useful and valuable Earn editorial links from good sources It doesn't qualify as a "tectonic" or "massive" or "fundamental" change in SEO. The best practices we've been recommending to clients, developers and content creators for the last half-decade are actually less impacted by this change than by some of the other items we've encountered recently (Bing + Yahoo! combining, real-time results at the top of query results, more vertical results in the SERPs, etc.). These latter examples call for much more active changes, learnings and direct action on the part of SEOs vs. personalization, which by-and-large just strengthens the reasons for best practices we've long known to exist.p.s. Tomorrow evening at 6pm (Tuesday Dec. 22nd), I'll be attending an informal SEO meetup in San Diego, CA at the Gordon Biersch Brewery in Mission Valley- 5010 Mission Center Road San Diego, CA 92108. Hope to see some of you there before the holidays!Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by RobOusbeyAmongst the add-ons I add to any new install of Firefox is the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick. (Find the install links at the bottom of this post.)Obviously, this add-on is chock-full of features that are useful for web developers, but it really does make diagnosing various SEO issues much easier. This list gives the top seven tasks that I find easier when the toolbar is installed.Click on any of the small images in this post to see them in full size.1. Browse Like a RobotBy turning off JavaScript and Cookies, you can browse the web as it's seen by 'bots (which in most cases can't accept cookies or execute JavaScript.) This basic change can help you recognise site architecture issues pretty quickly, such as when a main navigation bar is displayed using JavaScript or when visitors who can't accept cookies always get redirected to the front page. (Yes, I've seen both of these in the wild.)2. See What the Spiders SeeFor a more hardcore spider-emulation experience, use the Toolbar to turn off styles and images. The sudden appearance of previously cloaked text or seeing that the 'main heading' is actually an H4 item and sat 75% of the way through the content might suggest why a particular page is having issues.This is how the site looked before Timmy joinedAlthough different spiders treat meta redirects in different ways, it can often be easier to diagnose some on-site issues if you disable them altogether via 'Disable → Meta Redirects'. To see what the site serves up to different user agents (such as mobile devices, GoogleBot, etc) you'll want to get the author's other successful add-on, the user-agent switcher.3. See the StructureTalking of page structure, you can press 'Information → View Document Outline' to see the structure of a page, or simply 'Outline → Outline Headings' to see the hierarchy of headings within the page.4. Validation and Best PracticesThe toolbar gives quick access to code validation tools (such as the HTML, CSS and RSS validation from WC3.) There are also options to highlight links without title attributes, or images with missing (or blank) alt attributes.5. A Tip for Search Marketers Who do CRO as WellThose of us with our massive screens (by the way, did you see this guy?) might not always appreciate how people view our pages. However, a quick click on the 'resize' button lets you see the site through the viewport of an older monitor or a net book.I should probably let LoveFilmknow that 20% of people can't see their big green 'Start a free trial' button.6. Making Web Page Screen Captures EasierA change we've tried to make at Distilled recently is to include more illustrative images in our client reports. A fiddly task that comes up from time to time is creating a screen shot of a web page, but without it being obvious which links you're already clicked on. A quick click on 'Miscellaneous → Visited Links → Mark All Links Unvisited' removes the 'visited' styles from any links on the page.7. Reputation Management Tip: Anonymity Made EasyA year ago, I posted about how to hide your referrer stringwhen browsing, as a handy way to prevent people seeing that you're probing their site. It's much easier to do with the Web Developer Toolbar, by simply clicking 'Disable → Disable Referrers'You can read more about the Web Developer Tool Add-On, or if you're running Firefox, simply install it now.If you're already a convert to this add-on, do let us know in the comments of any other features you use regularly.Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by great scott!Ho-ho-ho! Merry Winter to you! In a very special Whiteboard Friday we'll look at the new model for attracting lots of inbound links: giving back to webmasters.  Nowadays it's not always enough just to have great content. You've got to give the linkerati value--something that will incentivize them to link to your site.  Rand Fishclause discusses how this new model works and then, next week, we'll give you 12 link strategies of Christmas just in time for you to open them under your tree and put into action for the New Year.SEOmoz Whitebeard Friday - Give and Ye Shall Receivefrom Scott Willoughbyon Vimeo.Just a quick reminder that today is the final day to get the new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tacticsat the special launch pricing of 20% off + free shipping!Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by randfishFirst off, apologies for my absence from the blog these past few days. It's been an incredibly busy time, trying to wrap things up before I leave for San Diego over the holidays. So much for a December lull... In this post, I'm going to try tackling a lot of the recent trends we've been observing from the engines and talk about my personal perception of what's to come over the next 12 months. #1 - This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta HereMicrosoft initially beat Google to the punchin announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And inresponse, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumeror searchenthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance.As Danny Sullivan notes, it's like we're back to Infoseek in 1997. If you want to rank #1, don't worry about quality content, relevance or popularity, just be the last person to Tweet about a topic and you'll come out on top (at least, for a few seconds).This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment stats have their usability folks up in arms already, and it's only to preserve face from a PR perspective (as well as an increasingly prideful attitude of "Don't like it? So what are you gonna do about it?" that Aaron Wall describes in a gutting fashion here) that this has stayed in place as long as it has (1.5 weeks).In 2010, I think this fades away. Perhaps not entirely, but we won't be seeing it for nearly as many queries with the prevalence we do today. Google may love real time, and it's certainly gotten them a lot of press (though very little of it is entirely positive), but they can't continue sacrificing quality for PR in this fashion. I think the engineers still run things over there, and the stats data is already making them balk. Although I don't have numbers, my impression is that we're already way down in the quantity of queries showing real time results compared to last week.#2 - Twitter's "Link Graph" is the Real DealAll that real-time integration bashing aside, I'm a firm believer in my original hypothesis that Twitter is cannibalizing the web's link graph. In fact, I think a rough history of "recommendation sources" looks something like:Google has always strived to keep up with the latest ways that content is being recommended and suggested. It's how they determined popularity and relevance with PageRank and I think Twitter's data is merely the next evolution. Just yesterday, they launched their own URL shortening service(I think this was more to get data, but it's also possible it was a pre-emptive PR strike against bit.ly, who launched their PRO servicejust a day later). Google's not going to just take raw number of tweets or re-tweets. I think we're already seeing the relevance and reputation calculations in their decisions of which tweets and sources to show in the real-timeresults, and I expect that algorithms/metrics like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. will find their way into how Google uses the real-time data. Today, SEOs want to turn tweets into links so they can get SEO benefit. My feeling is that tweets are going to carry their own weight in helping pages rank in the not-too-distant future.#3 - Personalized Search is Here to StayUnlike real-time's temporal nature in the results, I think personalized search is here for the long haul. Google released their "permanent" personalization of results last week, and Bing released their own just this week. As usual, SearchEngineLand's coverage is impeccable, though one big question remains in my mind:What metrics impact personalization?Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads - either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick? I'd love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they're dealing with. If it's proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new "paid inclusion" for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn "organic" positioning as well.Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn't fundamentally change the game, IMO:The Rich Get Richer- It's now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you're going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before. Branding is More Important- you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We'll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this. There is No Normal Ranking- Or, at least, there's no "normal" ranking that's "average" in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the "personalization" battle, and you may start to care less about the classic "rankings" battle. Whenever we encounter these "paradigm changing" events in the SEO world, I like to go back to my philosophy about SEO fundamentals. From what I can see, it looks like things haven't changed enough yet to warrant panic. It's been a massively dynamic 3 months, but we're not on the precipice of anything that's going to shift SEO in the ways some previous "game-changers" have.#4 - It's Going to Be a Two-Engine, 80/20 WorldThe latest figuressuggest that Google continues to slowly gain market share in the US, while Bing & Yahoo! compete for share that will eventually belong to them both (once the regulatory hurdles clear, which I think they will). I believe that a year from now, most webmasters will be looking at a scenario where Comscore/Hitwise reports Binghoo! has ~25-28% market share, but those engines combine to send a little under 20% of all search traffic (remember that they count searches on all Microsoft and Yahoo! properties - even internal searches - while Google tends to send the vast majority of their search traffic externally to other sites).#5 - Site Explorer & Linkdomain will DisappearTragically, everything I hear out of Yahoo! and Bing is that Site Exploreris off to the great beyond. The expense of maintaining a web index isn't something Yahoo!'s willing to invest in once they don't have to, and Bing's given no indication that they're going to re-open the portal to link information. The best we can hope for is an acceleration in the functionality offered by Bing Webmaster Tools, but even that's unlikely to offer competitive link intelligence.I'm guessing other services will rise up to try to take Site Explorer's place, as the service had millions of monthly queries run against it.#6 - SEO Spending Will Rise DramaticallyForrester put out a great report on US Interactive Marketing Spend(a little pricey at $1749, but interesting). Two graphics struck me as particularly compelling:SEO trails only social media and online video as places where marketers (not just search marketers, but ALL marketers) will be shifting dollars.Meanwhile, SEO continues to outpace PPC in terms of CAGR. We've still got a long way to go before balance is established between the share of clicks SEO commands and the fraction of spend it receives, but the gap is slowly closing.#7 - 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate OptimizationIf I were doing another startup today, it would focus on software for conversion rate optimization. I think this is still the most under-utilized and highest ROI activities in the marketing department, but more awareness is on its way. CRO isn't just about testing; it's about building a process for improving conversion over time. Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this, yet few invest. I think 2010 is the year, simply because it's an inflection point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value. These guysare likely in for a blockbuster year; I wish I could invest :-)This graphic comes via my post on choosing which Internet Marketing Channel to Pursue.#8 - More Queries will Send Less TrafficGoogle & Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine. This is a good product practice for both companies, and I'm surprised Google's taken so long to move away from their "get people off Google" point-of-view, but it's definitely happening. Check out some recent examples:Everything I need to know is right there - the last game score, the record, the opponent, their next match day and time. The only thing missing? What channel it's playing on in my area.I don't even have to complete my query! Google's got that weather report sitting in the suggest box. They wrote about this feature herewhich launched last week. Google O/S had another good poston the topic.Thankfully, I'm not actually headed to Kodiak, but those results are pretty spiffy, and are likely to prevent me from needing to visit Alaskaair.com and get that flight info.The customer service number is something Bing's started to provide more and more (though there's one company even they don't have that data on). With Fedex, you don't even need to leave Bing to track a package (Google also offers similar functionality).My perception is that the more the engines can apply "instant answers" to search queries, the more they will, and the less any other sites will see traffic from those queries. It's a better user experience this way, and I'm certain it's one of the biggest things that engenders loyalty and return queries - something both engines are desperately competing for.  This post isn't intended to be one-sided, and I'd love to hear from you - do you agree? Disagree? Think I'm out of my head? Let everyone know :-)Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by Tom_CThis past week saw the launch of Google's real-time searchand quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it's not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this.Questions I'd love to see the answer to are things like:What triggers real-time one-boxes?How long do they last?Are they tied to a geographic location?Are they tied to a language?Unfortuantely I think it's a bit early to have answers to questions like this, so rather than tackle these questions I'm just going to talk a little bit about how you can go about tracking the impacts of real-time search results on your industry.Does real-time search affect my industry?The answer is probably yes. For search terms that have hardly any tweet-volume I've already seen examples where literally one or two tweets can generate a real-time one-box. Sometimes even for the brand name term. That means that more or less any breaking news in your industry will generate some level of real-time results.But what about other industries? After all many of us will be working on sites that target keyphrases that people DO tweet about. For us, the focus is on trending search terms. The key thing is to identify the types of keyphrase that might feature real-time search results. The most useful way of doing this that I've found is to monitor twitter volume and in particular monitor peaks and troughs in volume. Trendisticwill do this nicely for you. The first neat thing from Trendistic is that you can see a long list of hot topics by day in the archive:Browsing through the archives we see that there are certain topics which come up again and again such as TV, film, sports, celebrity etc. These search terms are alwasy going to be affected most by real-time search and SEOs working in this field are likely to already be used to working with QDF search results and various other one-boxes like News.How Do I Track Real-Time Traffic?The second nice thing from Trendistic is the ability to query individual terms and see when peaks and troughs occured over time, for example here's a snapshot of the [eagles] term (nice win Eagles!):By using a service like this you can query the historic search volume and take an educated guess at when real-time search might have been triggered. By doing this for your main search terms you can start to understand things like strange traffic drops or spikes that might have been caused by real-time one boxes hanging out in your SERPs.What about if you're actively engaging in twitter though? If you feel like you might have gained a portion of your search traffic from tweets that were appearing in real-timesearch results then you should think about tracking those clicks.Tracking real-time search volume and one-box traffic is a difficult problem however and one that isn't completely solved. That said, here's a few things that might be of use. Firstly, for anyone seeing #-based Google URLsyou can actually track clicks from different parts of the page. Looking at the following real-time search for [nexus one]:I clicked on two different results, the first one was a 'real' result that appeared in the real-time box, that is a page that's been crawled recently and shows up via Google rather than showing up because Google found the result on Facebook or Twitter etc. With the # URLs at Google in action I saw the following full referral path:http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=blog_result&ct=result&cd=11&ved=0CBcQmAEwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccortez.com%2Fhtc-nexus-one-blessed-by-the-fcc-updated%2F&rct=j&q=nexus+one&ei=gComS7LCDZehjAeDwdTOBw&usg=AFQjCNF2939x_yuKVTzL9UlN6m23cw0KogNote the "&oi=blog_result" in the referring URL (bolded added, obviously). This let's you see any real-time traffic that has come via a crawled blog post. After that I clicked on a twittered URL and got the following:http://www.google.co.uk/url?url=http://bit.ly/7315xj&rct=j&ei=2yomS4y7NYvNjAfQ3qXfBw&sa=X&oi=microblog_result&resnum=9&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CD8QoAQoADAI&q=nexus+one&usg=AFQjCNGWb9DkQaPZd2NGuOg6Th7lWd9hsgNote both the url=http://bit.ly/7315xj and&oi=microblog_result (again, bolded). This allows you to see both where the click came from (a real-time microblog result, i.e. from a site like twitter or facebook) but also the URL that was twittered (in this case the bit.ly link).These referring URLs will show up in your server logs but unfortunately won't show up in Google Analytics (since Google treats these all as search queries and so will just dump them in the same place and only let you see the keyword searched for). To get them to show up in Google Analytics you need to set up a profile to show the full referring URL, such as the filter detailed in part 2 of this post.Not all users see these # Google URLs however, most are still seeing the old style search?q= Google URLs. From looking at the traffic for sites where we have the appropriate filter set up I'd say somewhere between 5 and 10% of users are seeing these URLs. This means that if you can get this kind of data for a small proportion of your traffic and extrapolate for the other 90% of users. (Btw, does anyone have any more accurate stats on the % of users seeing which search result type? I've not seen anything concrete anywhere...)Of course, looking at the example above we see that a fair amount of traffic from micro blogging servicies actually goes through URL shorteners such as bit.ly. In that case there's another method you can use to track your traffic. Take a look at the following referral list for this bit.ly URL:This allows you to see which of your bit.ly links have appeared on Google search results pages - we can see from this example that 2 have come from new # style Google search results pages and one has come from the old-school format.I'm sure over the coming weeks more and more will get said about real-time search but hopefully this has been food for thought!If you haven't yet grabbed your copy of our new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVDseries, there's good news! SEOmoz extended the special launch pricing of 20% off plus free shipping until December 18th. Order your copy nowbefore the offer is gone!Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by great scott!They scrape you, they copy you, you license your content, you need geo-targeted versions of your pages...whatever the reason, duplicate content happens. In this week's Whiteboard Friday we'll look at how to deal with duplicate content in ways that will help you make sure you're the one who ranks for your material (as you should) and what traps to avoid .SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Dealing with Duplicate Contentfrom Scott Willoughbyon Vimeo.If you haven't yet grabbed your copy of our new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVDseries, I've got good news! We've extended our special launch pricing of 20% off plus free shipping for another week. This sale price will only be available until December 18th, and then it's gone for good, so order your copysoon!Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by Dr. PeteYou'd have a hard time telling by my posts (let alone my Twitter stream), but I'm supposedly a psychologist or something, so I thought it was time I did a little psychologizing here on the Moz blog. One thing I like to think I've learned over the years is the subtle art of persuasion – not the manipulative, why-won't-my-clients-be-reasonable variety, but the art of communicating in a way that helps promote win-win situations with clients, prospects, and partners.This post is the first in what could be a series (if you like it) about the art of professional persuasion. Whether it's your boss, client, prospect, co-worker, or website visitor, your success often hinges on the ability to communicate persuasively.The Yes/No QuestionEvery web designer has a version of this story – you work your little fingers to the bone to come up with the perfect design, research your client's color preferences, industry competitors, and TiVo playlist, finally present your masterpiece to them, and then gasp in horror as they rip your baby to shreds like a pack of wolves on tainted Slim Fast. What happened? Whether you realize it or not, you forced your client against a wall by asking them a Yes/No question:On the one-hand, you have your design, and on the other hand, nothing. Your client can only approve or disapprove. If they approve, great; if they don't, then they start to do what all people do: rationalize their decisions. On a gut level, there's something about your design they don't like, so they look for things to pick apart. You (naturally) get defensive, and it's all downhill from there. The Yes/Yes QuestionSo, what happens if you give your client two options? You've turned a Yes/No question into an A/B question. Instead of "Do you like it?", you've made the shift to "Which one do you like?":Not to over-illustrate what may be obvious by now, but you've just asked a Yes/Yes question, and the answer to a Yes/Yes question is almost always "Yes".Isn't That A Lot of Work?I know what you're thinking, because I thought it for years: isn't creating two designs a lot of work? Pardon a tangent, but I should say that design is just one example – you can apply this principle to proposals of just about any kind (except maybe the marriage kind – "Will you marry me? How about Chad?").A designer friend finally turned me on to the secret – take the original proposal and make some modifications you can live with it. At first, I have to admit that this seemed like cheating. If you just tweak a couple of colors and fonts and act like it's a whole new proposal, isn't that a bit shady? Well, no, and here's why. First, what amounts to "just tweaking" for you only seems easy because you're a professional. Second, every one of us, in the process of creating anything, inevitably makes choices along the way. Many times, we make a decision because we have to, but we could've gone more than one direction. Revisit those decision points, and use them to generate a second proposal. Ultimately, you'll be able to present people with options that aren't too difficult to create and still maintain your integrity.What if They Mix and Match?There's another worry people have with this approach, and it is justified in some cases, if a bit overblown. What if you present two options, and your target audience mixes and matches in ways you can't live with? This could be true for designs as well as sales proposals. The complicated answer is that you eventually learn to engineer your choices in a way that makes mixing-and-matching a bit more palatable.The short answer is: So what? Would you rather have a discussion about how Element B doesn't fit Site A and have to get creative or have your client tell you why Site A sucks and they don't want to pay you? If you can get your client to mix-and-match, then at least they're telling you what they like. Hearing a laundry list of what someone doesn't like is useless – hearing what they do like gives you options.How Much Choice Is Too Much?So, by my own logic, if two choices are good, how about three or more? More is always better, right?Sorry, got carried away for a minute there. Unfortunately, more choices won't necessarily yield more excitement for your target audience. Recent research certainly suggests that there's such a thing as too many choices. In most cases, 2 options will be sufficient – in some situations, especially where a lot of money is involved or the risk of a bad decision is high, 3 or more choices may be required.Let your own decision path be your guide. If you naturally encounter points along the creative path where you can't decide which of two options is better, that may be a good place to diverge and create a second version of whatever you're working on. If this happens frequently, then 3-4 versions may be natural. Just don't invent versions for the sake of bombarding your audience with options – the goal is to give people a choice, not overwhelm them to the point of decision paralysis.A Few More ExamplesI've used the website design example to illustrate this concept, but there are many more cases where I think Yes/Yes questions can help you persuade someone in a win/win way:Sales proposals- Try 2 package options or pricing levels Boss proposals- Bosses love choices - 2+ options boost the odds you'll get 1 of them Copywriting- Provide a long and short version (if applicable) Logo design- Consider color options to allow for client preference Christmas lists- I would like a (1) Upscaling DVD player or (2) HD TiVo - it's your choice ;) Of course, never present an option you can't live with. The whole point is to create a choice that helps you get an end result that's positive for both you and the client/boss/etc. Get creative, and you'll be amazed how often a little extra work up front can save you hours of headaches down the road.Speaking of persuasion, this is where I try to persuade you to check out SEOmoz's 6-DVD Advanced SEO Trainingseries. The introductory price (20% off + free shipping) has been extended until December 12.Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by randfishI've been a big fan of Chris Dixon's excellent blogfor a while now, so you can imagine that I was really excited to see him writing about SEOin a post last week. Chris kindly called out SEOmoz, which humbled me, but he also espoused some thinking in the comments that made me a bit concerned and was the catalyst for this post. Here's how it went:RAND:Chris - I think the biggest thing you've forgotten to mention is that 70%+ of the weighting/ranking used by all of the engines depends on links. If you're not thinking about how your content and pages will incent users/bloggers/writers/media/other sites to link to your work, you'll lose out to someone who does.A while back I got riled up about the lack of SEO in startup marketing and wrote about it - http://j.mp/4q9zkh- might be relevant/useful, though I did write with a bit more anger than was likely deserved.CHRIS:Rand - totally agree re links. But isn't getting links primarily about creating great content? Read the article you link to btw and am in complete agreement.RAND:Tragically, at least in my experience, the answer is a resounding no. Great content is easily missed by the web's link-heavy audience, while some pretty crummy content that's been marketed well (or made the right connections or comes from the right sources) will tend to overperform.The web's link graph isn't a meritocracy - like everything else in life, it's a popularity contest. Those who find the best ways to distribute, promote and market their works to the audience most likely to link to it are going to succeed much more so than just the "great content" producers.Just think of it like politics. The best, most rational, reasoned, intelligent arguments are the exception, not the rule. Instead, the conversation and media attention (and thus, public awareness) is focused on concepts that are easy to grasp, virally distributable (which often puts rumor and innuendo above fact) and fit a compelling narrative (rather than add complexity).A post on this topic - http://j.mp/4tYThKI would love to tell Chris that he's right, that the better the content, the better, higher quality and greater quantity of links that content earns. But, perhaps sadly, that's not the case. What those in the content world would call "better" does not always (nor even mostly) garner the links and rankings. Instead, those who have "better optimized" for attracting links tend to far outshine their peers with rankings and traffic.This may seem like a tragedy, or even a travesty of the democratic structure the web is supposed to represent, but in fact, it's the way all marketing has worked for generations. The "best" restaurants are often family-owned, hole-in-the-wall, never-marketed-themselves joints whose fabulous epicurean creations are a secret to all but the most diligent culinary Clouseaus. Meanwhile, the affront to humanity and cooking that is Olive Garden advertises relentlessly, conducts impeccable market research and appeals to the lowest common denominator in town after town to achieve geographic and market-penetration ubiquity (BTW - my wife is Italian and thus recoils at the very mention of this establishment and the tarnish it's brought to her beloved countrymen's kitchens).Like many parts of life - it's not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field. It's a strange, almost paradoxical leap of logic, but one you internalize this principle, it gets easier to accept and to spread to your clients and managers.p.s. I'm also a fan of Chris Dixon's startup, Hunch- I'd urge you to check it out and try answering a few dozen questions. The results are quite fascinating.Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by willcritchlowBingrecently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it.For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomainis a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenufor mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form.The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like:linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site - more on this below)linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title)linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page)The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query - with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com.How do you use this for SEO?This is a linkbuilding tip post - the idea being two-fold:suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those links (more on this below but it's very effective for building highly trusted links)sometimes the "one-step-removed" linkbuilding model can work superbly well for identifying linkbuilding targets. If I were running a cooking blog (wait, I do - it took superhuman effort not to drop a shameless link there), it might be a good idea to look at something like thisas a superb linkbuilding target listThe information contained in the second approach is typically findable through other means (or the targets are likely to appear on your radar in other ways) and there is a lot of searching through chaff to find wheat. I wanted to run through a worked example today to show you how powerful method #1 can be:Worked exampleI had to pick a niche and a target for my worked example. I decided to imagine I was linkbuilding for a technical but not-specifically-web-related company. I'm trying to get links from trusted authoritative domains so I start with big educational institutions.As some of you may know, I studied at the University of Cambridge(ending with a year at the Statslab). I don't want them getting link requests from all you lot, so I picked Oxford(**).I'm pretending my imaginary client works in some area of telecoms and has resources and technical papers on subjects like wimax and spectrum usage.First up, wimax:Start with the linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain%3Aox.ac.uk+wimax&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=nPick out an interesting-looking resource: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.htmlDive over to the labs tools to find ox.ac.uk links to this page: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/backlinks?uri=http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470510285.html&linktype=pageThis highlights this kind of page: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/details.php?id=O08C835H6JIt turns out that conted.ox.ac.uk is a goldmine for linkbuilders. It's the Continuing Educationsection of the Oxford University site and seems to be very generous with linking out. I might suggest that my client gives a talk or writes a resource for a CPD course. At the very least, it might be worth creating some content to target this kind of page.Tip: I find it best to look for links to pages that aren't homepagesbecause it's typically easier to find where the link originates from. Bing doesn't have an effective link: operator meaning that we have to use Yahoo, Linkscape or similar. Because we are then not using the same index, it can be tricky to track down the link found by linkfromdomain.Another example starting with spectrum auctions - sometimes it's funny where this kind of research can take you:A different linkfromdomain search: http://www.bing.com/search?q=linkfromdomain%3Aox.ac.uk+spectrum+auctions&filt=all&first=11&FORM=POREA different kind of interesting-looking (and, as it happens, off-topic) resource: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.htmlA demonstration of using Yahoo! instead of labs tools to find the source of the link: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Farts-entertainment%2Fbooks%2Freviews%2Fdead-aid-by-dambisa-moyo-1519875.html+site%3Aox.ac.uk&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35Leads to a new strategy - find a way to write about this college and drop them a line: http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/news/media.html(Incidentally, I found a very similar opportunity on the Cambridge site, but no, I'm not going to tell you about it.)In an unexpected turn of events, I also found some pretty active blogs writing about my target subject matter on ox.ac.uk URLs. Even I'm not mean enough to fill up those guys' inboxes with outreach from you lot just because they picked the wrong university.(*) I don't know about anyone else, but I am rooting for a more balanced search market (particularly in the UK, where Google has a ~90% market share). I think competition is good for consumers and for businesses.(**) seriously, we don't get on (US folks, think of the relationship between Duke and UNC) but I'm not encouraging anyone to spam Oxford University. Really. I'm not. Even though the varsity match is this week.There are some other great resources on linkfromdomain - I really liked PPC blog'stip about expiredand for saledomains.Rand has also written about the uses of linkfromdomain for finding spam you are linking toas well as teasing you with the fact that he "gave up"a similar tip to my worked example above at SMX Advanced.Technorati Tagslinkbuilding, bing, linkfromdomainDo you like this post? YesNo