Illustrating the Long Tail

Posted by randfish

The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail – gives some stats:

…the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic

• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic

• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic

• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic

The truth is my research is still greatly understating the true size of the tail because:

• The Hitwise sample contains 10 million U.S. Internet users and a complete data set would uncover much larger portions of the long tail.

• The data set I used filtered out adult searches.

• I only looked at 3-months worth of data (which were some of the slower months for search engines).

To help put this in perspective, I made a few spiffy charts that can help to illustrate these points:

In this first chart, you can see a representation of Hitwise’s data from the four chunks Bill broke down.

In this next representation, I’m showing the classic “long tail” style curve, but color-coded to help show the various areas of keyword demand. Note that you could conceptually say that the 9,000 of the top 10,000 terms should technically fit into the chunky middle. Bill classified them thusly in his post, but I tend to think that at those demand levels, we’re still talking about “head” of the curve figures.

For both of these graphics, there’s a large, high-res version available by clicking the chart. You can find lots, lots more on our Free Charts page

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Charting ‘Unique Keyphrases’ Using Advanced Segments

Posted by RobOusbey

A useful indicator of SEO success is the number of unique keyphrases that send traffic to a website. An increase in this number is a reflection of increased trust in the site by search-engines.

Google Analytics can show you the total number of unique organic keyphrases at a glance, on the Traffic Sources ⇒ Keywords page. (Make sure you select ‘non-paid’ to exclude any CPC campaigns.)

This post will show you how to break that down to a more useful level of granularity and help you to create a table such as the following:

We’ll aim to categorise traffic into three buckets: ‘branded’, ‘head terms’ and ‘mid-long tail terms’. (In reality, we’ll actually calculate the first two, and the third one will be ‘everything that is left’.)

As we often can’t export enough keywords from Google Analytics to do the analysis offline, we will have to use ‘Advanced Segments’ to do this. This means that we can only group together ‘branded terms’ and ‘head terms’ in ways that we can explain through AND and OR statements.

The process for doing this goes like this:

1. Plan to create advanced segments that define each group of keywords you want to track
2. Define rules using ‘AND’ & ‘OR’ statements that describe which keywords should be in each group
3. Apply these groups each month, one at a time, to the previous month’s data, in order to reveal the number of unique keywords.

Since this ‘rule defining’ will take place in Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments feature, we’ll be using ‘regular expressions’ – a clever but pretty technical method of defining which items in a set should be included in a particular subset. (More details about them at this site.)

The next sections may have particular appeal to the more ‘techie’ readers (or just those people feeling brave) – so do feel free to just skip down to the end to see screen-shots of these segments applied to the keywords report, if the nitty-gritty isn’t your cup of tea.

Creating the ‘Branded Terms’ Segment

If you’ve not really implemented Advanced Segments before, I suggest starting with Google Analytics’ help pages on the topic, but also having a play with the feature, to see how it works. (Really, do have a play. I’m going to assume you at least have understood what most of the main buttons do, and that’s a great way to find out.)

Planning the Segment

Let’s use a fictional company, TechNet, who make a product called the Vox9000. Their segment for ‘branded terms’ will include anything that mentions these terms.

Define the Rules, Create the Segment

To create the segment for branded terms, begin by clicking ‘Advanced Segments’ ⇒ ‘Create new custom segment’.

In the first ‘dimension or metric’ space, add a ‘Medium’ block (found under ‘Dimensions’) and set Condition to ‘Matches exactly’ and Value to ‘organic’. Then hit ‘and‘ to add another section. Place a ‘Keywords’ block here, with Condition as ‘Matches regular expression’ and a value that is all your branded terms, separated by the pipe character: |

(NB: the pipe acts as an ‘OR’ in these regular expressions.)

As an example, for TechNet (which people often search for it with a spaces, as ‘Tech Net’) that makes a product called ‘Vox9000′ (sometimes searched for as ‘Vox 9000′) would use the following string here: technet|tech net|vox9000|vox 9000

Give the segment a name, and save it.

Creating the ‘Head Terms’ Segment

Planning the Segment

The next segment – the head terms – is a bit more complicated, and you’ll see why it’s important for us to to specify rules that will define the head keyphrases.

Let’s imagine that TechNet sells laptops and notebooks in Philadelphia and Baltimore. (Therefore head terms will be those such as ‘notebooks’ or ‘laptops in philadelphia’)

In this example, the rules to define head terms might be:

• the phrase can’t mention any branded terms
• it must mention one of their product groups (laptop, notebook)
• it can only have two words of 3+ characters (this allows for some short linking words, such as a, in, at, etcetera)
• it can only have a maximum of four words in total.

Define the Rules, Create the Segment

The last two rules can be the trickiest to implement, so we’ll look at these first. Two insights help us solve these requirements:

Insight 1: Combining the two rules, and using S and L to indicate short words (1 or 2 characters) and long words (3+ characters) we see that the only twenty possible structures for keyphrases are: L, LS, SL, LL, LSS, SLS, SSL, LLS, LSL, SLL, LSSS, SLSS, SSLS, SSSL, LLSS, LSLS, LSSL, SLLS, SLSL, SSLL

Insight 2: The regular expression: \b[^ ]{3,50}\b matches a word of between 3 & 50 characters. It’s also necessary to know that ^ matches something at the beginning of an expression, and $ matches at the end. (Seriously, they do. Start by going through the examples at this site if you want to know why that’s the case.)

We’re now in a position to take the list of combinations from ‘Insight 1′ and replace ‘S’ with \b[^ ]{1,2}\b (matching words with 1/2 characters) and ‘L’ with \b[^ ]{3,50}\b, putting spaces in-between, wrapping in parentheses, and matching at beginning and end. Missed that? OK, here are examples of some of the resulting statements:

L becomes ^(\b[^ ]{3,50}\b)$
SL becomes ^(\b[^ ]{1,2}\b \b[^ ]{3,50}\b)$
LSL becomes ^(\b[^ ]{3,50}\b \b[^ ]{3,50}\b \b[^ ]{1,2}\b)$
etc.

You should join the twenty created expressions together using a pipe character, to create the resulting, massive, expression. To save space, I won’t post the whole expression in, but you can see what it looks like if you hover your mouse over this text.

NB: There seems to be a limit to the number of parts to an expression that you can put into Google Analytics, so I tend to break this up into two parts – say, those matching on three or less words, and those matching four – and put them as ‘OR’ alternatives in one section. I’ve done that below to demonstrate.

The resultant segment rules for ‘Branded Keyphrases’ look like this:

The image shown above reads:

• • Dimension: Medium, Condition: Matches exactly, Value: organic
• AND
  • Dimension: Keyword, Condition: Does not match regular expression, Value: technet|tech net|vox9000|vox 9000
• AND
  • Dimension: Keyword, Condition: Matches regular expression, Value: (hover over here to see it)
  • OR
  • Dimension: Keyword, Condition: Matches regular expression, Value: (hover over here to see it)
• AND
  • Dimension: Keyword, Condition: Matches regular expression, Value: laptop|notebook

Collecting the numbers

With our two Advanced Segments defined, we can head back to the ‘keywords’ page and set the date range to the last month. Click each image to see it full size.

We can apply each custom segment in turn, in order to collect the following numbers for September:

• Total keyphrases: 64,278
• Branded keyphrases: 393
• Head keyphrases: 2,835
• Other keyphrases: 61,050 (calculated from the previous three numbers)

You can now put these numbers in a spreadsheet in order to chart the change in number of unique keyphrases as months go by.

You can use these basic techniques to create and report on even more well defined segments of keyphrases (for example: you could group keyphrases by competitiveness, department, intent, etc.) If there are particular steps here that require more explanation, or you’re looking for more ideas about how to apply this to your SEO reporting structure, drop a comment below.

Link Building Has Changed

Posted by randfish

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.

Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more “white hat” kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.

As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts. Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.

I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:

Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring to Bing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:

• Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
• The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the “old crusty links” paradigm may be fading a bit.
• Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
• Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
• QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
• Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
• Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
• Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
• Billions of non-linked “references” flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.

As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.

Now we just have to figure out the tactics…

Is Social Media ROI Unmeasurable?

Posted by Dr. Pete

I’m reporting live from Pubcon Las Vegas this week, along with some of the SEOmoz team. To be honest, we’ve struggled a bit with how to cover the conference here on the blog. As someone who only hits a couple of conferences per year, I know how annoying it can be to have to hear how great an event is that you already regret not being able to go to. On top of that, sometimes information that seems brilliant in context just doesn’t translate into a quick blog blurb or Tweet. So, in the interest of providing value to those of you who aren’t here at Pubcon, we’re going to try to take some deeper dives into the content, hopefully providing some of that context you may be missing.

Is That An Elephant?

No, I’m not trying to distract you. These first two days of sessions, I couldn’t help but feel that there was an elephant in the room with us during the social media sessions. The enthusiasm for social media (and especially Twitter) has been stronger than ever, but we all seem reluctant to dampen that enthusiasm by talking about an uncomfortable fact – very few of us have really found a way to measure social media success. Sure, there are internal metrics for any given platform – Twitter followers, for example – but without something external to tie it to, those are little more than high scores in the social media video game.

The B-word

Of course, the default answer is always “branding”. Unfortunately, much like “engagement”, branding is too often just a distraction, an intangible excuse we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure. Ironically, during a session that had nothing to do with social media, I heard something close to an answer during Q&A. No matter what you think branding is, find a way to measure it. Here are just a few possiblities:

• Direct brand mentions
• Links with brand-related anchor text
• Branded search volume

Where’s there a number, there’s a path to calculating ROI.

Target a Response

At this morning’s keynote, we had a chance to hear from the marketing departments of various Vegas hotels. Like the rest of us, these marketers are learning as they go, trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook to drive real business value. Most of the hotel marketing departments see social media as a direct-response channel, and that’s certainly a start. Put out a special offer through social media channels, and you can measure the response. Where there’s a measurable response, there’s ROI.

MGM Grand’s marketing head hinted at another possibility – their employees monitor Twitter to spot dissatisfied hotel guests, dispatching staff to help solve the problem. What’s the natural next step? Measure this response. How many problems did they intercept? How many were they able to solve? What does solving one customer’s problem equal in real dollars? All of these questions can be answered, and from those answers comes tangible value.

Find a Comparison

Finally, during a session about how social media and search intersect, we heard a great example from Lee Odden about how to put a value on social media. Lee mentioned that his firm drives about 15-20 major media mentions per month from social media. He estimates that this equates to paying a PR firm $10,000/month. This may not sound like metrics in the traditional sense, but it’s an entirely valid approach. PR costs money to generate, and social media has replaced that value.

Just Measure It

When it comes to measuring social media ROI, what are we really afraid of? If I start measuring, will I have to admit that being a 307th-level Maniac on Facebook Mafia Wars isn’t providing solid business value? Stop making excuses, stop mumbling about branding, and find a way to quantify social media success in real dollars.

Headsmacking Tip #16: Meet the Linkerati in Person

Posted by randfish

We all know about the Linkerati by now – how to identify them, how they’re segmented and why they’re the secret to SEO. Yet, time and again, I see link builders and companies pass up amazing opportunities to earn links and attention from those who have the best ability to help your content/brand spread virally.

I’ll lay out two scenarios below to help illustrate this point:

Scenario 1: Emailing a Prominent Blogger/Writer/Journalist/Site Owner/Social Media Personality/Etc. Hoping for a Link

You/your company:

• Identify a list of Linkerati that may be relevant/interested in your business/content
• Send a carefully crafted email to each individual, hoping to attract their attention and interest
• Follow up with those who reply (and maybe those who don’t) with emails or even a phone call
• Request a review of your product/tool/site/idea

Scenario 2: Meeting that Same Person First, then Following Up

You/your company:

• Identify prominent (or even relatively less known) Linkerati in your city or at an event you’re attending
• Schedule a meeting / invite them to coffee or to tour your offices (or even just go to an event you know they’ll be at)
• Introduce yourself politely and humbly and mention you’re a fan. Exchange business cards, have a chat and let them know what you do (also helps if you can find some non-work related topics to bond on as well)
• Follow up with an email thanking them for the meeting and asking if they’d take a look at your product/tool/site/idea

I’d argue that while Scenario 1 is more scalable, it’s also potentially damaging in the long run. When you first introduce your work to someone who can help it spread, you have that single chance to make a first impression. If the relationship matters and you’re seeking a high “conversion rate” for attracting attention from the Linkerati, use Scenario 2.

The beauty of these links is that they not only create value for SEO, but often attract second-order effects like increased brand awareness, links/tweets from the followers & fans of the Linkerati, and improved odds that you’ll be positively remembered and introduced when someone mentions they need “X” (whatever it is your product/tool/site/idea does).

In-person connections have always been powerful attractors of value for me in the SEO, social media and startup worlds and when I see early stage (and mature, later-stage companies) engage in this fashion, it’s almost always positive. Just make sure you’re professional, candid, friendly and never over-bearing in your interactions; chances are you’ll get much more than a link.

New & Interesting Insights Into Google Rankings & Spam from Pubcon

Posted by randfish

Tonight’s post comes via the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas and is likely of interest to many in the webmaster and search communities. Today, during the Interactive Site Review Session, Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, along with Vanessa Fox of NinebyBlue and Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft took thorough dives into a number of sites. The session was well coverd on Twitter, and in live form by Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.

Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox on the Site Review Panel (photo credit: davecolorado.com)

A few points in particular stood out and are worthy of coverage:

• Blocking Internet Archive may be a Negative Signal
  Matt Cutts noted that spammers very frequently block archive.org from crawling/storing their pages and few reputable sites engage in this. Thus, it’s a potential spam signal to search engines. SEO Theory has a good writeup on when and why there may be legitimate reasons to do this, but webmasters seeking to avoid scrutiny may want to take heed.
  _
• Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings
  Maile Ohye actually mentioned this at SMX East in New York, but Matt Cutts repeated it again today. In a nutshell – while slow page load times won’t negatively impact your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. This comes on a day when the Google Chrome blog introduced their new SPDY research project. I’m particularly happy about this news, because it’s also true that load times have a positive second-order effect on SEO. Pingomatic recently published some excellent research on load times from Akamai noting the expectations of users for faster web browsing have doubled in the past 2 years. In addition, fast loading pages are, in my opinion, considerably more likely to earn links, retweets and other forms of sharing than their slow-loading peers. This tool from Pingdom is a great place to start testing your own site.
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• It May be Easier to Walk Away from Banned Domains
  Sites that Google’s webspam team has severely penalized or banned entirely from the index can be very difficult to re-include, and thus, Matt suggested that “walking away” and “starting over” may be a more prudent strategy. In my opinion, this is largely due to link profile issues – if your site has a “spammy” link profile, it’s tough to ask an engineer to sort out the wheat from the chaffe manually (or algorithmically) and stop counting only the bad links. Thus, re-consideration requests may not be as effective a use of time as registering a new site and trying to re-build a more trusted presence.
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• Repetition of Keywords in Internal Anchor Text (particularly in footers) is Troubling
  During a specific site’s review, Matt noted that keyword usage in the anchor text of many internal links, particularly in the footer of a website, is seen as potentially manipulative. Yahoo!’s search engineers have noted this in the past and we at SEOmoz have seen specific cases where removal of keyword-stuffed internal links from a footer had immediate impacts on Google rankings (removing what appeared to be large negative ranking penalties sitewide).
  _
• Having Multiple Sites Targeting Subsections of the Same Niche can be Indicative of Spam
  Matt Cutts today mentioned that “having multiple sites for different areas of the same industry can be a red flag to Google.” Though Googlers have mentioned this before, today’s site review panel brought renewed attention to both Google’s ability and proclivity for carefully considering not only an individual site, but all the other sites owned by that registrant/entity/person. Given Google’s tremendous amount of data on web usage behavior, many SEOs suspect that they track beyond simply domain registration records.

I also presented at Pubcon today – on a panel called Linkfluence: How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk (live SERoundtable coverage here) - as the counterpoint speaker (on why not to buy links). I’ll try to have that presentation in written format early next week on the blog.

p.s. I was asked by a large number of attendees at the conference about our venture capital fundraising experience. I expect to be able to write about that very soon and certainly appreciate all the support.

p.p.s. For those who are interested, my brother, Evan Fishkin (who works at Portent Interactive) had his head shaved by Google’s webspam chief. On a personal note, I must say I was particularly impressed with Matt’s ability to shave a head without nicks or cuts, and his foresight in bringing proper equipment. Unfortunately, I’m not fully briefed on why this occurred, but I do know that my little brother was in terrible need of a trim (photo of my shocked observance of the event here & more photos/video here).

What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 2

Posted by chenry

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

What really makes a blog post worth linking to?  In my last post, What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 1, I took a look at the 3,800 blog posts on SEOmoz and did some analysis on a few different aspects of the posts and their affect on the number of in linking domains (ILDs).  Some of the results were very interesting to me and it made me want to push it further.

I created a list of 40 SEO/SEM blogs that I read and feel are important to people in the industry and set those as my sample population.  I first crawled each website and collected a list of over 72,330 different blog posts from the 40 different websites.  Then over the course of the next few days, I crawled each post and collected the following information in my database:

• Blog Post Title
• Original URL
• # of Links from Root Domains (Via Linkscape API)
• # of ILDs (Via Linkscape API)
• If The Post Had Images, Lists, Or Videos
• Content of Post (No Comments or Other Text on Site)
• # of Words in Post

POSTS TITLE EFFECT ON ILDs

Does the length of the post’s title affect how many domains will link to it?  The data suggests that posts with a title length between 10 and 18 words are on average more linked to than those with less or more.  The data also suggests there may be a “sweet” spot around 14 to 16 words in length.  The chart below was created without removing stop words.

This data proves to me that a descriptive title is what the linkerati is looking for.  Going overboard on the length of the title can prove to be a bad move also.

EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS WITH TITLE LENGTH IN THE “SWEET SPOT”

• Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow
• Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
• What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones

POSTS LENGTH EFFECT ON ILDs

Post length is a long debated thing out there in the blogosphere.  Most bloggers will tell you that you should keep your posts around 500 to 900 words, and that might be stretching it.  When it comes to SEO/SEM blogs, longer more content filled posts are more linked to than those with limited amount of content.

From the chart below you can see there is a word range that seems to collect more ILDs than other word ranges.  Based on the data, the ideal length of your posts should be around 2328 to 2618 words.  In my previous post, the ideal length for only SEOmoz’s post was between 1800 and 3000 words.

The chart above shows posts only up to 2812 words, but accounts for over 99.55% of all the posts. Posts that were greater than 2812 words really had a low number of ILDs.  For this reason and for the display of the chart, they were removed.

EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS (BETWEEN 2328 AND 2618 WORDS)

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• SMX East: Give It Up
• Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview

DEPTH OF POSTS EFFECT ON ILDs

Seos know that you want to keep your key content in as few subfolders as possible but does this affect the number of ILDs you receive?  The data suggests that the depth of your post doesn’t affect the number ILDs.  The graph below shows that just about half of the blogs out there place their content two subfolders deep, such as seomoz.org/blog/POST-TITLE.

MEDIA’S EFFECT ON ILDs

What role does placing list, images, and/or videos in a post play on the number of ILDs?  The data shows that putting any one of the media’s in your post will increase the number of ILDs you receive.  Putting a list on your plain text post could double the number of ILDs you receive.  The results are even more outstanding when all three types of media are used.

Do I really believe that you can take any post, slap a picture in it and you will automatically receive more links?  No, but if you have decent content and media to support your post, it will appeal to more users and in turn increase the number of potential links.  I find it amazing that just by adding images and lists to your post could increase the number of ILDs by a large percent.  Images and lists are one of the easiest things to create and anyone can do it, so why aren’t they?  See the chart below for the full specs on adding media to your post.

TOP MEDIA POST EXAMPLES

So I’m sure you are all wondering what some good examples are of the different type of post along with the media.  Below are some links to some great posts that contain different types of media and have been successful.  Some of these posts should be your guide when creating new content for your site.

ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES

• Twitter Exploit Still Works
• The Paid Links Debate Rages On – SES San Jose 2007

ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS

• Google Caffeine
• Submitting to Web Directories to Build Your Link Profile

ONLY LISTS & IMAGES

• Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
• Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS

• You Can’t Be Everybody’s Friends
• FTC Going After Bloggers = Epic Fail

ONLY LISTS

• Filing a reinclusion request
• 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog

ONLY VIDEOS

• More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results
• Interview With Paul Sloan

ONLY IMAGES

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

NONE

• Dashes vs. underscores
• 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

TOP DOMAINS FOR MEDIA TYPE

The data shows that there were certain domains that tended to use certain types of media in their posts.  Below I’ve put together two sites for each category so if you enjoy posts of a certain type you can visit their blog.

ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES

• 10e20.com
• bruceclay.com

ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS

• seobythesea.com
• seobook.com

ONLY LISTS & IMAGES

• outspokenmedia.com
• unstuckdigital.com

ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS

• distilled.co.uk
• shoemoney.com

ONLY LISTS

• seobythesea.com
• seobook.com

ONLY VIDEOS

• pronetadvertising.com
• shoemoney.com

ONLY IMAGES

• bloommedia.co.uk
• freshegg.com

NONE

• ericgoldman.org
• searchenginelowdown.com

AUTHORITIES EFFECT ON ILDs

What role does a blog authority play in the number of ILDs?  Seems like a simple question and the data seems to show that if your an authority in your niche, you will generate many more ILDs than someone who is not.  Look at the chart below and you can see that Matt Cutt’s blog generates almost twice as many as its closest competitor, sugarrae.com!

TOP TOPIC THAT ATTRACT LINKS

Unlike SEOmoz not every blog places their post into nice categories and if they do, those categories will not match across all the sites.  So how do we determine what topics are attracting the most links and are good topics to create posts about?  We crawl 72,300 posts, determine the ILDs, and then extract the most used words from those posts to create a “super” group of keywords that result in link worthy blog posts.

The first thing I wanted to do was extract all the text and find the words that are most used in all blog posts, I was curious, aren’t you?  After pulling out 27,658,728 million words and sorting them, five words came out on top: Search, Google, Yahoo, Site, and SEO.  Was I surprised, no but it’s interesting to know and a good starting point.

Taking a look at the top 1% of all 72,330 posts, it was found that the words did change a little bit.  Some of the top words used were:  Search, Google, Site, Links, SEO, Content, People, and Social.   This data seems very similar to what was found in part one of this study, with the SEOmoz data.  Posts that are about link building are very popular but now we can conclude that they are attracting links.  When we look at a much smaller percentage say only the top 50 posts, you find that you are getting very similar words such as: Google, Search, Blog, Link, Pagerank, and Site.

So what can you really take away from the content of the top 50 blog posts?  Stick with the major engines: Google, Yahoo, and maybe even Bing, on a good day.  The linkerati likes topics including Link Building, Pagerank, and Social Media.  As my disclaimer stated above, these are not the rules but just observations from a small sampling of the blogosphere.  If I knew the exact topic that the linkerati loves, I wouldn’t be writing here, I would be out making millions writing all day.

BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

• The data suggests that posts with title between 14 and 16 words attract more ILDs than those with longer or shorter titles.
• Contrary to belief, the data suggests that posts with more than 900 words are attracting more links than those with 900 words.  Shoot for post between 2328 and 2618 words.
• The data suggest the location/depth of your blog post doesn’t seem to have an effect on the number of ILDs you will receive but may affect your SEO work, so be cautious.
• If you’re interested in the top post with a certain type of media, check above.  Also if you’re interested in the blogs that tailor to a certain type of media, check above.
• Authority plays a major role in the number of ILDs that you will receive on your post.  Matt Cutt’s blog receives twice as many ILDs as the next closest blog.
• Hot topics that attract links include: Google, Search, Blogs, Link Building, Pagerank, SEO, and Social Media.

SUMMARY

In summary, the takeaways above are generalization about a small group of post from the blogosphere and should not be taken as rules but merely as a guide to help you create content that will have the possibility to generate links.  Work on the authority in your niche and become that place people come to receive great advise.  While you’re waiting for authority to grow, make sure that your posts included visual aids to help readers get the takeaways quickly.

SPECIAL THANKS

Special thanks to the SEOmoz team for the access to the Linkscape API.  Without the use of the API this post would have never been possible.

It’s What Time?!

Do you find yourself chasing after so many things that before you know it, it’s the end of the day and you’ve gotten very little accomplished? Welcome to business in the 21^st century.

With all of the avenues available for communicating, networking, and learning it can be more challenging than ever to manage your time effectively and productively. Even all of the so-called ‘productivity enhancing products’ can become time stealers.

So what do you do when you find your productivity has vanished? Implement this 3 step process to get yourself back on track.

1. Discovery

Before you can fix the problem you should have a clear view of how you are actually spending your time, what you aren’t getting done, and what you need/want to accomplish. Sounds simple. The point is you can’t go to the resolution step if you don’t know what needs to be resolved or where it is you want to go. In addition, you should give some real thought to how you operate effectively. Some people use technology to keep themselves organized and effective. Other people need to use paper – as in making lists. And still others use a combination of paper and technology to create a system.

Whoever you are, use the system that works best for you. Trying to use web based productivity tools may not be the best method for you. Don’t use them if you aren’t wired that way (so to speak).

For the longest time I felt frustrated because I wasn’t getting my writing done. When I finally went through the discovery process I realized the following:

a. I write best in the morning

b. I was scheduling meetings and clients in the morning

c. I was getting in my own way and had created a situation that was an obstacle to my writing

Voila! I now knew why I was unproductive.

2. Decision

Once you complete Step 1, it’s time to figure out how to change your processes so you can improve your productivity.  It may be as simple as changing when you do certain things. Of course, it depends on what was getting in your way.

I determined after some investigation that the best way for me to improve my productivity was to schedule clients and meetings in the afternoon. This way I could block out most mornings for writing. I was realistic regarding the meetings that were out of my control. The key was to deal with the mornings that were in my control.  I also decided to wait to open my email until I had accomplished some tasks. I created a list the night before of all the things I needed/wanted to get done the next day. When I get up in the morning, I write and then I hit the list. I do not open my email until I have completed the most critical items. I can tell you that it is amazing how much you can get done if you are not checking your email all the time.

The point is this – I discovered that email was a distraction. It kept interrupting my train of thought. By postponing it I was able to be more productive. I still use this method.

Knowing who you are is critical in the decision phase. I’ve tried to use web based productivity tools. They didn’t work so well for me. I now use Outlook tasks, calendar, and to-do lists. That helps me stay productive. I also use pads of paper. The combination is a winner. That’s me. Your job is to decide based on your honest assessment of what works for you.

When you’ve identified how you work best, investigate the options available to you based on that information.

One comment about Social Media here – this can be a HUGE time stealer. My advice is to schedule the time you will devote to Social Media and what you will do with it. Any Social Media strategy should be built around what you hope to achieve through the use of S.M.

3. Deploy

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. I’m not a big fan of major overhauls because they are hard to implement while trying to run a business or maintain a sales process. So, try one change at a time. Create a plan that will take place over a week or so. Gradually implement that plan and keep an eye on how you’re doing.

The best policy in my estimation is to take it one day at a time. Don’t worry about how you’re going to proceed two days from now; just get through today. Before you know it, you’ll have a system in place that has helped you increase your productivity. Then continue to monitor your behavior so you don’t find yourself in a situation where your performance falls down again.

If you find your plan isn’t working well, tweak it. This is a work in process. As times change and your business changes, you may find you need to change your process. That’s okay. When you are monitoring it, you’ll know fairly quickly what you need to do.

The easiest way to deal with productivity is to never let it get so out of hand that you need a major overhaul to repair your world. Paying attention, on a daily or weekly basis, to how you are meeting your goals and obligations will help you adjust before things get out of hand.

We all encounter times in our lives where we are challenged with maintaining a reasonable level of productivity. In this quick changing world it is easy to get caught up in minutia and lose a day. I don’t think many of us can afford to lose too many days. The quicker you discover what’s in your way and how you operate most effectively you will be able to decide on a plan of action to correct your process.

Once that decision is made, deploy – get cracking! Revisit this 3-step process whenever you find yourself losing momentum and productivity.

* * * * *

About the Author: Diane Helbig is a Professional Coach and the president of Seize This Day Coaching. Diane is a Contributing Editor on COSE Mindspring, a resource website for small business owners, as well as a member of the Sales Experts Panel at Top Sales Experts.

From Small Business Trends

It’s What Time?!

Small Business Contests and Awards to Apply For

Here is the latest list of contests, sweepstakes, and awards for growing companies.  This listing is updated every two weeks and brought to you as a community service by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com.

Marketing Sherpa 2101 Email Marketing Awards
Enter by November 20, 2009

This is the fifth year MarketingSherpa is recognizing Email campaigns that achieved outstanding, measurable results. When you win a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award, it means that your Email campaign was the most effective 2009 campaign within its category.  MarketingSherpa evaluates the creative, the goals and — most importantly — your results.   Details here.

Deluxe Business Makeover Sweepstakes
Enter by November 30, 2009

Deluxe will randomly award a $10,000 gift certificate from Target Commercial Interiors  featuring HON furniture and a $5,000 DeluxeBucks gift certificate to use toward logo and Web site design, promotional products and additional marketing and branding solutions. Ten second-place winners will receive $500 DeluxeBucks gift certificates.  More information here.

The Great TCBY Store Giveaway

Enter by: November 30, 2009

TCBY (the frozen yogurt stores) is holding a competition to give away a brand new TCBY franchise store for FREE. To enter you must:

• Create a video up to 2 minutes long indicating why you should win a TCBY store.
• Complete the application form and submit it with your video.
• Legal residents of the U.S. who are 21 and older are eligible to participate.

For more information watch the YouTube video.  You can find the rules and the application to enter here.

Elance Contest: What Does “The New Way To Work” Mean To You?

Enter by: December 7, 2009

This contest from Elance is a chance for contract professionals to show the world their best stuff and win a grand prize of $10,000. If you’re a writer, write a story that tells how you are a part of the “new way to work”. If you’re a graphic designer, design something. Developer? Create an app. Finalists will be chosen by December 7, 2009. Rules and entry instructions are on the Elance blog.

NYC BigApps Competition

Enter by: 5:00pm EST December 8, 2009

The NYC BigApps Competition will reward the developers of the most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable applications for delivering information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users. Winners will be chosen for best overall application — including a grand prize — as well as an investor’s choice winner, a data visualization winner and city talent winner. In addition, the public will be able to choose their own “popular choice” winners through NYCBigApps.com. All the winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in January and will receive a total of $20,000 in cash prizes plus dinner with Mayor Bloomberg. The competition is open to individuals, start-up companies and nonprofits with fewer than 50 employees.

DREAM BIG Small Business of the Year Award
Enter by December 18, 2009

The DREAM BIG Small Business of the Year Award winner will be presented with a $10,000 cash prize courtesy of Sam’s Club®. Nominate an outstanding business from your community – or start an application for your own business today for the DREAM BIG Small Business of the Year Award.

Nominations are due December 18 and applications are due January 15.  Information on eligibility, award criteria, levels of recognition, and the program timeline is listed below and available in a printer friendly format here.

New York StartUP! Business Plan Competition
Enter by December 18, 2009

The New York Public Library (“NYPL”) and the Citigroup Foundation are sponsoring the first annual New York StartUP! Business Plan Competition for New York-based startup entrepreneurs with cash prizes totaling over $28,000. The New York StartUp! Business Plan Competition gives aspiring entrepreneurs an opportunity to compete for the top prize, while learning about the comprehensive small business resources at NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library (“SIBL”). StartUP! is a competition for legal residents of Manhattan, The Bronx, or Staten Island who aim to start a business based in one of these three boroughs.  Visit New York Public Library here for competition details, dates, and entry requirements.

Regus Win an Office Sweepstakes: One Year of Manhattan Office Space

Enter by:  December 31, 2009

Winner receives fully-furnished and equipped workspace at one of Regus’ 18 New York City locations, for 12 months.

Entries will be accepted through December 31st, 2009. There is no purchase necessary to enter.  To be eligible for consideration, contestants can fill out an entry form online or at participating Regus locations.

Go here for entry form and to see contest rules.

‘Holiday in a Bag’ Email Marketing Tool Kit and Chance to Win Marketing Consultation Package
Enter by January 5, 2010

As part of the Holiday in a Bag promotion Campaigner is offering a “bag of tools” including holiday email templates and graphics, holiday e-cards, and 100 tips for holiday marketing. They are also offering a drawing for a day of free marketing consultation from Campaigner marketing experts.  Sign-up online before January 5, 2010 for the chance to win.

Make Mine a Million $ Business Competition

Enter by: January 15, 2010

The “Make Mine a Million $ Business” competition is for businesses organized and doing business in the United States that are at least 50% owned by a woman, who want to grow the business to $1 Million or more in revenue in the next 12 to 18 months.

All applicants who are selected as Finalists must attend the Make Mine a Million event at their own expense and be willing to participate in the coaching program, related public relations events, and promotions for the Make Mine a Million $ Business program and its sponsors and other partners.

Applications for the Make Mine a Million $ Business program are screened by Count Me In staff and a team of banking and financial professionals selected by Count Me In. Applicants with the highest ratings will be selected as Finalists.

At the event, each Finalist will make a three-minute presentation of their business, their qualifications, and how they would benefit from the Program. This elevator pitch is given in front of a live audience and a panel of qualified judges selected by Count Me In. The judges, with input from the audience vote, will select which of the Finalists should be named as award recipients.

Apply for the Make Mine a Million award here.

Google Free Airport WiFi and Photo Contest

Ends January 15, 2010

When you’re traveling this holiday season, you can enjoy free WiFi at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight. Just bring a WiFi-enabled laptop or mobile device and stay connected to family and friends for free while you travel now through January 15, 2010.

Photo Contest – Win cool prizes

Starting Monday, November 16, 2009, you’ll be able to win prizes by submitting a photo of yourself using the WiFi in any participating airport or on a Virgin America flight. In addition to being able to win great stuff, winning photos will be featured on the website.  More information about free airport WiFi here.

PLEASE NOTE: The photo contest is vague at this point.  And while this contest is not limited to small businesspeople, we thought it and the free WiFi so valuable to traveling entrepreneurs that we decided to point it out.

Intuit’s Love a Local Business Contest

Enter by March 3, 2010

In a nationwide effort to help support the growth of small businesses,  Intuit is hosting the “Love a Local Business” sweepstakes.  Fans of local small businesses can nominate their favorite hometown haunt, which will make them eligible for a drawing to win a $1,000 Intuit Growth Grant, which includes a $500 Visa gift card and $500 in Intuit business services, such as Intuit Websites and Web Listings. One of those five winning local businesses will receive a grand prize of $5,000!

In addition, each business that is nominated will appear on a custom Google Map displaying favorite businesses from across the country. The more nominations a business has, the more chances they have to win a grant. Intuit has already awarded $55,000 in small business grants, now it’s time to show support for your favorite neighborhood shop! Go to Love a Local Business for more information.

If you are putting on a small business contest,  award or competition, and want to get the word out to the community, please email the details to:  contests.smb@gmail.com.

To find other small business awards, contests, competitions and grants, visit our Small Business Events Calendar. 

Please note:  The descriptions provided here are for convenience only and are NOT the official rules. ALWAYS read official rules carefully at the site holding the competition, contest or award.

From Small Business Trends

Small Business Contests and Awards to Apply For

Google Updates, Re-Updates Quality Guidelines

Google got all the local search experts talking last week with the release of an updated (and then re-updated) set of Business Listing Guidelines. Google hopes the new rules will help cut down on the amount of spam popping up in local search. But have they made things even more complicated for small business owners?

Grab a pen and check out what’s new, what’s concerning and what small business owners should be aware of.

Mike Blumenthal did an excellent job breaking down the changes in wording when Google performed its update last week and broke out five main changes. The top three are strict rules, while the bottom two are labeled “best practices” by Google.

1. Your business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name [since removed]
2. PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
3. A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.
4. Use a shared, business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
5. If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.giraffetoys.com, a matching email address would be you@giraffetoys.com.

It was that first guideline (which has curiously since been removed) that caught many local search experts and SMB owners to raise an eyebrow. Obviously, Google was trying to deter overzealous business owners from stuffing their listed business names with keywords, but it almost present some serious problems. For example, may SMB owners don’t use their full legal name as their company name and instead go by a dba. By forcing them to use the legal name, it would seriously affect their rankings.

Some commenters on Mike’s blog even noted that they weren’t sure of their full legal name because they operate under a different one. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Google would accept a dba as a legal business name as the new guidelines made no mention of it.

Then, as quickly as the change had come, it was reversed with Google removing the wordage altogether. And then they wonder why businesses get confused.

The rest of the changes made by Google still remain and look mostly trust-related: Google wants to make sure that businesses aren’t creating PO Boxes to make it look like they have multiple locations. They want to be able to tie specific users with updates. And they want branded emails when possible to make things seem more legitimate.

If you’re a small business owner, these are definitely changes you’ll want to be aware of. I’m a little disappointed that Google won’t allow SMB owners to use a PO Box as their main address (again, there’s so much ambiguity its difficult to know if ALL PO Boxes are against guidelines or just ones set up for multiple locations). With so many SMB owners working directly out of their home, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to make that information public.

If you haven’t read the new Business Listing Guidelines, I’d start on Mike’s blog and then read the hard version yourself from Google. However, seeing how fast Google can change the game making new guidelines and the removing them, it’s also really important that SMB owners become more pro-active about blocking and tackling. Make sure that your site is equipped to compete regardless of spur of the moment changes by Google. These things are going to become more important than ever.

The more you know, the better off you’ll be.

From Small Business Trends

Google Updates, Re-Updates Quality Guidelines

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