Posted by randfish

I know I'm always making fun of Alexa data but this one was just too good to pass up. A lot of folks have been talking about Reddit's acquisition today and I know that many of them have been pointing to Reddit's Alexa graph...

SEOmoz vs. Reddit - last 3 months

You know looking at that I'd say that we with our 8 employees and higher traffic levels are worth at least twice Reddit's 4 people and middling traffic. $130 million valuation here we come!

p.s. This is all tongue-in-cheek; I'm actually a huge fan of Reddit and recognize that they have at a minimum 5X the traffic of SEOmoz and considerably more reach. I'm just ragging on Alexa because it's so easy.

p.p.s. I'm a last minute addition to Jeremy's Netincome show right now check it out at WebmasterRadio.fm.

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Posted by randfish

Michael Martinez when he was a blogger and regular commenter here at SEOmoz often chided me for holding the viewpoint that rankings are "all about links." Recently there's been more conversations along those lines both here at SEOmoz and elsewhere.

It's a frequent topic for debate though to me there's no real cause for contention. Everyone who's worked in the SEO space for a long time tends to hold some truths to be... self evident. Specifically these ones:

• In areas of low competition well-written well-optimized content on relatively low-link popularity websites can rank at the top of the engines even if those pages have no external links pointing to them.
• In areas of heavy competition you will virtually never see content ranking purely because it's high-quality well-optimized content. It has to be on a highly-linked-to domain or have many inbound links pointing directly to it.
• Great content has a better ability to attract great links (and more of them) than low quality content.
• Low quality content with lots of great links will outrank high-quality content with few links everytime. We've all seen thousands of examples of this in the SERPs.

Based on this last point I'm of the opinion that for the moment at the three major search engines (although MSN can be all sorts of strange on occassion) links outweigh content in nearly every way. Great content is merely a means to an end not a ranking strategy by itself. In fact I have little doubt that much (possibly most) of the very best content on the web today ranks nowhere in Google because it hasn't been well-marketed.

This falls under my "Paris Hilton Law of Visibility" which states that even the least attractive content can be the most visible with the right media attention. Put another way; the salesman who can unload volcano insurance in the Carolinas will make for a far better SEO than the hermit who invents a cure for volcanoes (I'm assuming you just throw it in the lava pit when it starts boiling like a geologic Pepto-Bismol).

The reason content quality has increased in importance over the last few years has almost nothing to do with LSI or LSA or the increased use of on-page text analysis by advanced search engine algorithms. It has to do with the ease of promoting great content through the rise of social media a more virally-attuned web audience and portals like Digg Del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Netscape etc. On the flipside it's much harder to buy links build link farms or auto-spam than it ever was. This combination makes the economics of creating great content more and more appealing.

There's no chicken and egg debate here - SEOs were link-building long before they were linkbaiting and until such time as Wikipedia pages rank on page four while small-town experts rule the top 10 link building will be the end-goal of search engine optimization.

Your thoughts?

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Posted by randfish

I should be eternally castigated to the fiery furnace for spoofing a Devo tune but hopefully redemption can come in the form of this post's value. We've been spending some time in analytics programs lately both for our own in-house projects and for some clients. In every instance the addition of action tracking makes a huge difference to how well we can optimize and make changes to internal pages and external marketing.

Action tracking is one step deeper than basics analytics - rather than simply observing what pages are visited and how many unique sessions are logged action tracking allows you to narrow down groups of visitors by the actions they take on your site. In most instances it requires setting up a code in your analytics program and attaching that code to a button page load image rollover or other javascript-trackable task (a click or hover). Once you've plugged it into your analytics and the website the action can be used to refine data you're already collecting. I've created a quick example below:

You can see from the above that:

1. Avatar's Loan Form has action tracking applied to it
2. Based on the people who submit loan inquiries we can predict which search terms will be better at converting visitors into applicants
3. The "revenue" column is empty but if we were tracking e-commerce buyers we could put their totals into those columns and track high-volume buyers
4. Expanding on this idea you could also track users by time of day the search engine they used their geographic location etc.

What I've done in this post is to list out all of the actions that you should be tracking depending on the type of site you run. Many sites will fit into multiple criteria:

E-Commerce Site

• Add to Cart Button - studies have shown us that users who "add to cart" even if they don't complete checkout are more likely to return to make a purchase. This is also a good way to calculate shopping cart abandonment and make changes to refine improve.
• Complete Checkout - an obvious one this action will show you what percentage of each user group is converting into sales.
• Save in Wishlist - e-commerce sites offering wishlists are still in the minority but it's a great way to track interest that "isn't quite a purchase."
• Send this to a Friend - many sites offer the "share this page" function and it's a great action to be aware of. If folks are sending out your link you know you've got a hit.

B2B Site

• Subscribe to Newsletter - A subscription is a tacit endorsement of your brand and a desire to stay in contact. It may not be a conversion but for B2B it may well be the next best thing.
• Contact Form Submission - A runner-up with subscribing to a newsletter is filling out the contact form. Though some of these will be support issues many may be questions about your products/services and will indicate a desire to open a sales conversation.
• Email Link - As with contact forms direct email links have the possibility to be a sales contact. The best thing you can do is to clearly label sales emails and track them separately from support or business issues.

Blog

• Subscribe to RSS Feed - An RSS feed subscriber is the blog's equivalent of a conversion; tracking these is imperative.
• Add Comment - Anyone who's contributing content to the blog or participating should be paid attention to (as should those channels that send you participatory people)
• Social Bookmark / Share - all those folks who are submitting your content to Digg & Reddit deserve to be recognized (and sought after).

Forum or other UGC-Based Site

• Sign up for an Account - These users are active contributers; you need to know where they come from.
• Contribute Content - When a user publishes discovering their path is important (especially if it's not from a bookmark/type-in)
• Add Comment - As above comments are a great predictor of engagement.
• Vote/Rate - Even low levels of participation like a rating or vote is worth tracking when every piece of participation counts.

You can get very creative with many of these and track all sorts of actions. If you offer a tool or calculator track usage. If you want to follow who clicks a particular link (rather than just a page) add an action to it. You can even see which users hovers on an image.

For many marketers action tracking is the secret sauce. Once you install and activate this data even an inexperienced manager can easily make changes to an AdWords campaign or focus marketing efforts on particular terms phrases or pages that will make a huge difference to the campaign's efficacy. For professionals it's a "can't-live-without-it" tool. The recommendations made based on this kind of track is backed up by real data. In my experience there hasn't been a time when a high-volume action tracking study hasn't made a huge impact on a site's bottom line.

I know that the following analytics services offer action tracking though to what extent for each I'm not certain:

• Indextools - obviously it's our favorite both for its ease of use and shockingly low price. It does have some limitations though and isn't quite as robust as Omniture or WebSideStory.
• WebsideStory - Along with the Omniture it's tops for offering the most complete package.
• Omniture - as above
• ClickTracks - a little less in-depth but a great interface and a very usable product.

I believe there are others (though Google & Urchin are notably absent). If you've got suggestions for other programs that run action tracking or on how to use it we'd love your feedback.

p.s. Come on track it. Track it good.

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Posted by randfish

Michael Martinez when he was a blogger and regular commenter here at SEOmoz often chided me for holding the viewpoint that rankings are "all about links." Recently there's been more conversations along those lines both here at SEOmoz and elsewhere.

It's a frequent topic for debate though to me there's no real cause for contention. Everyone who's worked in the SEO space for a long time tends to hold some truths to be... self evident. Specifically these ones:

• In areas of low competition well-written well-optimized content on relatively low-link popularity websites can rank at the top of the engines even if those pages have no external links pointing to them.
• In areas of heavy competition you will virtually never see content ranking purely because it's high-quality well-optimized content. It has to be on a highly-linked-to domain or have many inbound links pointing directly to it.
• Great content has a better ability to attract great links (and more of them) than low quality content.
• Low quality content with lots of great links will outrank high-quality content with few links everytime. We've all seen thousands of examples of this in the SERPs.

Based on this last point I'm of the opinion that for the moment at the three major search engines (although MSN can be all sorts of strange on occassion) links outweigh content in nearly every way. Great content is merely a means to an end not a ranking strategy by itself. In fact I have little doubt that much (possibly most) of the very best content on the web today ranks nowhere in Google because it hasn't been well-marketed.

This falls under my "Paris Hilton Law of Visibility" which states that even the least attractive content can be the most visible with the right media attention. Put another way; the salesman who can unload volcano insurance in the Carolinas will make for a far better SEO than the hermit who invents a cure for volcanoes (I'm assuming you just throw it in the lava pit when it starts boiling like a geologic Pepto-Bismol).

The reason content quality has increased in importance over the last few years has almost nothing to do with LSI or LSA or the increased use of on-page text analysis by advanced search engine algorithms. It has to do with the ease of promoting great content through the rise of social media a more virally-attuned web audience and portals like Digg Del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Netscape etc. On the flipside it's much harder to buy links build link farms or auto-spam than it ever was. This combination makes the economics of creating great content more and more appealing.

There's no chicken and egg debate here - SEOs were link-building long before they were linkbaiting and until such time as Wikipedia pages rank on page four while small-town experts rule the top 10 link building will be the end-goal of search engine optimization.

Your thoughts?

View Comments

Posted by randfish

I should be eternally castigated to the fiery furnace for spoofing a Devo tune but hopefully redemption can come in the form of this post's value. We've been spending some time in analytics programs lately both for our own in-house projects and for some clients. In every instance the addition of action tracking makes a huge difference to how well we can optimize and make changes to internal pages and external marketing.

Action tracking is one step deeper than basics analytics - rather than simply observing what pages are visited and how many unique sessions are logged action tracking allows you to narrow down groups of visitors by the actions they take on your site. In most instances it requires setting up a code in your analytics program and attaching that code to a button page load image rollover or other javascript-trackable task (a click or hover). Once you've plugged it into your analytics and the website the action can be used to refine data you're already collecting. I've created a quick example below:

You can see from the above that:

1. Avatar's Loan Form has action tracking applied to it
2. Based on the people who submit loan inquiries we can predict which search terms will be better at converting visitors into applicants
3. The "revenue" column is empty but if we were tracking e-commerce buyers we could put their totals into those columns and track high-volume buyers
4. Expanding on this idea you could also track users by time of day the search engine they used their geographic location etc.

What I've done in this post is to list out all of the actions that you should be tracking depending on the type of site you run. Many sites will fit into multiple criteria:

E-Commerce Site

• Add to Cart Button - studies have shown us that users who "add to cart" even if they don't complete checkout are more likely to return to make a purchase. This is also a good way to calculate shopping cart abandonment and make changes to refine improve.
• Complete Checkout - an obvious one this action will show you what percentage of each user group is converting into sales.
• Save in Wishlist - e-commerce sites offering wishlists are still in the minority but it's a great way to track interest that "isn't quite a purchase."
• Send this to a Friend - many sites offer the "share this page" function and it's a great action to be aware of. If folks are sending out your link you know you've got a hit.

B2B Site

• Subscribe to Newsletter - A subscription is a tacit endorsement of your brand and a desire to stay in contact. It may not be a conversion but for B2B it may well be the next best thing.
• Contact Form Submission - A runner-up with subscribing to a newsletter is filling out the contact form. Though some of these will be support issues many may be questions about your products/services and will indicate a desire to open a sales conversation.
• Email Link - As with contact forms direct email links have the possibility to be a sales contact. The best thing you can do is to clearly label sales emails and track them separately from support or business issues.

Blog

• Subscribe to RSS Feed - An RSS feed subscriber is the blog's equivalent of a conversion; tracking these is imperative.
• Add Comment - Anyone who's contributing content to the blog or participating should be paid attention to (as should those channels that send you participatory people)
• Social Bookmark / Share - all those folks who are submitting your content to Digg & Reddit deserve to be recognized (and sought after).

Forum or other UGC-Based Site

• Sign up for an Account - These users are active contributers; you need to know where they come from.
• Contribute Content - When a user publishes discovering their path is important (especially if it's not from a bookmark/type-in)
• Add Comment - As above comments are a great predictor of engagement.
• Vote/Rate - Even low levels of participation like a rating or vote is worth tracking when every piece of participation counts.

You can get very creative with many of these and track all sorts of actions. If you offer a tool or calculator track usage. If you want to follow who clicks a particular link (rather than just a page) add an action to it. You can even see which users hovers on an image.

For many marketers action tracking is the secret sauce. Once you install and activate this data even an inexperienced manager can easily make changes to an AdWords campaign or focus marketing efforts on particular terms phrases or pages that will make a huge difference to the campaign's efficacy. For professionals it's a "can't-live-without-it" tool. The recommendations made based on this kind of track is backed up by real data. In my experience there hasn't been a time when a high-volume action tracking study hasn't made a huge impact on a site's bottom line.

I know that the following analytics services offer action tracking though to what extent for each I'm not certain:

• Indextools - obviously it's our favorite both for its ease of use and shockingly low price. It does have some limitations though and isn't quite as robust as Omniture or WebSideStory.
• WebsideStory - Along with the Omniture it's tops for offering the most complete package.
• Omniture - as above
• ClickTracks - a little less in-depth but a great interface and a very usable product.

I believe there are others (though Google & Urchin are notably absent). If you've got suggestions for other programs that run action tracking or on how to use it we'd love your feedback.

p.s. Come on track it. Track it good.

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Posted by randfish

I believe that we're at the very nascent beginnings of web marketing in the political sphere and as studies like this one from the AP suggest more and more of the millions of dollars of campaign funding will go towards SEO PPC & web content strategies. From the piece:

35 percent in this country say they look to the Internet for political news _ a number that rises to 43 percent among likely voters. Online political browsers are most likely to go to news sites such as those operated by the newspapers networks and newsmagazine _ with almost nine in 10 saying they check such sites. More than one-third go to candidates' sites and almost half go to political sites.

Looking at a few political searches (that are almost certainly heavily trafficked) it's easy to see where this trend might be headed.

• Bush Iraq Plan
• Senate Race
• Michael J Fox Ad
• Stem Cell Research - check out who's bidding on ads
• Dave Reichert - a candidate here in WA

If you look at nearly any contested race in the US you'll see AdWords campaigns blogs news articles and some results that could be "reputation management." SEOmoz has been approached about a national campaign (which we turned down) but I wonder - have you seen more activity in the SEO sphere from the world of politics? Would you be willing to take on a campaign in that arena? Do you think there's already a large amount of work being done in this space?

Perhaps most important of all are voters likely to use search engines for information about elections?

p.s. Let's keep the discussion purely on the SEO/industry implications and not on the political topics themselves. Thanks!

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Posted by randfish

First off a huge thanks to everyone who contributed to our search for a new tagline. Many of the suggestions made us laugh and several were truly outstanding. I've compiled the cream of the crop - ones that we like best from our submissions and those of our readers - and put together a poll.

Thanks for your help - the new tagline will be part of the new SEOmoz website now scheduled to launch (ahead of schedule) just before Pubcon in November.

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Yesterday’s off-topic post of 250 movies made it to the digg / popular page and is right now climbing on the delicious / popular page (and more delicos would be nice – Hint. Hint.)

But was it REALLY off topic?

Today’s post will focus on why that post was successful and give you 3 helpful lessons to write better link bait.

The real story started something like this:

From the land of off topic posts I present to you a list of the 250 Best Movies Made in the Last 30 years.

Why the last 30 years?

Well I’m creeping up on 30. Since I’ll be returning to the States in December for a few weeks I want to get a 500 Gig Hard Disk full of movies I enjoy for my return trip to Brazil. One of the things I miss about being down here is not having access to movies.

So I started researching which films I’ve enjoyed and every time I see these “Best Film Lists” they always include the same stuff from the 40s 50s 60s and early to mid 70s.

My younger brother owes me about $1500 and he agreed to try to round up and rip all the movies on the list to work off some of what he owes me. I just put in the order for the 500 GB external hard drive and a new Mac Book Pro. Plus I’m sure if I post a list like this I’ll get some great feed back on the movies I missed.

 

I took a look at the post as written and realized it was shit. Why should you (my readers) give a rats ass about me? The focus needed to change from ME to YOU for you to be interested. That’s when the idea for the first Hook came in:

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a 500 Gig Hard Drive full of all the best movies ever made?

 

By changing the focus from ME and my life to YOU and your life the post becomes 100 fold more engaging. Suddenly we’re working on hooking you up and fulfilling your dream rather than blabbing on and on about my life.

Link Bait Lesson 1: Good link bait focuses on the Reader not the Author.

Now if you recall from the ten ways to make the front page of digg:

9. Insult as many groups as you can. Flamewars are popular for a reason. Throw out bombs that dare people to comment on your story.

 

I didn’t have to just omit the classics – I had to shit on them! That way someone is bound to get pissed off and throw out flames. I had to say that MY list was the best and that if you like old movies you suck. So the intro evolved to:

Who wants to see that old crap?

 

Link Bait Lesson 2: Controversy will incite passion. Passion drives links.

Then to pepper things up I remembered that everyone hates the RIAA. Since the post was not likely to get many DVD sales if it didn’t get links Dugg or Delicoed anyway the best rout was to not bother with those Amazon links (less work less spammy) and say the reason was so that we can sick it to the RIAA!

but I’d rather you go download or Rent & Rip them just to piss off the RIAA

 

Manipulative? Sure a little. But that’s what link bait is. You have to think of these things so your stories have hooks to draw people in.

Link Bait Lesson 3: If you can pile on to a quasi-political cause that has widespread acceptance it will drive support and fanfare.

But Quads – who is the master baiter?

I am. Master Baiting is what I was born to do.

Posted by rebecca

1. Tell digitalgopher that his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries and then fart in his general direction.
2. Have Alzheimer's or be like Leonard from Memento. "Oh this digg website looks neat! I'll make a profile. Hey this story seems cool! I'll digg it."  Ten minutes later... "Oh this digg website looks neat! I'll make a profile. Hey this story seems cool! I'll digg it..."
3. Undercut other users by submitting the exact same entry as theirs only differentiating yours by adding "Read this one instead! It's super-cool!" in the title.
4. Submit a story titled "Top 10 Reasons Why Netscape is the Coolest Ever!"
5. Submit an article that has pictures of Kevin Rose spooning Owen Byrne.
   
   


6. For each article on digg post a comment that says "Lame. Dugg down because it looks so fake." Actually since it's on digg it should look more like "laim. dug down bcoz it loks fak."
7. Keep submitting stories like "How to Smuggle Explosives onto a Plane" and "Best Ways to Take Out a Government Building." This is also a good way to see what an FBI official looks like in person though you'll probably be handcuffed as well.
8. Or you could keep submitting stories that are nothing more than pictures of you wearing a tutu and covered in butterscotch.
9. Trash Ubuntu and say SuSE is where it's at.
10. Submit a story titled "Hey Have You Seen This Cool Star Wars Kid Video?"

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Posted by I Brian

• Sales of links for “PageRank” purposes exploded as a market. It was a market that went mainstream among webmasters.
• John Scott evangelised that the anchor text in links was king for rankings. The idea was radical for many whitehat SEO’s who knew anchor text was important – but many hadn't realised to what extent. Suddenly they saw the wood for the trees.

• Google stopped the Google Dance – until then a monthly PR and backlink update. After a summer of nothing we found what was left had gone quarterly.
• A Google Update began migrating from a new datacenter on November 12th. I made first call on what would live in infamy in SEO - Florida - a major shift in the ranking algo using multiple aspects of previous patents.
• On December 31st Google engineer Matt Cutts and others filed for a patent on a paper called Information retrieval based on historical data - a paper in which historical data and user behaviour could be factored into ranking algorithms.

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Posted by randfish

This is competitive intelligence - the kind that SEO firms shouldn't be sharing because it reveals a considerable portion of the value they (we) provides to clients. Thus it's the perfect topic for an SEOmoz post.

The best way to do this is by example. I've picked one lucky website - EvoGear.com (based here in Seattle) and one of their primary keyword phrases "snowboard equipment" (which they should really put in their title tag) to illustrate how you should perform searches that will result in high quality link acquisition targets.

A Few Basic Rules:

1. You should perform all of these searches at each of the major engines (Google Yahoo! MSN & Ask - yes even Ask as they often link to some very valuable and achievable link sources). I'm illustrating using Google for simplicity and brevity.
2. At Google and others it often helps to show 100 results per page and have the maximum "grouping" of results from the same site. That way you can find all of the most relevant pages on a particular domain with ease.
3. This process is only half the battle - the other half is identifying the sites inside the SERPs that would make good targets; I'll try to cover that next week.

The Obvious
Basically we're seeking every possible permutation of the term/phrase - links from any of the top ranking sites (#1-100 depending on competitiveness) will provide high value. As you go down the list you can also use these modified terms/phrases to get extra results from the other sources.

• snowboard equipment
• "snowboard equipment"
• snow board equipment
• "snow board equipment"
• snowboard
• "snow board"
• snowboards
• "snow boards"

Advanced Operators
Thes use the engines' advanced query parameters with the basic phrase. As we refine in this manner the number of pages that still provide value shrinks - I'd probably look at the top 30-50 results maximum.

• allintitle:snowboard equipment
• allinanchor:snowboard equipment
• allinurl:snowboard equipment
• allintext:snowboard equipment

Alternative Search Sources
The main indices are great ways to divine value but adding in some alternate sources for link searches can help to diversify. The engines might not always consider these sources as important (which is why I'd stick to only the highest profile sites/pages in these results) but they can often be great sources for traffic.

• Google News - snowboard equipment
• Google News Archive - snowboard equipment
• Yahoo! News - snowboard equipment
• Technorati - snowboard equipment (sort by authority too)
• Del.icio.us - snowboard equipment del.icio.us/tag/snowboard and del.icio.us/tag/snowboarding too 
• Ask.com Blog Search - snowboard equipment
• Google Blog Search - snowboard equipment
• Wikipedia Search - snowboard equipment
• DMOZ Search - snowboard equipment (check the categories the sites and the sites listed in the relevant categories)

Directory Search Terms
Appending the word "directory" and other similar terms can help to dig up valuable hubs where you can submit your site for inclusion. Note that many of these use advanced operators and will generally have a short list (top 10-25) of valuable targets.

• snowboard equipment directory
• intitle:directory "snowboard equipment"
• inurl:directory "snowboard equipment"
• snowboard directory
• snowboard * directory
• directory * snowboard
• snowboard catalog (this term ranges in value and may not have much here)
• snowboard equipment catalog
• "list of snowboarding sites"
• "list * snowboard"
• "list * snowboard * sites"
• snowboard websites
• snowboard sites
• "snowboard sites"
• "snowboard websites"
• "recommended links" snowboard equipment
• "recommended sites" snowboard equipment
• "favorite links" snowboard equipment
• "favorite sites" snowboard equipment

Blog & Forum Searches
The goal here is to find places you can participate. You don't want to spam but a quick link drop to highly relevant content once you're already an accepted member is perfectly reasonable. Having a presence in the UGC sphere also means you can quickly step in and manage reputation save face or recognize trends to leverage.

• snowboard forum
• snowboarding forum
• "snowboarding forum"
• intitle:forum snowboarding
• inurl:forum snowboarding
• snowboarding blog
• intitle:blog snowboarding
• inurl:blog snowboarding
• "add comment" snowboarding
• "post comment" snowboarding
• snowboarding members
• snowboarding join
• snowboarding tag
• intitle:tag snowboarding
• intitle:post snowboarding
• snowboarding group
• intitle:group snowboarding

Submit-Type Searches
These are often the most valuable searches (thus I've saved them for last). The idea is to search for sites/pages that are accepting submissions or additions. I tend to run pretty far down these SERPs just because it can be so easy to obtain the links.

• snowboard equipment "add url"
• snowboard equipment "add site"
• snowboard equipment "add website"
• snowboard equipment "add your site"
• snowboard equipment "add a url"
• snowboard equipment "add * url"
• snowboard equipment "add * site"
• snowboard equipment "add * website"
• snowboard equipment "submit url"
• snowboard equipment "submit site"
• snowboard equipment "submit website"
• snowboard equipment "submit your site"
• snowboard equipment "submit a url"
• snowboard equipment "submit * url"
• snowboard equipment "submit * site"
• snowboard equipment "submit * website"
• snowboard equipment "suggest url"
• snowboard equipment "suggest site"
• snowboard equipment "suggest website"
• snowboard equipment "suggest your site"
• snowboard equipment "suggest a url"
• snowboard equipment "suggest * url"
• snowboard equipment "suggest * site"
• snowboard equipment "suggest * website"

And now I hope to get your secrets - if you've got more to add please don't be shy. You can use my example or create your own.

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Posted by randfish

I spent some time on the phone today with William Stinson from InfoSearch Media (link condom applied). They had cold called an old client (and friend) of mine who referred them to us. I spent a good 20 minutes chatting with William to attempt to understand their business model and their services. I took a few notes from our phone conversation - here's what InfoSearch Media had to say:

• Google currently uses LSI as a big part of their ranking algorithm (which is a load of bull)
• The perfect length for an article to rank well is between 200-250 words; any shorter and the search engines don't have enough material any longer and they start to get confused (no seriously that's almost verbatim what he said)
• Text content is the primary metric on which search engines base their rankings - links while important are a smaller part of the equation
• InfoSearch Media was named "best content writer" by TopSEOs.com - apparently they're also an "official sponsor" - can you say "conflict of interest"? Luckily the press release didn't reveal that information.

William had evidence to back this up too. He showed off a few clients:

• This page ranks #3 for "kobe beef steaks delivered" thanks to the great article that Infosearch wrote for Allen Brothers.
• This one ranks #1 for "organic dark roast coffee" once again due to the brilliant article writing. William told me that if they had opted for the full package of 400 article they could probably rank for "coffee." (more on that gem later)
• This page ranks #1 for "buy hard drives" - they can rank well for these competitive terms because Infosearch wrote so many great articles for them not because they're NewEgg... right? (BTW - the "article" they wrote that's helping the page rank is at the bottom of all the products - it's "not for users.")

I literally felt like I was on a phone call to crazyland. I tried asking William to explain the logic behind why Google would want to rank a site higher simply because they had more articles on a subject than another and we came back to LSI. Then I received the following from them through email (after our call had ended):

Hi Rand-

Here is the info I was referring to about LSI and Google:

How Does Google Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)? Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) helps Google and others maintain relevancy by distinguishing in search results between polynyms words with multiple meanings ...
www.wilsonweb.com/seo/google-lsi.htm

 Also my manger sent me this email after we spoke about Google:

“I just came back from the WebMaster World Conference in LV. I spoke with a man who recently worked for Google. He explained to me that Google is restructuring their algorithm to align more closely with LSI. Many people have been noticing a wide shuffle in search relevancy scores recently. Some of those well in the know attribute this to latent semantic indexing which Google has been using for a while but recently increased its weighting.”

When I told William I was speaking at WMW Vegas next week he told me that his manager "was quoting a blog he read."

Contentlogic (the Infosearch service I was being pitched) says on their homepage that article content (like the type they offer) is the best way to achieve high search engine rankings. They excerpt a quote from Mary O'Brien (formerly of Overture) when the actual article Mary wrote is a near-perfect argument against the kind of "write-for-engines-not-users" philosophy that's embodied in their services.

It's not that their services are bad - they COULD be valuable to the right company in the right place. The writing is good quality and the subject matter isn't awful it's just that they go about promoting it in such a horribly manipulative shyster-like style that it's hard to take anything they say seriously. It makes me sick - no wonder there's articles like this and this about SEO. With these guys as role models we're going to be thought of as bottom feeders for a long time to come.

p.s. Obviously (as with all things in the blogosphere and on SEOmoz) the above represents my opinions. If you're curious about whether I've got the right to say these types of things without fear of legal retribution check out this guide to defamation as it relates to blogging.

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Posted by rebecca

Danielsen who writes a blog called "The Voice of the Nation's Blind" for the National Federation of the Blind says accessing the Internet has been a "huge boon" for blind people. It's allowed them to accomplish a great number of tasks on their own that would otherwise present difficulties or require the help of a sighted person such as banking buying plane tickets and shopping for things like groceries and music.

But like any evolving technology accessing the Internet has hardly been a smooth ride for the blind. Some sites can be difficult to navigate particularly if they contain relatively few text links and rely more on graphics and other visual elements that screen-reading software such as Jaws can't interpret.

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Wouldn’t it be great if you had a 500 Gig Hard Drive full of all the best movies ever made? Problem is every time you look for a list they always have these films on there from the 40s 50s 60s and early to mid 70s.

Who wants to see that crap?

So I’ve gone through the trouble of sorting through the best movies from only the last 30 years. I was going to put an Amazon link to them but I’d rather you go download or Rent & Rip them just to piss off the RIAA.

So from the land of off topic posts I present to you the list of the 250 Best Movies Made in the Last 30 years.

48 Hrs. (1982)
A Christmas Story (1983)
Airplane! (1980)
Alien (1979)
Aliens (1986)
Almost Famous (2000)
Amadeus (1984)
American Beauty (1999)
American History X (1998)
Amores Perros (2000)
Animal House (1978)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Army of Darkness (1992)
Aviator The (2004)
Back to the Future (1985)
Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Bad Taste (1987)
Basketball Diaries The (1995)
Batman Begins (2005)
Beetle Juice (1988)
Before Sunset (2004)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Big Fish (2003)
Big Lebowski The (1998)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Blade Runner (1982)
Blair Witch Project The (1999)
Blow (2001)
Blues Brothers The (1980)
Boiler Room (2000)
Boogie Nights (1997)
Boondock SaintsThe (1999)
Braveheart (1995)
Brazil (1985)
Breakfast Club The (1985)
Breaking the Waves (1996)
Bronx Tale A (1993)
Buffalo ‘66 (1998)
Butterfly Effect The (2004)
Caddyshack (1980)
Casino (1995)
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Chasing Amy (1997)
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Cinderella Man (2005)
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clerks (1994)
Closer (2004)
Clue (1985)
Crash (2004)
Crimson Tide (1995)
Cube (1997)
Dark Crystal The (1982)
Dead Man (1995)
Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
Departed The (2006)
Descent The (2005)
Devil’s Advocate The (1997)
Die Hard (1988)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Dumb & Dumber (1994)
Dune (1984)
Ed Wood (1994)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
El Mariachi (1992)
Elephant Man The (1980)
Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Event Horizon (1997)
Evil Dead The (1981)
Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain Le (2001)
Fargo (1996)
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Few Good Men A (1992)
Fifth Element The (1997)
Fight Club (1999)
Finding Nemo (2003)
Finding Neverland (2004)
Fish Called Wanda A (1988)
Flash Gordon (1980)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Fugitive The (1993)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Game The (1997)
Gandhi (1982)
Ghost Busters (1984)
Girl Interrupted (1999)
Gladiator (2000)
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Glory (1989)
Good Morning Vietnam (1987)
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Goodfellas (1990)
Goonies The (1985)
Green Mile The (1999)
Gremlins (1984)
Grosse Point Blank (1997)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Hable con ella (2002)
Hackers (1995)
Halloween (1978)
Hamlet (1996)
Happiness (1998)
Heat (1995)
Heathers (1989)
Hero (AKA Ying xiong) (2002)
History of the World: Part I (1981)
Hotaru no haka (1988)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Hunt for Red October The (1990)
Idi i smotri (1985)
In The Company Of Men (1997)
Incredibles The (2004)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Kids (1995)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Labyrinth (1986)
Lean on Me (1989)
Legend (1985)
Léon (1994)
Lethal Weapon (1987)
Life of Brian (1979)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Lost Boys The (1987)
Lost Highway (1997)
Mad Max (1979)
Magnolia (1999)
Major League (1989)
Matchstick Men (2003)
Matrix The (1999)
Memento (2000)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Mononoke-hime (1997)
Monsters Inc. (2001)
Mystic River (2003)
Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
NeverEnding Story The (1984)
Nightmare on Elm Street A (1984)
Office Space (1999)
Oldboy (2003)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Pianist The (2002)
Pink Floyd The Wall (1982)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Planes Trains & Automobiles (1987)
Platoon (1986)
Player The (1992)
Point Break (1991)
Poltergeist (1982)
Predator (1987)
Pretty Woman (1990)
Primal Fear (1996)
Princess Bride The (1987)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Quiet Earth The (1985)
Raging Bull (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Ran (1985)
Ray (2004)
Real Genius (1985)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
RoboCop (1987)
Romancing the Stone (1984)
Romeo Juliet (1996)
Run Lola Run (1998)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Say Anything… (1989)
Scarface (1983)
Schindler’s List (1993)
Scream (1996)
Se7en (1995)
Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001)
Serenity (2005)
Sex Lies And Videotape (1989)
Shallow Grave (1994)
Shawshank Redemption The (1994)
Shining The (1980)
Shrek (2001)
Shrek 2 (2004)
Silence of the Lambs The (1991)
Sin City (2005)
Sixth Sense The (1999)
SLC Punk! (1998)
Sliding Doors (1998)
Snatch. (2000)
Sneakers (1992)
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)
Spaceballs (1987)
Sphere (1998)
Stand by Me (1986)
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Wars (1977)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Starship Troopers (1997)
Straight Story The (1999)
Superman (1978)
Superman II (1980)
Swingers (1996)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Terminator The (1984)
There’s Something About Mary (1998)
Thirteen (2003)
Titanic (1997)
Tombstone (1993)
Top Gun (1986)
Total Recall (1990)
Toy Story (1995)
Toy Story 2 (1999)
Trainspotting (1996)
Transformers: The Movie (1986)
True Romance (1993)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Unforgiven (1992)
Untergang Der (2004)
Usual Suspects The (1995)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Vacation (1983)
Vita è bella La (1997)
Walk the Line (2005)
Wall Street (1987)
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
WarGames (1983)
When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Wild Things (1998)
Willow (1988)
Withnail And I (1987)
Wo hu cang long (2000)
X2 (2003)

Do you agree with the list? What movies are missing from the perfect 500 Gig hard Drive Collection?

Posted by randfish

I just want to set this down for the record.

The days when ongoing SEO was required because the search engines kept changing their ranking algorithms are gone. That is no longer the justification for a long-term organic search marketing contract. SEO firms (at least the ones I'm familiar with) charge for monthly services because (here comes the shocker) - SEO is inherently and ongoing task.

Barry pointed to David Pasternack's article on SEO and to an SEW forum thread on the topic. As Jon Mendez said in that thread David's really showing his ignorance about the practice of SEO with this piece. Here's why:

1. The premise for David's piece is the MarketingSherpa study. I shouldn't have to say anything else. The study was flawed multiple people noted why (low levels of participation inaccurate colllection methodology small sample size etc). If you're going to make assertions about the reasons for a trend you should first make sure your source for the trending data is accurate.
2. David says that SEO is a "fix-it-once" task. I'll agree that there are a small number of SEO services that require only a single fix but if David thinks the job of an SEO firm is primarily to make sites crawlable and add title tags he's lost in 2001. Services like link building content creation linkbaiting viral marketing social media optimization reputation management even keyword research and analytics monitoring don't end - they are tasks that demand attention every month. The choices are: bring it in-house outsource it to an SEO firm or have your lunch eaten by your savvier and higher-ranking competitor.
3. Let me suggest my opinion of the real reasons why there might be a drop in SEO revenue year-over-year (if there actually is one):
1. More and more SEO companies are switching business models as they find that their skills can easily be applied to their own projects for greater revenue and profitability.
2. Companies are pulling SEO in-house because they have seen the massive impact success in the SERPs can have on their bottom lines.
3. The firms calling themselves pure "SEOs" are losing out to more fully featured Internet Marketing firms because the tactics they once relied on (I'm talking here about the Internet Advancement's and Traffic Power's of the world) are no longer effective.

In my opinion whenever you have a statement like this accompanying what purports to be a research document:

With all that fabulous ROI plus years of proof that in-house SEO just doesn't do as well as outsourcing why is SEO industry growth sagging so dramatically? It's a mystery to me.

... the wisest course of action is not to make the assumption that the data is flawless and assign causation. David might be a brilliant PPC manager but I'm not sure he's the best qualified guy to write about the death of SEO revenues (and someone needs to kill that flash presentation on did-it's website).

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Posted by JaneCopland

When I flew back from the NCAA championships this past spring I thought to myself "well that's the last time I'll fly on an aeroplane for a good long time." I was facing imminent graduation (read: unemployment) and I expected to be expelled into the world a lowly M.A-less English major browsing job websites for Junior Copywriter positions until the next coming of Christ. The gig was up. A cardboard box underneath I-5 had my name Sharpied on its side.

I did not bargain on entering an industry where travel is as common as it is in SEO. During my first week at SEOmoz Rand informed me that I could well be sent to London for training with Rebecca in November. However my immigration status currently does not allow me to travel: I am perfectly entitled to live in the U.S. (I have a work permit and am married to an American) but if I leave the country right now I cannot return. Anyhow we discovered that PubCon Las Vegas is scheduled around the same time as the proposed England trip. This event will provide me with a great deal of search education presented in a conference format as opposed to one-on-one training.

Neither Jeff nor I have ever been to an SEO conference... in fact I don't believe that either of us has been to any conference of any sort ever. The university teaser courses I took at fourteen probably don't count. PubCon Vegas' website promises an array of sessions many with useful content for a web-dev guru like Jeff and many more for an SEO consultant like me. We will also be responsible for creating an SEOmoz report on the conference the likes of which you've seen before in the form of Rebecca's SES San Jose article.

I'm looking forward to learning more about this industry and experiencing the circus-façade-in-the-desert that is Las Vegas. See you all in a few weeks' time!

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No matter how you slice it GOOG posted incredible earnings numbers. 70% YoY revenue growth is astounding – especially for a company that size. Since my top ten reasons to sell Google stock the price has shot up almost 41%.

With that kind of track record you’d have to be an idiot (or a Google Employee) to take my advice on investing.

. . .so for my fellow idiots out there I dug up a Motley Fool’s Post I did around June of 2000. It was posted on the “Gorilla Gamers” board – a subforum of investors nay Disciples dedicated to the principles of Geoffrey Moore’s Book “The Gorilla Game.” It was largely done in response to one of the board leaders BruceBrown who commented something to the effect of “Just buy Stock in Gorillas and go fishing for 20 years.”

How does Google Fit into Moore’s definitions? It would be classified as a King more than a Gorilla. How does this post relate now? Maybe some. Perhaps not at all. Judge for yourself:

How ’bout some “Gorilla-Like” Returns?

Imagine if we “Gorilla Gamers” found a company that pioneered a new market in technology software AND hardware. This company:
1. Developed a discontinuous innovation that would forever change the world
2. Has proprietary open architecture to this technology
3. Has very high barriers to entry
4. Has a relatively high switching cost
5. Developed and completely controls the value chain and
6. The market will grow at 25% for at least the next 20 years!

If I told you that this company generated over $2 Billion dollars in profits last year and owns more than 90% of the market how much would you pay for it?

Some of you would say 25 X earnings would be a steal - $50 billion.

Some of you would say 80-100 X earnings or even 192 X earnings like Cisco would be fair - $160 - $384 billion.

Some of you would even say that that “it doesn’t matter what the market capitalization of this company is - just buy it!!!!”

Regardless most all “Gorilla Gamers” would say that you could put $500000 into this company not look at it and basically go fishing for 20 years - right BB?

Let’s say (for arguments sake) that you got in when the market cap of this company was only $50 billion and went fishing for 20 years.

Now you just got back from your 20-year fishing safari and are ready to retire in Style! You look up the ticker and can’t find it. It turns out that your ENTIRE COMPANY was sold to Hasbro in 1998 for $5 million (with an m).

The company you just bought was Atari Inc. in 1980. At that time they had just posted record sales and $2 billion in annual profits occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale California and dominated over 90% of the video gaming community.

Your $500000 investment is now worth

Drum roll . . . .

$50 - Have fun on your retirement.

Atari was the biggest and best example of a mature gorilla 20 years ago. They DOMINATED the video gaming world controlled the value chain and had ALL the characteristics of a Gorilla as defined by the book and this board.

I realize that the principles of the GG say to sell when a discontinuous innovation threatens the gorilla; you may have sold Atari when you acknowledge a threat from Nintendo. The point is you must stay informed and open-minded about evolving technologies. Most importantly you must understand that price does matter when evaluating a stock.

Unfortunately there is no easy answer. No book has all the answers for investing. The Gorilla Game isn’t “wrong” per say it just isn’t always right. Price DOES matter and the people who said to buy QCOM in January 2000 were WRONG. If you owned it then you should have sold.

If you own CSCO now you should sell - it’s too expensive given it’s future earning potential

If you own INTC now understand that it is both expensive and NOT a sure bet; the AMD Athlon core is a discontinuous innovation (possibly akin to Nintendo vs. Atari?). INTC does not have the laser tight focus it had 5 years ago; it’s branching out into everything.

JDSU - I donno: I really don’t.

I know that Price Does Matter and “Gorilla-Like” returns could mean a 10000 fold DECREASE in your portfolio over a 20-year period.

JMHO (with some facts thrown in)

-corley1

P.S. Perhaps the Gorilla Game should be re-titled “You should have bought CSCO in 1990.”

 

About every stock that was talked about on the Gorilla Game board in 2000 is still in the shitter. It’s been more than 6 years and almost all of the companies discussed are down significantly from where they were. The moral of that story is not to get caught up in Pop Investing Advice.

But is Google the next Atari? Probably not. They are not sitting on their laurels. The Youtube buyout could be the most important Internet acquisition of the decade. Jim Cramer Says Google is going to 560 and Joseph Morin says Google revenue could grow from $10 billion per year today to . . .

$208 Billion.

Interstingly enough Joseph sites “Crossing the Chasm” another of Geoff Moore’s books akin to the Gorilla Game.

hrmmmmmmmm . . .

Posted by randfish

Currently SEOmoz has the dismally boring and horribly generic tagline "a search engine optimization resource." With all the tagline and article headline writing we do for clients you'd think we could do better but sadly we're suffering from the same disease as the cobbler's children. Thus it's with great hope that we turn to you our most stalwart fans for ideas.

Here's a few we've come up with so far:

• Because the Internet is Hard
• Carefully Nurturing the Seeds of Search
• Like DMOZ Only Useful
• Your Decoder Ring for the Secret Language of Search
• Where No Good Search Goes Unoptimized
• The Daily SEO Show
• There's No Place Like Search
• An Owner's Manual for the WWW
• Google Asked Us to the Prom But We Already Had Plans
• It's Magically Searchlicious
• Into Every Search A Little Marketing Must Fall
• A Rosetta Stone for the Language of Search
• Delectable Tidbits of Searchy Goodness
• Boldly Searching Where No Engine Wants Us
• It's Magically Searchlicious

If you have a favorite among these we'd appreciate your feedback and if you have a new idea that would be even better (as we can't find one among these that we love). If the winning tagline is suggested by a commenter we'll be happy to give you full credit on our new about us page (with a shiny link too) as a way of saying thanks.

p.s. Progress on the new site is coming along quickly - we're hoping for a release before SES Chicago in December. I see Jim's working away at his new site too - let me urge you Jim to 301 your blog to your main site so you can see the benefits of all those links helping out WeBuildPages. I just want what's best for the guy :)

p.p.s. Just noticed that Mr. McCarley recommended a post on this subject way back in May. Sorry for the delay on that and thanks for the suggestion!

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Posted by randfish

First for those who may not be familiar with Apostolos Gerasoulis and the Teoma search technology ExpertRank (which now powers Ask.com) here's a brief synopsis:

• The web is made up of communities of experts on given topics (science math literature underwater basket weaving etc.)
• The links within a subject-specific community can be identified and given higher weight than links from off-topic websites or pages.
• Using subject-specific communities of experts as the basis for link weighting will produce better results than a global link metric that doesn't differentiate based on topic.

For a long time I've felt that the Teoma technology was a strong alternative to Google Yahoo! & MSN's ideas of global link measurement (though those engines may very well also use some degree of community measurement). Lately however I've been thinking that the entire hypothesis behind Teoma - that topical communities know better - might be false.

The topical community system would have a tough time with many of the emerging (and some of the classic) patterns of recognition and discovery on the web including:

• Dogmatic Communities - in which sites around a topic may be insular and incestual prohibiting new content new ideas or new from making a significant appearance.
• The Blogosphere - where subject specific communities are greatly outnumbered by random-topic sites and even sites inside a subject area often point to resources outside their expertise.
• Populist Intelligence- the idea that the popular vote rather than the votes of the few in power will produce better results.
• Multi-Topic Sites - Wikipedia Digg Reddit Newsvine Squidoo and hundreds of other emerging properties don't have a topic expertise per se.
• Temporal Trends - Many of the "expert" sites that the Teoma algorithm was built around followed the classic model of static resource hubs. Today a great number of sites evolve and update content and links on a daily basis pointing to the latest and greatest. The resource sites meanwhile are often stale and conservative failing to pick up on trends or new information.

What's your opinion? Is the Teoma concept still viable? Was it built for an earlier model of the web and is now obsolete or can it evolve and embrace social networking user-generated content portals the blogosphere and less well-defined web communities?

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