Posted by randfish

Ugh… Part of me just wants to link to this old blog post and leave it at that.

But, since there’s actually a bit of data to share helping to show that (at least so far) Google Instant changes less than your average algorithmic rankings update, let’s share.

880,000 Search Visits Analyzed

Conductor released some nice research from anonymized data of sites on their software platform making a compelling case:

If Conductor keeps putting out this kind of stuff, they’ll be a “must-read” in no time

Hmm… Looks pretty darn similar to me. A tiny increase in 4, 5 and 6 word phrases would seem to go against many of the prognostications and fears that this move would decimate the long tail (though, to be fair, plenty of savvier search folks predicted a slight increase as Google’s “Suggest” function would be more obvious/visible to searchers and push them to perform more specific queries).

Data from 10,000 More Searches

Matt Bennett at MEC blogged some data from 5 sites in his purvue representing about 10,000 searches. He shared this excellent graph (similar to the one above):

That’s more evidence to suggest this is a very subtle change (if there’s any at all) in keyword demand.

Google Search Traffic for SEOmoz & Open Site Explorer

While I don’t have as much data to share as Conductor, I can show you some tidbits from SEOmoz.

Here’s SEOmoz.org’s traffic from Google in the past week compared to the week prior:

And here’s a similar look at OpenSiteExplorer’s Google traffic:

There’s a suspiciously small amount of change in the keyword demand, and although these are certainly un-representative of the broader web, we can be relatively confident that lots and lots of folks in our industry, performing queries that might lead them to these two sites, have awareness of and are using Google Instant.

One change that did catch my eye (thanks to some Tweets on the topic) is that Google’s Suggest itself seems to have changed a bit:

Hard to complain about that

Other Sources Worth Reading on the Topic

I was a bit dismayed to see so many in the SEO field taking this as a serious threat or even touting the massive “changes” that would be coming soon to SEO best practices or even search query demand. We’re usually pretty good about shrugging off Google’s pressbait around technical changes that don’t have much of an impact, but this one seemed to have more legs than usual.

That said, there are a few pieces I think warrant a read-through (or at least, knowledge of):

• Google Instant was Actually a Counter to Bing’s Advertising Blitz from SearchEngineLand
• Google Undertand Not Google Instant from Michael Gray
• 3,000+ Mashable Voters Prefer Google Instant (Slightly) from Mashable
• Sad to link to this PCMag Retraction Showing Their Tragic Ignorance of Search – they confused SEO and PPC, thought marketers might need to buy ads on partial words (“flow” for “flowers”), etc.
• Explanation of Ad/Query Triggering (basically it’s 3 seconds of inactivity) from AdWords
• The Complete Google Instant Users Guide from SELand
• A Great Image from SEOBook showing how Instant further marginalizes the organic results
• A downloadable spreadsheet from the folks at Seer Interactive that can help you calculate your own data on keyword demand changes

Very much looking forward to the discussion, but I’m leaving for Social Media Week Milan and will be hard pressed to contribute at normal levels until my return next week. Until then – Buona notte!

p.s. If you have data to share on how Instant has or hasn’t impacted your traffic-driving queries, that would be awesome. If you blog/upload it, we’ll be happy to update the post with links.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: randfish

Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?

At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.

How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they’re on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.

But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn’t only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.

This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let’s see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.

Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn’t send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.

These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!

2. Don’t forget about mobile

My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.

Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!

I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools.

That’s 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.

3.    “UGC is content that rocks”

That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.

Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.

In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.

Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!

The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions.

The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!

4.    Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people

This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.

For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.

There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.

Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there’s no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let’s motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.

Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we’re currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?

5.    Public Relations, the other PR

Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!

She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you’ve optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:

• Use a social media newsroom like PRESSfeed
• Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
• Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
• Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
• Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
• Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
• Look at LinkedIn and Facebook

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn’t spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the… what?!

One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I’m stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.

This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?

Final Takeaways and Actions

1. Don’t forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
2. What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can’t?
3. UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
4. Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
5. Public Relations is social now, so get on it.

This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we’re completely sold out!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: jennita

Posted by randfish

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it’s fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft’s Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it’s a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that’s now unavailable.

While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results.

For the query above, Yahoo! previously showed pages that pointed to any page on SEOmoz.org from sites with the .edu TLD extension (these now return no results)
_

Webmasters and marketers will no longer be able to use advanced parameters on link: and linkdomain: searches such as inurl, intitle, site, etc. breaking many data sources for software tools and limiting link research abilities. However, there are several worthwhile solutions/replacements, including tools from SEOmoz (though I’ll also cover a few others).

#1 – Linkscape Advanced Reports

SEOmoz PRO members now have unlimited access to Linkscape advanced reports, which can apply filters through the UI in much the same way one could with Yahoo! link searches.

Using the filters and search capabilities, I can add nearly all of the filters previously possible through Yahoo!, and many others unique to Linkscape.
_

This tool is available at www.seomoz.org/linkscape

#2 – OpenSiteExplorer CSV Exports

Another methodology without quite as many bells and whistles, is to use Open Site Explorer. While Linkscape offers filtering right inside the interface, Open Site Explorer is built for speed, meaning you can see lots of links, but only in the views directly ported from our API. To get into the deep filtering, you’ll need to use the CSV export + Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet program).

The filters in OSE are more limited than Linkscape, but most reports take <10 seconds to generate
_

When I export the results to CSV and open in Microsoft Excel, I can easily filter for the .edu links (or any other modifier I’m interested in). OSE also shows up to 10,000 links per report vs. Linkscape’s 3,000.

Using the "find" command in Excel is the simplest methodology, but you can do all sorts of awesome filtering using more advanced techniques
_

This tool is available at www.opensiteexplorer.org

#3 – Majestic SEO

A UK-based search engine built using distributed crawlers, MJ-12, offers an SEO tool for backlink research. The index varies slightly to how major search engines and Linkscape build – instead of new indices built from regular crawls, MJ-12 adds new links and pages as they’re discovered to an ongoing index. This means a much larger dataset, but not always the same level of freshness and limited de-duplication/canonicalization. However, many SEOs like this project a lot, and MJ-12 enables the same filtering available in Linkscape:

Many cool filters and ordering are available via MJ’s tool and reports typically return fairly quickly
_

This tool is available at www.majesticseo.com

#4 – Yahoo! Site Explorer CSV Exports

Just as CSV exports from Open Site Explorer can enable link searching, so too can exports from Yahoo! ‘s Site Explorer. The big limitation is the 1,000 link limit (1/3rd that of Linkscape and 1/10th that of Open Site Explorer). Previously, SEOs would use modified queries to make requests and get more link data from Yahoo!, but with this switch, the only remaining option is to request links for many pages on a single domain to help get a better sense of sites with greater than 1,000 external links.

The "Export first 1000 results to TSV" button + Excel filtering option enables marketers to do research, but is limited in quantity
_

This tool is available at search.siteexplorer.yahoo.com

#5 – The SEOmoz API

For those with some programming skills, SEOmoz offers a free API for link data with up to 1 million calls per month, as well as a larger, full featured link data API starting at $500/month. This is the same API that powers both the Linkscape tool and Open Site Explorer, as well as integrations with Conductor, Hubspot, Flippa, Brightedge and many others.

The APIWiki offers lots of information and examples on how to make calls to the service and integrate with your own softare or practices.
_

This API is available at www.seomoz.org/api

#6 – Use Yahoo! in Other Regions (Temporarily)

It appears that while Yahoo! Search in the US has been replaced by Bing, these commands can still work in other regions, such as Yahoo! India and Yahoo! Italy. However, this is likely a short term solution, as Bing will be rolling out to power Yahoo! serach in these countries over the next 1-2 years.

Hat tip to Himanshu in the comments!

#7 – Other possibilities

In addition to these sources, there are a few other options, albeit with less fully functional or open systems. These include:

• Google’s Webmaster Tools (which enables you to export links, but only for sites you own/control)
• Bing’s Webmaster Tools (with similar limitations, and fewer link options)
• Exalead (a European search engine with limited link command functionality)
• Blekko (a new search engine with a comparatively small index, but interesting link functions – though it’s still in private beta)
• Alexa (which contains a limited set of link data for some sites)

Other sources may yet emerge, and certainly players like Majestic and SEOmoz are working hard to improve their coverage, quality and functionality. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the link research landscape – hopefully Bing is working on something valuable to help replace this functionality and to serve up data when Yahoo! Site Explorer is also retired (currently scheduled for 2012).

p.s. If you’re hankering for more information on link research and training on SEO tools, we’ve got just a few tickets left for next week’s PRO Training in Seattle.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: randfish

Posted by Danny Dover

 This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.

View statistics for this video

Embed video

<object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_156841" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/68002269a24d03accbf2f4055daa8840e3e2b51e.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/62386dc87c43d53083393f18e766a2e421b95a3d.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_156841&mediaDuration=355.36"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_156841" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/68002269a24d03accbf2f4055daa8840e3e2b51e.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/62386dc87c43d53083393f18e766a2e421b95a3d.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_156841&mediaDuration=355.36"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed(‘wistia_156841′,640,360,{videoUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/68002269a24d03accbf2f4055daa8840e3e2b51e.bin’,stillUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/62386dc87c43d53083393f18e766a2e421b95a3d.bin’,distilleryUrl:’http://distillery.wistia.com/x’,accountKey:’wistia-production_3161′,mediaId:’wistia-production_156841′,mediaDuration:355.36})</script> <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz – SEO Software</a>

 

Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)

Build YourBrand.com

Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc…) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com

Build an Alternative Brand Site

After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.

Create Social Media Profiles

This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc…) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.

Do Interviews/News

Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.

Do PPC

This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der…) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.

Update: You can see 4 more excellent suggestions from seo-himanshu in the comments below.

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

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: Danny Dover

Posted by richardbaxterseo

• Home
• About
  • History
  • Team
  • Offices
• Services
  • Web Design
  • Internet Marketing
• Contact Us
  • United Kingdom
  • France
  • USA
  • Australia

A simple example expanding a list of options for a user searching for flights:

Improving your navigation can have a positive impact on your site architecture. By making sure these fundamentals are covered, you can build your marketing efforts on a solid foundation knowing your website is crawlable and super-friendly to search engines. What are your favorite examples of great navigation?

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: richardbaxterseo

Posted by randfish

Another great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled “Startup Competitive Advantages that Work.” It’s definitely worth a read, even if you’re not at a startup.

As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn’t help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we’re in – domination of the organic search results – can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it.

The core of Jason’s post is below:

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven’t already.

To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don’t have an “edge” just because you’re passionate, hard-working, or “lean.”

The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought.

Like what?

And he’s got a number of terrific answers, but SEO, and more broadly, phenomenal organic web marketing, isn’t among them. Before I tackle why I think it belongs there, let me explain the difference between “good” SEO and defensible, “competitive advantage” style SEO.

“Good” SEO means

• You have a solid quantity of unique, quality content that users and customers will find useful.
• Your pages and links are crawlable, indexable and generally search friendly.
• You’ve done your homework with keyword research and update it regularly (monthly – quarterly) as new terms/phrases rise/fall in demand.
• You’ve engaged in some decent link acquisition campaigns, garnering links from a few authorities in your industry, some blogs, maybe a few article sites, press releases, link exchanges and the like to the point where you have similar metrics to your competition.
• You’ve engaged in social media and have profiles on the major sites, have a few tweets every week that point to your site and a few hundred fans on Facebook.

In other words, you’ve followed best practices, done the “right” things and while an SEO audit might reveal some missed opportunities and an error here or there, you’d generally come away with an “A” on your SEO report card.

“Competitive Advantage” SEO means

• Your site produces content people love to visit and love to share in a scalable, hard-to-replicate way
• Your on-site SEO is “best of breed.” Note: This isn’t much different than good SEO – on-page/on-site optimization is unlikely to ever be a competitive advantage.
• Your keyword research is baked into the content generation process. The material your site produces fulfills keyword demand just as, or even before it exists by tapping into the subconscious of the web and the culture of ideas/questions in your industry/niche.
• Website owners and content creators have a powerful psychological incentive to link to your work frequently, just as those who participate/contribute to the social web are incented to share via their network of choice.

Some Examples of “Competitive Advantage” SEO Sites:

• StackOverflow
• Yelp
• Wikipedia
• LinkedIn
• Mashable
• Last.fm
• NY Magazine
• Amazon
• Cheezburger Network
• WordPress
• AllRecipes
• SmashingMagazine

All of these have content pouring out of them, generated rapidly, scalable, and in time with query demand. They have broad networks of patrons and participants that incent the spreading and sharing of their content through links and social networks. They employ content+SEO+sharing in a high-return equation that’s nearly impossible for competitors to match. I’ll illustrate:

That’s not to say they can’t be beaten, but runner B (a new competitor) is going to have to go dramatically faster than runner A (the market leader) if they want to catch up before runner A sees them coming and turns up the jets.

SEO Can Be a Competitive Advantage

This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages.

1. It’s massively hard to duplicate
2. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines)
3. It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so)

It’s certainly not the only option, but it can have a dramatic impact. If you’re starting a company, starting an SEO campaign or just want to renew your vision for how your site will go from ranking for a few keywords to becoming a dominant market player, it’s, at the least, a strategy worthy of consideration.

p.s. If you’re interested in some more practical SEO advice this morning, my slide deck from the Blueglass LA conference – Strategic SEO Link Analysis – may be able to scratch that itch.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: randfish

Posted by timsoulo

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.

Howdy SEOmoz fans! It is an overused practice to start from some “shocking” stats and dissertate on how Facebook is powerful and important for business. So, I will just consider you all know what is Facebook and how cool it is.

What you’re about to read is a step-by-step SMM strategy for promoting your business on Facebook. I’ve gathered all the best practices and tips that I have used myself, together with some advice that I haven’t tried but am confident will work well. Ok. That’s enough for the intro, let’s go!

Where To Start?

1. Brand Ambassador.

First of all, don’t use your personal account to promote your business, unless you want your customers to see your childhood pictures and lulz from the recent party. You can create another (purely business oriented) instance of yourself or hire someone to become your brand ambassador. This will be the person who represents your business online and handles all communications, so the info on the profile should be brief and clear and all the pictures neat and professional. Remember that users will associate your business with this guy.

Power Tip: Create a separate e-mail account in Gmail and import all the e-mail addresses of your clients there. Now when you use this account to create a new Facebook profile – the system will automatically find all of your clients in your address book and suggest to add them as your friends on Facebook! What a great start!

2. Creating a Facebook page.

Promotion on Facebook is all about having a page for your business. To create one, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the “+ Create a Page” button.

Power Tip: “Page Name” is one of the the strongest ranking factors on Facebook search. Don’t miss the opportunity to add some keywords you wish to rank for as you are not allowed to change your page name later.

Configuring Your Facebook Page

1. Profile picture & avatar.

Profile picture is one of the few things in the design of your page that you can actually customize, so be sure to make the most of it. Here are two great articles that will help you: “5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Profile Photo“; “Making the Most of Your Facebook Profile Picture“.

2. Page info.

The next important thing to do is fill your Facebook page with information about your business. Most of it is stored under the “Info” tab, which you cannot remove or hide. Lots of people visit it, so work hard to make your info as brief and engaging as you can. “Think SEO” and use your keywords, as each of the tabs is indexable by the search engines.

Power Tip: if you type a URL starting from http:// in the info box under your profile picture, Facebook will turn it into a clickable link. So you can easily refer your visitors to your website, blog or twitter account.

3. Applications.

• Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) – allows you to create 10 additional tabs, which can contain HTML/CSS, Flash, FBML, iframes and FBJS;
• NetworkedBlogs – allows you to post your RSS and Atom feeds directly to your wall;
• Twitter Tab – posts your twitter updates to a separate tab;
• Extended Info – adds an additional box which supports html/fbml, images, video and music to the left sidebar of your page;
• Fan Appz & Promotions – helps you handle all kinds of contests, sweepstakes & give aways.

Tip: you’ll probably end up with lots of tabs by adding various applications. However you can easily drag them around if you think that some of them are more important.

4. Vanity URL.

To be able to convert your ugly “326727833086?ref=sgm&ajaxpipe=1&__a=7″ URL into something fancy-looking, like “http://facebook.com/mybusinesspage” you need to have at least 25 fans. Once you do – go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and click the “Set a username for your Pages” link at the bottom.

5. Custom landing page.

You need an attractive landing page, which will convert your visitors into fans. Here is when the FBML application comes into play. Using HTML, CSS, FBJS and even flash you can create awesome landing pages that people will not only “like”, but link to, and suggest to friends.

Tip: If you’ve got no development skills you can find some nice facebook FBML page templates that have just started to appear around the template stores.

What To Expect?

Before we start reviewing various Facebook promotion techniques, I’d like to clear things up a little bit. Essentially when someone “Likes” your Facebook page, they will be notified every time you update its status, it’s almost the same as following someone on Twitter. To have your message spread on Twitter you need to have your followers retweet your post so that their followers could see it and retweet in turn. On Facebook, the principle is a bit more sophisticated: when someone likes or comments your status update, this fact is being reflected in his profile. And when your status update gets a decent amount of “likes” and comments it is promoted to the Top News section of a user’s News Feed, so that more people could see it.

Now let’s refer to a famous “90:9:1 Social Behaviors Rule” to understand what it takes for your message to become visible.

Let’s consider that “Heavy Contributors” are those ready to comment on your update, “Intermittent” ones will probably “like” it, and “Lurkers” will read it or just scroll through. Say your page has 100 fans. Knowing the fact that only 12%-20% of all your “Fans” will see your status update in their Live Feed, we can see that:

I hope this delivers a clear understanding that Facebook promotion takes an enormous amount of effort to become successful.

Promoting Your Facebook Page Internally.

1. Using your Brand Ambassador.

• Add to friends any people that may be your potential customers or somehow relate to your business. Recently, Facebook has added Skype integration, which can suggest you some Facebook friends from the list of your Skype contacts. Once you have a decent amount of friends use the “Suggest to friends” and “Share” buttons to promote your Facebook page to them;
• Use Facebook Search to discover relevant pages, groups, events, people and even messages. With Search you can easily track any mentions of your brand and provide feedback – people really love that;
• Once you join pages, groups and events, you are able to participate in the conversation, which is a great way of direct promotion. Moreover you can see the list of the group members and easily add them to friends;
• Communicate. Once someone comments on your new status, a photo, or anything else – answer back. Moreover you need to make people love your brand and become active contributors and then brand ambassadors. 1/4 of search results on each big brand is UGC (User Generated Content).

Power Tip: When composing a message put the @ symbol and start typing the name of your business page to mention it, just like you mention someone on Twitter. This can be used as a signature to your updates.

2. Keep the page fresh and interesting.

People join your page hoping to receive some interesting stuff from you, so do not disappoint them. Facebookers usually prefer pictures, videos and links to plain text updates. Here is a comprehensive list of things that you should keep in mind to avoid losing your fans: don’t post too many updates; don’t automate your content; don’t be a duplicate of your website and don’t be boring. Your page wall is your social proof and a signal for people to get involved.

3. Cheat a bit.

Ask fellow staff & your team members to post “likes” and comments on each of your status updates to boost its rankings. Only status updates with 5 or more “likes” and comments show up in the Top News section. This will also make your wall look “alive”, which will inspire your fans to be more active on your page and participate in the conversation.

4. Fill in your page with media content.

• Upload pictures of your products/services, your office and your team at work to make your company easier to relate to;
• Encourage your fans to post  pictures of how they use your product;
• Upload pictures from each event you host and tag your fans there;
• Post videos of your team members talks;
• Show your products/services in action;
• Use video to respond to your fans (Bill Clinton frequently does video responses on his page).

5. Treat your fans.

You need to offer your fans something special and reward them. For instance 1-800-FLOWER Facebook page shows the discount code only when you click the “Like” button.

You can make some special offers, which are available to your Facebook fans only and are not announced outside of Facebook. It’s dead easy to reward your loyal fans by promoting them to the admins of your page, which will most likely turn them into enthusiastic brand ambassadors. Anyway, if there is some prominent fan – he should be publicly rewarded.

6. Send an update to Fans.

Direct messaging is a very powerful tool, but do not misuse it. Think twice before sending a message to all of your fans – it should be really valuable if you don’t want everyone to ignore it or get irritated.

Tip: Facebook allows you to send targeted updates. Think of a way you could use that feature for your business.

7. Ask your fans for help.

Now and then you can post a status update asking your fans to help build the community by suggesting your page to their friends. Just refer them to “Suggest to Friends” and “Share” links on your page and measure their response.

8. Build partnerships with other pages.

Notice that each page on Facebook has an “Add to my Page’s Favorites” button. When you do this, the logo of this page appears in a special “Favorite Pages” box on your own page. People see it and they might click the link to find out more about this page.

Your aim here is to build partnerships within your niche and be “favourited” as much as possible. Add to favorites pages that you like or that your business is related to and inform their owners about it with a wall post or a private message. Most likely you will be “favorited” back.

9. Use the applications.

There are a lot of crazy apps that you can use to promote yourself. You can even develop one of your own if your budget allows that. But how do the viral applications work in common?

You need something that people would willingly launch. This might be a game or a quiz or any other kind of dynamic content that most people love. Once a person has his score, bagde, vitual gift or any other result – the application publishes it to his wall so that all his friends could see it. The application should have a clear call to action, so that new people could easily get engaged. If the application has some kind of a High Score – people will play it again and again till they outrank their friends. You can (should) use the apps for sweepstakes and giveaways – people love them a lot.

10. Spy!

Yes! Always keep an eye on your competitors, especially on those outranking you. Check what they do and if you consider it to be a successful strategy – do the same. When they fail – try to avoid their mistakes. Anyway, you should always be informed on what others are doing to promote themselves.

11. Ads?

Indeed the most common way to promote your page. But before you use it, check out these stats:

Promoting Your Facebook Page Externally.

1. Facebook for webites.

The Facebook team has come a long way toward making your website more personalized and social. There is a list of great social plugins that can be easily embedded into your website and drive lots of new visitors: “Like Button” plugin, which is almost everywhere now, “Like Box”, which let’s you become a fan of the website without leaving the page, “Live Stream” which is often used while broadcasting some event. Try them on your website and see what happens next.

2. “Like” and “Share” buttons.

These two are so powerful that they require a separate paragraph. Once you own an online store – those buttons are of exceptional value. Whenever you find something that appeals to you in an online store – you no longer need to copy the URL and send it to your friends to ask for their opinion. Just press the “Like” button. They will see that and comment on it. This applies to photos, videos, games, blog posts, reviews – literally anything that can be found on the web.

3. Put a link everywhere.

Once you have a website, you put its address everywhere – e-mail signatures, forum signatures, twitter info, author bio section, LinkedIn profile, links section of your blog. Do exactly the same with your Facebook page. Highlight your Facebook presence at offline events, print it on your business card, use every opportunity you have.

Power Tip: Take some twitter auto follow script that follows a person whenever he has specific keywords in his tweet. Some percent of the people you’ve followed will follow you back. Write an engaging request to join your Facebook page and set it as an automatic direct message to people, who have just followed you. Being launched, this system will drive some new fans to your Facebook page on a regular basis.

4. Using video.

Almost every video sharing service allows you to annotate your videos with links. This is a great way to drive some new fans onto your Facebook page. You can make viral videos, funny videos, tutorials, explanations, presentations etc. and include a link to your Facebook page with a request to join. Works perfectly!

5. Other services.

There are a lot of websites where you can get some targeted audience. For instance, upon writing this guide I’ve gone though dozens of presentations at SlideShare and Scribd. There I’ve seen many referrals to join Facebook pages specialized on marketing, and I did join some of them truthfully as I enjoyed their presentations. Examine carefully all the websites where you post information or showcase your services and think of the way you could refer people to your Facebook page.

Power Tip: In case you have some kind of a digital product – create a torrent with some demos, name it with trending keywords and upload to all torrent trackers you can find. In the info or in the comments section add a link to your Facebook page. Then go to your analytics and watch your numbers grow.

Wheew… That’s the end of my guide. Sure there’s a lot more to add, but I tried to keep my tactics brief, to leave some space for your imagination. I’m sure each of you can invent lots of fantastic ways to use Facebook for SMM. I am open for any questions, shoot!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: timsoulo

Posted by Sam Crocker

Good morning Mozzers!

Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries.

WARNINGS:

1. There is something to be said for having a similar site, brand, and feel that can be recognized all over the world.

2. Some CMS systems do not allow for easy changes to be made for different versions of the site.

3. With Google Translation, many folks are becoming less interested in having multiple sites anyhow.

4. More sites mean more potential problems and things to worry about.

Now, with these warnings out of the way let’s first jump into some of the potential benefits, and then look at some examples. 

Why Change a Good Thing?

Let’s consider an example company that has enjoyed a great deal of success in a country like the US and would like to become a major player in a country like Japan. Now, setting aside some of the logistical nightmares and translation issues we could stick with the templates and design from our original site in hopes of breaking into the Japanese market as a known quantity. After all, our model has worked wonders in the States and is likely to appeal to the Japanese market as well, right?

Well, maybe.

On the other hand, it’s probably worth considering a number of things about the site before we make a decision either way.

How Powerful is my Brand?

First, have we done our market research? It is all well and good if we have experienced success in one market, but it won’t necessarily mean that our brand name means anything to the new market. We don’t need to look too far outside of the field of SEO to realize that market shares and the "major players" can vary greatly from one country to another.

Now, we search marketers may tend to be biased towards Google in our SEO efforts, but we at least are all familiar with Bing and Yahoo! Meanwhile, some countries (China in the example) these "major brand names" may not mean anything. So banking on your "established brand" means very little when exploring a new market- be sure to do your research!

"I want a Pretty Site"

Secondly, what if up means down and down means up. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s not so far off. Colors can mean totally different things from one country to another. And I’m not talking about horoscopes here! This isn’t a simple question of blue means serenity and purple means power there are much more pressing conversion factors to talk about here.

Let’s look at the implications of red and green and up and down. This factor was brought to my attention in a recent blogpost by the folks on the Yahoo Developer Blog and it is a really crucial point to consider- especially for conversions. In the US and most English speaking countries we are accustomed to a simple logic: Green = Good, Red = Bad. This holds from everything to traffic lights, to stock markets. However, in China and Korea the opposite is true.

These two screenshots were taken at the same time. The one on the left was taken from Yahoo! Finance whilst the one on the right was taken from Yahoo! Korea. As you can see, both images are showing the same data, although one of them appears with red arrows for the upward movement of the stock markets and the other appears with green arrows. This may be a simple illustration but it is easy enough to understand how the massive red letters you use to draw attention for falling prices on your US site could cause a bit of confusion.

Browser Usage

Finally, be mindful of the most common browsers in the country you are targeting. Compatibility across all browsers is always advisable but not always achievable. Although you may have built your site in the US with an understanding that most people would be using Chrome or Firefox the same may not be true everywhere else. In fact, as much as we bemoan Internet Explorer in the UK and the US it is still far and away the pre-eminent browser in Japan.

*REMEMBER THIS, because this bit of information may become even more relevant to you after a forthcoming casestudy by Tom which reveals some potentially massive Conversion losses from Internet Explorer users. I fear I may have said too much already, but be sure to watch this space for a link to the article.

    EDIT: Here is the case study on the Google Analytics Blog!

 Speaking the Language

Image: Engrish.com

My final suggestion for creating a site outside of your country comes with a word of warning. If this image looks ridiculous to native English speakers, imagine how silly a site built by one of us looks to a native mandarin speaker. Invest the time and effort to find the right person to build the site. If you are looking to take your ecommerce site to a global audience make sure you’re doing it the right way!

Do What Makes Sense!

As you may have realized, some of these seem like common sense but are far too often overlooked. If your site/brand doesn’t have any recognition to speak of make sure you’ve done your market research. It makes perfect sense for a brand like Amazon (without too many "offensive" colors used on any of their sites) to capitalize on their brand recognition across the web. There is no reason for them to invest too heavily in a redesign and a new name- because they can afford to acquire existing brands and rebrand.

However, if you have just enjoyed some excess in your home market and are thinking about taking your ecommerce platform to new heights be sure to consider the impact on usability.

Image: Cartoon Depot

Have I got the colors right? Have I considered the language issues? Have I thought about conversions and browser issues? And perhaps most importantly- have I got the funds to do this the right way at the moment?

If you can’t afford to make the switch properly, perhaps it is better to consider a "friendlier" market that is more similar to your current market and save your global dominance for a later experiment.

*Browser and Search Statistics from StatCounter

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: Sam Crocker

Posted by Danny Dover

  Want happier website visitors and higher rankings? This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how and why to speed up your website. It is more technical than previous videos so I tried to spice it up with an ode to one of my favorite canceled TV Shows, Pop-up Video. Can’t stand the content? At least the added commentary is entertaining. (It is the perfect plan ;-p)

7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm

The following are seven proven techniques well known websites use to boost their site speed.

1. Enable Gzip

Gzip is a open source compression algorithm that can used to compress your website’s content before your server sends the data to a visitor’s browser. This makes your servers job easier and makes pages load faster for your users. You can learn how to enable Gzip here.

2. Minify Javascript/CSS

Minify is the process (and software) for removing unnecessary formatting characters from code. This makes your files smaller and your visitors happier. You can learn all about this process here.

3. Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network)

CDNs are systems of interconnected server resources that spread content and assets around the globe to shorten the distance between server and prospective user. They are commonly used by the Web’s most popular websites. You can find a list of free CDNs here. Note: This is not a tip for beginners. Working with CDNs gets complicated very quickly.

4. Optimize Images

You can take advantage of the countless man hours that have been devoted to image compression and make your users happier by simply saving your images as the appropriate type. As a very general rule of thumb, I recommend saving photos as JPEGs and graphics as PNGs.

5. Use External Javascript/CSS

When a browser requests a website from a server it can only download a set number of files of the same type at any given point. While this isn’t true of all file types, it is a good enough reason to host applicable files on alternative subdomains. This is only recommended for sites where the pros of speed will outweigh the SEO cons of creating a new subdomain.

6. Avoid Using Excess Redirects

While redirects can be extremely useful, it is important to know that implementing them does force your servers to do slightly more work per applicable request. Always avoid redirect strings (301 -> 301 -> 200 or even worse 301 -> 302 -> 200) and use these tools sparingly.

7. Use Fewer Files

The most straightforward way to speed up your website is to simply use fewer files. Less files means less data. My favorite method of doing this is utilizing CSS sprites. You can read how popular websites are using this trick here.

Google’s Mission to Speed Up the Web

Fueled by the massive potential of the Internet, Googlers are working on many projects in their attempt to speed up the Web:

• Rewriting Internet Protocols – Starting at the foundation, teams at Google are rewriting the protocols that run the Internet in order to get faster performance.
• Creating a Public DNS – Google recently released a public DNS resource to help speed up DNS calls.
• Providing Fiber-optics for the Public – For a select few cities in the United States, Google will soon be offering ultra high-speed broadband networks for consumers.
• Encouraging Webmasters/SEOs to Speed Up Their Sites with a New Algorithm Update – Google spilled the beans about their one new aspect of their ranking algorithms by saying that site speed is now a ranking factor. This post explains how to take advantage of that.

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

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: Danny Dover

Posted by Dr. Pete

We’ve had a lot of discussions recently about SEO as a Science. Unfortunately, these discussions sometimes devolve into arguments over semantics or which approach is the “best” in all situations. I’d like to step back for a few moments today and talk about the wider world of SEO evidence. While not all of these types of evidence are “science” in the technical sense, they are all important to our overall understanding. We need to use the best pieces of all of them if we ever hope to develop a mature science of SEO.

The Fundamental Assumption

All science rests on a fundamental assumption, long before any hypothesis is proposed or tested. The fundamental assumption is that the universe is orderly and follows rules, and that through observation and experimentation we can determine those rules. Without an orderly universe, science would be impossible (as would existence, most likely). A related assumption is that these rules are relatively static – if they change, they change very slowly. Our view of the universe may change dramatically, resulting in paradigm shifts, but the underlying rules remain roughly the same.

The advantage we have as SEOs is that we know, for an absolute fact, that our universe is orderly. Like Neo, we have seen The Matrix. The Algorithm consists of lines of code written by humans and running on servers.

The disadvantage for SEO science is that the rules governing our universe are NOT static. The algorithm changes constantly – as often as 400 times per year. This means that any observation, any data, and even any controlled experiment could turn out to be irrelevant. The facts we built our SEO practices on 5 or 10 years ago are not always valid today.

(1) Anecdotal Evidence

All science begins with observation. In SEO, we make changes to sites every day and measure what happens. When rankings rise and fall, we naturally try to figure out why and to tie those changes to something we did in the past. Although it isn’t “science” in the technical sense, the evidence of our own experience is very important. Without observing the universe and creating stories to explain it, we would never learn anything from those experiences.

PROS – Anecdotal evidence is easy to collect and it’s the most abundant form of evidence any of us have. It’s the building block for just about any form of scientific inquiry.

CONS – Our own experiences are easily affected by our own biases. Also, no single experience can ever tell the whole story. Anecdotal evidence is just a starting point.

(2) Prophetic Evidence

SEOs have a unique type of available evidence. Every once in a while, a prophet will descend from the Mountain Top (or Mountain View), shave his head, and speak the words of the Google Gods. Whether or not we choose to believe these prophets, the fact remains that there are people who have seen and written the Algorithm, and those people have access to facts that the rest of us don’t. Their statements (and our ability to critically reconcile those statements) are an important part of the overall puzzle.

PROS – The prophets are as close to objective reality as we’re ever going to get. They have direct insight into the algorithm.

CONS – The prophets don’t have a vested interest in telling us the whole truth. Their messages can be cryptic and even misleading.

(3) Secondhand Evidence

When you hear “secondhand” evidence, you may naturally think of the extreme examples, like hearsay and urban legends:

My cousin’s neighbor’s stylist said that she once changed all of her META tags to “sex poker sex poker sex” and her site immediately jumped to #1 on Google!

To be fair, though, secondhand evidence also includes the legitimate science that came before us and the experiences of our peers. If we were forced to confirm and replicate every single conclusion for ourselves, we would never make any progress. Ultimately, we build on the reliable conclusions of other experts, past and present.

PROS – Secondhand evidence is the foundation for scientific progress.

CONS – Sometimes, experts are wrong, and you have to learn how to tell the difference, especially in a field as young as SEO.

(4) Experimental – “The Wild”

Experimentation is the heart of Capital-S Science. The most basic experiments happen something like this:

• You form a hypothesis (“Adding keywords to my title tag will improve rankings”).
• You make a change to test that hypothesis.
• You measure the outcome and find out if you were right.

Most SEO experimentation, by its nature, occurs in the “wild”. We have to put our sites out in the world, and we often have to use existing sites that are already complicated and changing.

PROS – By directly forming and testing a hypothesis, we can start to determine causality. We can also repeat the process, helping to validate what we’ve learned.

CONS – Using existing sites in the wild introduces a lot of extra noise. Often, our sites have to keep changing (even during the experiment), and Google is always changing. There’s also a fair amount of risk – if we change our bread-and-butter sites to test SEO theories, mistakes can be costly.

(5) Experimental – Controlled

This is the classic SEO experiment, where we register one or more new domain names and build sites from the ground up. We can even introduce a control group, by building both sites up to Step X and then only changing one of the sites after that point. Even then, it might be best to call these experiments “semi-controlled,” since the Google algorithm can still change and we can’t always control outside influences (like someone accidentally linking to one of the sites).

PROS – This approach is about the best we can do, in terms of control, and it separates out a lot of confounding factors.

CONS – The artificial sites we set up in these experiments (often using nonsense words) aren’t always representative of real, complex sites. In addition, these experiments are usually conducted on a sample of just one or very few sites, to save time and money. Statistical significance can be very difficult to achieve.

(6) Correlational Evidence

Sometimes, either we can’t separate out the variables involved in a complex situation (like the 200+ factors Google uses in its ranking model) or direct experimentation would be impossible or unethical. For example, let’s say you want to understand how smoking affects mortality. You can’t take 1000 5-year-olds, force them to smoke for 70 years, and compare them to 1000 non-smoking 5-year-olds. In these cases, you take a very large data set and look at the correlations. In other words, if I look at 1000 smokers and 1000 non-smokers, how likely is each group to die at a certain age? Correlation can help you understood how changes in X (smoking, in this case) co-occur with changes in Y (mortality).

PROS – Correlation can help us mathematically find relationships when direct experimentation is impossible or impractical. These techniques can also help model complex situations where multiple variables are affecting the same outcome.

CONS – Correlation does not imply causation. We don’t know if changes in X cause changes in Y or if they just happen to co-occur (maybe even due to a Factor Z affecting them both).

(7) Large-scale Simulation

If we can collect enough data, we can build a model of the universe and test hypotheses against that model. Now that large-scale indexes are being built to mimic Google (including our own Linkscape and indexes like Majestic), it only stands to reason that we’ll eventually be able to run experiments directly against these models. Although the conclusions we draw from these simulations are only as good as the models themselves, simulation data can help us both improve models and conduct something closer to a laboratory test than is usually possible in SEO.

PROS – Simulations can be controlled. Unlike Google, we know whether we’ve changed the model or not. Experiments can also be run very quickly and on a very large-scale.

CONS – The result of any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and our models are still in their infancy.

Which One Is The Best?

Any type of evidence, including controlled experimentation, has limits. In a field like SEO, where the Google algorithm is constantly changing, relying too much on any one type of evidence can either stall progress or lead us to bad conclusions (or, in some cases, both). Understanding every available source of evidence not only helps us paint a broader, more comprehensive picture, but it also helps us cross-test our hypotheses and prevent mistakes. SEO science is a young and constantly changing field, and, at least for now, SEO scientists will need to adapt quickly.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read other posts by this Author: Dr. Pete