Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I’ll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 – Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin – Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users – deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller’s Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand’s humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online – there’d be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced – it’s light and airy, it’s up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in “the cloud”) and it even calls out the “sexiness” of the application.

When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they’re more likely to:

• Link
• Share
• Contribute Content
• Participate
• Remain Loyal
• Invest in the Experience
• Browse more Pages

All of these have either first or second-order impacts on SEO in a positive way.

#2 – The Scroll-Triggered Call-to-Action

Sometimes, you don’t want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action… At least, not until you’re fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That’s where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.

Browse any article on the New York Times website and you’ll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you’ve reached the bottom of the current piece:

It’s great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.

In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:

This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid’s flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.

Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for SEO are far greater in quantity than just what’s been shared above).

#3 – User Badges

If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?

For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet from Concept Feedback authored a brilliant piece analyzing this precise behavior and exposing some terrific examples.

We’ve noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it’s spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering SEO:

The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It’s the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts – fans won’t just wear them to bed; they’ll actually show off your brand.

#4 – The Animated HTML Multiheader

I wrote about the multiheader a long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point, Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I’ve screencaptured them elegantly “swooshing” in and out of the headline position:

The advantage is two-fold – more content on the homepage that’s accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it’s a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.

BTW – Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner’s 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you’re seriously missing out.

#5 – Sexy, Embeddable Infographics

Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it’s a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you’re off to the link acquisition races.

Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it’s creation):

And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:

As with badges, the “beauty rule” applies – the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.

#6 – Designing Around Illustration (with CSS)

It used to be that I’d see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their SEO, too.

Google’s “text only” cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot – we’ve come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn’t make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below… errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that’s the one!)

For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:

Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an SEO ask?

#7 – Creative Content Formats Unleashed

Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you’ve seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.

A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:

Above: Grain and Gram Gentleman’s Journal

Above: Sanctuary T Shop (who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)

Above: Heart Directed (a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an SEO example itself)

p.s. If design inspires you, I’d recommend checking out Drawar and Six Revisions list of 10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish

Posted by JoannaLord

We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes.

You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives that you usually discover the data that can change your current course of action. So this post is going to tackle an approach to analytics that is often overlooked and (thanks to Google and their silly naming convention decisions) is rarely used to its fullest capacity. Get excited folks we are going to talk about benchmarking {Woohoo! Insert audience applause here}.

All of you excel spreadsheet lovers out there know plenty of ways to extract data and pinpoint specific red flags or recent successes. In fact, most people use analytics to simply analyze the current state of their account. While this is certainly a priority, it really is one dimensional. Instead of stopping there, why not go further? Why not better understand where your data was, and how you are measuring up? In fact, why not use this data to help inform your internal decisions as a company? It’s like an analytical epiphany—“using past and current data to help guide you moving forward.” Glorious.

While many of the analytics platforms out there have given us a number of ways to compare historical data to current data, we are still limited to two distinct time ranges (for the most part). It’s great to see those two ranges stack up against each other, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. Without going further you miss the “interaction” between those two distinct time ranges.

Benchmarking your data is a great way to discover more about this, often overlooked, gray area. Benchmarking simply means you set a standard at which you compare something else to. When used for data mining, it means you plot two distinct variables (time ranges, metrics, dimensions, etc.) over a period of time and then use these “benchmarks” to infer conclusions when making decisions.

You can then see  a more complete picture of your site’s momentum. In my opinion, understanding your site’s momentum is one of the most powerful metrics an analyst can calculate. If you can say with authority that you know how your site is doing and how it will likely be doing in the next week, month, few months, etc., you are in an ideal place. With data like that you can take more calculated risks.

*First, I want to throw out a disclaimer—a little over a year ago Google decided to integrate “Benchmarking” into their Visitors tab in GA. This just made things confusing in my opinion. The GA feature actually shows your site in comparison to a {very very very limited} industry pool of similarly {not really} sized sites. There is a lot wrong with the assumptions of this feature, but for our purposes here, when I say “benchmarking” I mean the act of plotting two distinct variables over time to extract insight…not the {ridiculous-I-can’t-believe-they-took-it-out-of-beta} GA feature.

The “benchmarking” feature in GA on SEOmoz

Okay now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can benchmark your data to hopefully gather some insight into your site’s performance.

Know your bottom-line (and your “high-line” –yes, I just made that word up)

This is probably the most common approach to benchmarking. It’s a pretty simple way to analyze the current state of your account. You should know your extremes for every metric. For example if you are a company that sells a seasonally successful product, you should know what your lowest conversion rate is for the year, as well as your peak conversion performance. In understanding the extremes you can make better assumptions on how your off season stats are trending. While not the most accurate approach to data mining, benchmarking the extremes of your account enables you to speak intelligently, at any given moment, on how your site is currently performing.

Know your ratios & relationships

Am I the only one that always reads “ratio” as “radio”? I digress. Knowing your metric ratios and how they relate to each other, is a great way to quickly detect when things are headed south. Often, as analysts, we don’t realize something has gone wrong until we see sales are down. While that is an effective method of pinpointing mistakes, it certainly isn’t ideal. Wouldn’t it be nice to quickly identify issues as they actually become issues? Crazy, I know. Well this is exactly what benchmarking the ratios of your site’s metrics can do. At SEOmoz, we use ratio/relationship benchmarking to keep our traffic stats in check. We don’t just plot out how many visitors each section of the site brings in out of the total visitors; we compare those percentages against each other. This gives us a ballpark value to guide us. An example; “the X part of the site brings in roughly twice as much as Y, which brings in about 1/3 of the traffic as Z.”

The great part about this method of benchmarking is you can easily turn it into a visual representation of the different pieces of the pie, and isolate out when things start to shift. Below is an actual example Rand pulled together earlier this week (yes he does that sort of thing for fun! A true data-head!). In this chart we have graphed out the top trafficked pages on our site, and then plotted them against each other to show how they are performing in relation to each other.

Also see a larger, detailed version

You can see the significant drop in the blue segment (our Tools page), which was due to a redirect mistake we made (oops…Rand talks more about that here). By visually representing these sections, we can easily identify shifts in the relationships, which can guide us on where we should focus our attentions (aka fix our silly SEO mistake ASAP!).

Know the norm

Okay I know, I know…I talked a whole lot of trash above on the GA benchmarking feature, and here I am talking about “knowing the norm,” but approaching data analysis this way can be insightful. Knowing and using industry standards in benchmarking can efficiently identify low hanging fruit.

However, the actual GA benchmarking tab is a poor example of this. Keep in mind that sites have to opt into the benchmarking, so (a.) this feature might not even have your industry represented and (b.) you have no way of knowing how many sites these “standards” are calculated on. Also keep in mind there are only three buckets for website “size” in this feature—small, medium, and large. WTF right? Yeah, since when do all websites fit into those three sizes? What am I ordering a latte over here?

With that said, it’s worth knowing the vital metric standards for your industry. If you see that similar sites to your own have a bounce rate of around 40% and you are chilling around 65%, while all the other metrics look closer in range, then you can assume this metric is where you should direct your optimization efforts. This approach isn’t as scalable or as accurate as other benchmarking methods, but it’s definitely worth a mention, if only for peace of mind.

Know the limits

While benchmarking is incredibly effective for things like trending, projecting, and exploring the data, it’s important to know the limits of the process. It is meant to be a discovery process, not a scientific formula. Just like anything else you take away from the data, it is just an insight, not a guarantee. You are making assumptions based on past performances, and performances change. So one word of caution to all of you data-heads out there—benchmarking is a great tool to add to your bag of tricks, but it is only one of many you should be using. Don’t get so caught up in forming relationships between the metrics and dimensions of your site that you lose perspective on the independent variables themselves.

In conclusion

Get in there. I mean it, seriously. I know we are all crazy busy, but that shouldn’t translate into a two minute GA log-in, a quick glance at the vital metrics and a few automated reports. Our analytics are meant to be explored. Benchmarking is one of those processes that may take an extra hour or two, but discoveries made during those few hours can be instrumental in guiding your company’s decisions.

Confession: At SEOmoz we haven’t always been the best with analytics and tracking, but in the past half a year we have refocused our energies on truly knowing what our users are doing, how our site is performing, and finding opportunities within the data. It’s time consuming, and tricky, and what you discover is not always fun to find out, but it has certainly helped us redirect resources where they are needed.

Over the next few months we are rolling out all sorts of good stuff, {the Chrome toolbar launch was just a teaser my friends }. We are using processes like benchmarking to better prepare us for these changes. Taking on new challenges as a company is an awesome thing, but doing it with a little data to steer you, makes the ride even more fun.

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Read other posts by this Author: JoannaLord

Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance’s transition have begun.

Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search? Let us know.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

More WebProNews Videos

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.

Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum

Posted by richardbaxterseo

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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?

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Photo src

If you’re an AdWords advertiser, chances are you’ve heard the expression “Google slap.” Maybe you’ve even known someone who has been Google slapped or you’ve been Google slapped yourself.

A Google slap can mean one of two things:

1. Google has deemed your ad and associated landing pages of such poor quality it has significantly lowered your ad’s position in search engine results. This means you have to pay much more for your ad to appear at the position you’d like.
2. Google has deemed your ad and associated landing pages of such poor quality it has disabled your AdWords account.

Clearly, both of these scenarios are undesirable. So it’s up to you to make sure your pay-per-click campaign doesn’t get Google slapped in the first place.

Here are 10 ways to make sure that Google doesn’t “slap” your account:

1. Make sure your keywords are in your ad. If your keywords aren’t in your ad text, then users will be less likely to click your ad, because your ad won’t seem relevant to the query they entered into Google. This mistake will negatively impact your click-through rate (CTR), conveying to Google that you aren’t giving users what they want. You will thus be punished.
2. Make sure your landing page is optimized. This includes putting your keywords in your headline, body copy and meta tags; simplifying your page’s message and design; and adding clear calls to action. If your page doesn’t appear relevant, straightforward, or easy-to-read, users will jet before converting. This hurts your profits, as well as your page’s value in Google’s eyes. Be proactive with your landing pages by trying out Google’s website optimizer.
3. Improve your landing page’s loading time. Google penalizes AdWords advertisers whose landing pages take a long time to load. That’s because the load delay is an inconvenience for users. When people have to wait more than a few seconds to see a page they often just navigate away from that page. You can reduce the size of your page by compressing your images, eliminating popup ads, and doing away with videos that play automatically.
4. Make sure your landing page is safe for users. In other words, make sure that it isn’t sending viruses to users’ computers. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you may be sending out viruses without even realizing it. Maybe the software you’re offering actually harms computers using a particular Internet browser, or someone hacked your account overnight. Test your landing pages frequently, and with different browsers, to ensure they are secure.
5. Make sure your landing page is not misleading. If your landing page states that a particular download or service is free, make sure that’s truly the case. If you are lying to customers then Google will undoubtedly shut down your AdWords account. This is especially the case now that the Federal Trade Commission has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives advertisers.
6. Don’t make unrealistic promises about your product or service. The FTC also condemns this practice, and Google is well aware. If your landing page suggests that your hair gels will make hair grow six inches per month, you are making an unrealistic promise. Those who buy your products will clearly be disappointed, and it will hurt Google’s credibility (not to mention your own). Google doesn’t want that to happen, so it will disable your AdWords account as early as possible.
7. Have your landing page be part of a comprehensive website. The more pages you have on your website, and the more informational, up-to-date, and unique their content, the higher your landing pages and associated ads will be regarded by Google. A robust website indicates that you are offering users something of value, and aren’t just about getting rich quick. Possible website elements include a blog, educational videos, and user forums.
8. Don’t include too many links on your landing pages. This encompasses links to other pages within your site as well as links to other websites. If you give visitors too many options of places to go, they’ll either become overwhelmed and leave the page or click on one of the links and leave the page. Either way, you are jeopardizing your chance to convert.
9. Avoid reciprocal, broken, and low-quality links. Make sure that any links on your landing page are there to help the user. That means don’t just link to specific websites because they’ve agreed to link to your site. It also means make sure the links actually go to the desired destination, and that the other sites actually provide users something of value.
10. Reconsider your keywords. Make sure that the keywords you’ve chosen accurately describe your offering. If they don’t, users won’t click on your ad or convert. When users neglect your offering this indicates to Google that it isn’t relevant to what they are seeking. Before Google punishes you for this error, think about what keywords more accurately portray your product or service. Consider using a tool to discover long tail keywords for this effort, and then bid on the new keywords.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Avoid Being Google Slapped

Read other posts by this Author: Larry Kim

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.

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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!

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Read other posts by this Author: timsoulo

The first result in Google gets as many visitors as position 2-4 combined

“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.

The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”

Result number 10 gets 143% more clicks than result number 11

“The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1. Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic. However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.

As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.”

Here are the numbers:

Google Result	Impressions	Click Percentage
1	2,834,806	34.35%
2	1,399,502	16.96%
3	942,706	11.42%
4	638,106	7.73%
5	510,721	6.19%
6	416,887	5.05%
7	331,500	4.02%
8	286,118	3.47%
9	235,197	2.85%
10	223,320	2.71%
11	91,978	1.11%
12	69,778	0.85%
13	57,952	0.70%
14	46,822	0.57%
15	39,635	0.48%
16	32,168	0.39%
17	26,933	0.33%
18	23,131	0.28%
19	22,027	0.27%
20	23,953	0.29%

How to judge the financial value of your Google rankings

A number 1 ranking on Google is great but it won’t help your business if it is for the wrong keyword. To judge the value of a keyword, you can do the following:

1. Start a Google AdWords campaign for the keyword, select “exact match” and point the ad to the page on your website that is most relevant to the keyword.
2. Track the impressions and the conversion rate of the ad. To get useful data, you should track at least 500 clicks.
3. With that data, you can make a guess about the value of a visitor that finds your website through that keyword.

For example, your ad might have had 10,000 impressions during a week and 200 visitors have come to your website. Six of them purchased something of your website and the total profit was $500.

That means that the average single visitor who finds your website through that keyword is worth $2.50 to your business ($500 / 200). The 10,000 ad impressions in a week can create a click-through rate of 34.35% (see table above) if you have the number 1 ranking for that keyword.

That means that you would get about 3,435 visitors per week. Based on the average value of $2.50/visitor you would earn $8,587.50 per week or $446,500 per year just with a single keyword.

That is why businesses love search engine optimization.

Being listed on Google’s first result page for the right keywords greatly contributes to the financial success of your business. Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to get your website on Google’s first result pages for the keywords of your choice.

In June, Google Analytics released a new version of AdWords reporting for all accounts.  The much-improved update makes it easier to analyze your AdWords campaigns by providing new reports, as well as new ways to dimension your reports.  Prior to the update, you had to run these reports from within AdWords or custom build your own reporting to include site performance metrics.  It simply wasn’t easy to get at the numbers.

As many search marketers know, the keys to successful paid search optimization are sometimes deeper than simply looking at keywords and ads.  There may be other factors impacting your ROI, and those factors might not reveal themselves so easily.  The new AdWords reporting in Google Analytics definitely helps surface some of this data.

Below, I’ll explain how to use one of the new reports in Google Analytics to reveal a potential opportunity for boosting your AdWords ROI.  We’ll be running Day Parts reporting, which will provide performance data by time of day for your AdWords account.  Then we’ll dimension that report to break it down by campaign.  Once you export this report to Excel and analyze the results, you might end up making several changes to your campaigns to improve their performance.  Let’s get started.

Day Parting in AdWords

When you set up your AdWords campaigns, you have the option of day parting those campaigns (via the Ad Scheduling feature in your campaign settings).  Using day parting, you can tell AdWords the times of the day (and days of the week) that your ads should appear per campaign.  You can also adjust your bid during specific times of the day.  In my opinion, day parting is underutilized by many marketers.  I think part of the reason it’s underutilized is because marketers are hesitant to flick the switch, thinking that they might miss out on conversions or revenue if they stop their ads from appearing during certain parts of the day.  It’s a valid concern, since this can definitely happen if the proper analysis isn’t completed.  But, if you gather enough data and analyze the reporting, you just might find some interesting trends by time of day.

With the latest AdWords reporting update, Google Analytics now provides Day Parts reporting so you can quickly analyze campaign performance by time of day.  And since the reporting is located in Google Analytics, you have access to a range of site performance metrics, including conversion and revenue.  The reporting makes it much easier to gauge performance by time of day and day of week.

Note: You could always run reporting by time of day via the AdWords reporting interface (in your AdWords account).  That said, the reports are somewhat hidden in the reporting tab within AdWords and it’s not extremely intuitive to run reporting by time of day.  In addition, you don’t have access to site performance metrics like you do in Google Analytics (including revenue).

A Day Parting Example:

Let’s say you run an e-commerce website, but your ROI isn’t optimal for certain campaigns.  You end up running the day parts reporting I’m about to show you and notice some interesting things.  You clearly see that from 11PM to 4AM conversion drops off significantly. There are still clicks (not as many as other times of the day), but no conversion.  When you add up the cost during that time period across an entire month, you determine that you spent $4000 without a single sale to show for it.  The same number of clicks during another time period accounted for $14K in revenue.  Based on the data, you might choose to test day parting for this campaign to see how it impacts your ROI.  On the flip side, you might find a spike in conversions and revenue during certain times of the day that you wouldn’t have expected.  In this case, you would want to make sure you keep running ads during these times, and possibly not show your ads during other times of the day (to focus your budget on the most important time of the day conversion-wise).

Regardless of your specific situation, you won’t know until you run the reports.  Let’s fire up Google Analytics.

Running Day Parts Reporting in Google Analytics

Sign into Google Analytics and click the Traffic tab on the left side of the interface.  Then click the new AdWords tab (currently with a beta label attached).  Click the Day Parts link to view your AdWords data by time of day.  Note, “time of day” is based on your own account settings and not the time zone that searchers are located in when clicking your ads.

Locating Day Parts Reporting in Google Analytics:

While viewing this report, you can access site usage data, conversion data, and revenue.  At this point, you might already be seeing some interesting information in your report.  But, this is for your entire AdWords account, and not for specific campaigns.  You definitely want to view this data by campaign, if possible.  If not, you might make changes that impact your entire account (or all campaigns), which can result in collateral damage.  For example, you might mistakenly set up day parting for one of your campaigns that doesn’t need it set, based on what you see in this first report (covering your entire account).

The next step is to dimension your data by campaign.  While in this report, you will see two dimension dropdowns near the top of the report (see screenshot below).  One will have “Hour of the Day” selected already, which is the default option when choosing the Day Parts report.  The second dropdown will enable you to dimension the current report by several other options (and many are new based on the latest update to the AdWords reporting in Google Analytics).  I love this functionality, and you will too once you see how it helps us.  Click that second dropdown and choose “Campaign”.  Now you will see your day parts reporting by campaign.  Like everything else in Web Analytics, aggregate data and broad reporting won’t tell you very much.  Viewing day parts reporting by campaign now gives you a stronger view of the data.  At this point, you might want to scan through the reporting and see if you notice any glaring issues.

Dimension Your Report by Campaign:

But hold on… the reporting still isn’t perfect.  You might find this layout somewhat confusing to get through, especially if you have several campaigns listed for each timeframe.  We can fix that.

Export to Excel

Yes, Excel to the rescue again.  At the top of the report in Google Analytics, you can click “Export” and then “csv for Excel”.  Then you can work inside Excel to further analyze your data.  Once you open the Excel file that you just exported, you will want to filter the data.  You can do this by clicking the “Data” tab, and then the filter icon.

Filtering your data in Excel enables you to select specific values from each column to “filter” your data.  Filtering data enables you to isolate certain parts of your report.  For our purposes, we will filter the data by campaign so you can view performance data by time of day, per campaign.  First, you should delete the top rows of extra data (which gets included by default when you export reports from Google Analytics).  Keep the header row, which will contain the column titles (like Hour of the Day, Campaign, Visits, etc ).  Once you just have the header row and your rows of data, you can filter your results.  Simply click the filter icon within the Data tab in Excel (see screenshot above) and then each column header will have a dropdown arrow next to the title.

Filter Your Data in Excel:

If you click the arrow next to “Campaign”, you can isolate each campaign in your account.  You can do this by clicking the checkbox next the campaign you want to analyze (and clearing the ones you don’t want to analyze).  Now you can quickly view how each campaign performs during each hour of the day.  Again, you might find some incredibly positive or negative things at this point.  Based on your analysis, you might want to test day parting in AdWords to see if you can enhance your ROI.

Select a Campaign to Isolate:

Was Time On Your Side?

The new AdWords reporting in Google Analytics has some powerful new reports and options.  By running the Day Parts report, you can start to get a feel for how your campaigns perform by time of day, which can help you optimize performance using the Ad Scheduling feature in AdWords.  You never know, those late night clickers may be dragging down your ROI… or boosting it.  As I explained above, you’ll never know until you run the reports.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Time is on Your Side, Using Day Parts Reporting in Google Analytics to Increase Your AdWords ROI

Read other posts by this Author: Glenn Gabe