One idea that comes to mind courtesy of both Inc magazine’s article on Yelp, and from Kyle Lacy is to organize offline meetups.

Make your community more than virtual – get your users to meet offline.

The closer the bond offline, the more they'll frequent the site online.

As it is, the thing that brings people back to forums, Twitter, Facebook etc is the interaction with other members.

Domainers anxiously wait to hear whether their private message about selling a particular domain name got a favourable answer.

Hip-hop “textcees” (instead of being ‘emcees’, textcees write rap battles in text; yours truly was one in high school) can’t wait to see how judges voted on their battle against other textcees.

Facebook is a particularly potent community in this respect.

Facebook members can’t wait to get comments on their pics – and it offers users plenty of ways to interact, like pic, wall, and other comments. The interaction itself is a mini-high.

This also plays on another universal trait – humans love attention, and what better way to get it than posting interesting pictures, videos, status updates, notes etc? Indeed – one thing that you see Yelp has done, as described in Inc, is to have certain members of the community go around giving encouragement to other members for their contributions to Yelp, giving positive attention to their reviews, pics etc.

Facebook does still more to draw people into its community.

…It taps pre-existing offline communities. This started by having people only join from American colleges, who then were their ‘network.’

Facebook developed the concept by allowing people to show their attachment to communities of various religious, political, social, work and other affiliations, and has recently reinforced that with the introduction of ‘fanning’ .

And as with forums, Facebook enables direct messaging such that you can’t wait to hear back from that cute girl you messaged after meeting her at your friend’s party.

Another thing that largely explained Facebook’s meteoric rise was that it adapted a dating site’s people search function. You could look for people – in your network (college / and later city) – by marital status, sxual orientation, age (I think) religion, relationship interest (serious dating, casual dating, flings, friendship and the pathetic-sounding “whatever I can get”).

Wanted a Roman Catholic from Ohio State University in Cincinnati who wanted a fling? Well, you’d obviously fail since Catholics never have sx before marriage, but you might find one interested in casual dating.

(I’m not picking on Roman Catholics – I could just as easily say the same about Muslims, orthodox Jews etc.)

Takeaways:

- Offer multiple ways to interact and communicate.

- Enable and encourage behaviour that draws attention. Give attention yourself.

- Facilitate and help offline meetings.

- Allow people to identify with large (city / college) groups they belong to and narrower groups too (fans of Rick’s driving school, a real self-organized group that Rick didn’t start but just reflects his numerous satisfied students’ affection).

- Toss sx into the mix.

This post was guest-written by Mark for Red Fly Marketing, an Dublin internet marketing company providing search engine optimisation services in Dublin and web design, too.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

How Facebook Built A Competitive Advantage While Blocking Google

]]> http://seoroi.com/case-studies/how-facebook-built-a-competitive-advantage-while-blocking-google/feed/ 1 http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/trend-content-communities-commodifying-them/ http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/trend-content-communities-commodifying-them/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:33:07 +0000 Gabriel Goldenberg http://seoroi.com/?p=1598 Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Is The Trend Towards Content-Communities Commodifying Them?

]]> Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities.

These content community sites typically follow this outline, with some variants:

• Generic brand name geared towards the industry as a whole, which leaves room for subsequent growth. Eg Health World instead of Weightlifting World

(hattip stuntdubl)

• Editorial content of varying depths but frequently at a high standard
• User Generated Content (UGC) via blogs users can sign up for
• Hawk their own products or sell loads of ads
• Supplement with forums, reviews, blog comments (though frequently there are none, or they’re not taken seriously) etc.
• Don’t link out, or else only to sites not germane to the industry (eg mainstream news)

The first site that did this in an industry is probably rolling in dough.

Ditto the second.

And the third.

The fourth a bit less.

The fifth still less.

Does the sixth elicit a yawn from health readers who’ve seen it before and wonder why they should sign up here when they’re already part of sites 1, 3 and 4?

Does the seventh get ignored entirely?

This leads me to ask…

If quality content becomes a generic commodity, how do you achieve competitive differentiation? If community becomes a commodity, how do you achieve competitive differentiation?

The trends also seems to imply a tax for late-comers who want to develop content communities of their own.

Aaron Wall loves to point out that newbies are always the most populous group in an industry.

What that implies is that the first handful of sites to establish themselves as content communities can continue to grow by virtue of attracting newbies to their midst. They can rank for newbie topics/terms.

Newcomers to the space can’t target newbies as easily because they don’t have the domain authority to rank for short-tail terms. Even with equivalent-quality content, the sites won’t rank.

So to attract users and establish their own base of authority, new sites need to:

• Play public relations to get authority and attract users
• Buy ads to build up a user base
• Spend money on making incredibly remarkable content (in which I include tools and the like)

Bottom line:

There’s a tax on late-comers.

These late comer sites will have to expend significant sums on marketing to catch up. And chances are, that further commoditizes content and lowers margins.

How do you overcome that?

Come by tomorrow for part 2: What Notoriously Closed Facebook Can Teach SEOs About Competitive Advantage

This post was guest-written by Mark from Red Fly Marketing, with 3 divisions: a full service Dublin search engine optimisation firm, a general Ireland online marketing firm and web design services.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Is The Trend Towards Content-Communities Commodifying Them?

]]> http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/trend-content-communities-commodifying-them/feed/ 4 http://seoroi.com/specialty-services/5-surprising-sources-of-competitive-intelligence/ http://seoroi.com/specialty-services/5-surprising-sources-of-competitive-intelligence/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:32:57 +0000 Gabriel Goldenberg http://seoroi.com/?p=1583 Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence

]]> Competitive intelligence provides entertainment, an inside-track on industry trend-spotting, and the potential to develop tangential business opportunities before others, or at least catch up quickly. I gluttonously consume information, and thought I’d share some parts of my diet with other competitive intelligence collectors with hearty appetites.

1) Affiliate networks.

Ever wonder what a competitor’s margins are like?

What countries they focus on? What KPIs they use?

What verticals they’re in?

Get the answers to all these questions and many others by joining multiple networks.

2) Email newsletters. I recently got a newsletter disclosing [indirectly] the profitability of certain market segments. For newbies struggling to find their affiliate niche, this is valuable info!

Consumer-facing email newsletter are also valuable, although I admit that I’m slack in monitoring these. Some things you can pick up:

- Benefits emphasized – to model your copy on

- Profitable or high volume products or otherwise desirable goals

- Tone of voice for branding purposes

3) Corporate HQ websites.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular company that I highly respect, where they openly share corporate strategy. It’s pretty impressive seeing the massive, fast-turning gears turning in these people’s heads, but it’s also inspirational here and there.

If you’re a fast-food restaurant owner, you can probably pay attention to McDonald’s, Harvey’s, Wendy’s, KFC and other press releases to see where they’re going in a broad sense. The same is broadly true of many industries.

4) Alerts and keyword trackers.

Think these tools just serve to measure how much brand discussion is happening in social media? Guess again.

If new, as-yet-unknown competitors are linkbaiting, you can’t subscribe to their RSS feed.

You can set up trackers to look for particular keywords linkbait might target, or roll your own solution to monitor Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

Similarly, if the approach is more traditional, why not monitor press-release sites for your industry keywords?

Find ‘em while they’re fresh to the industry and buy those sites out…securely.

5) Mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines.

This week’s edition of Maclean’s (a popular Canadian newsmagazine) has an excellent piece on the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and paywalls.

There are some fantastic nuggets to pick up in there, which I haven’t seen on places like Search Engine Land (despite Danny Sullivan’s thorough coverage of the issue!).

During SMX Advanced, I picked up the local Seattle paper and saw a piece about Google taking on Amazon for ebooks. Now, Slightly Shady SEO imagined that almost 2 years ago! And I had similar feelings and predictions on Google’s move into ecommerce and the implications about 7 months before SMX Advanced.

Since I love saying I told you so, here’s a little gem from my now 1+ year old post.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.” If you haven’t seen Google base practically become the default spot 3 on commercial searches, you’re sleeping:

Oh, and have any of you read Aaron Wall’s interview with eBay’s head of SEO?

Here’s an excerpt:

“[Millions of listings] end up cradle to grave quickly. What are some of the keys to helping search engines understand the structure and importance of content in such a fast changing environment?

[...]

“We have invested a good amount of resources in our data-feed technology & analytics. The Sitemaps protocol plays an important role here. As eBay has so many new listings every day, over the course of the day, you can almost update the sitemaps on a continuous basis.

“However, the effort to source the items from the database, generate the sitemap files, submission and pick up, takes decent amount of time. We have made good headway tuning our feeds in way to get more efficiency out of the items we send. We started optimizing based on probability of conversion. We can make these assumptions based on predictive modeling and data. Predictive modeling on large datasets will become even more important when it comes to scaling the projects. As a company, we are putting lots of efforts in building out a competitive advantage based on analytics, predictive modeling and scaling the technology to handling even larger datasets.”

If that isn’t the integration of merchandising and SEO, what is?

Well, here’s one of 5 calls I’d made about Google shifting more and more into ecommerce:

<“Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

“As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

And if you go to eBay, you’ll see that cruises abundantly listed there, for example, are of the cheap and generic variety. Where something is advertised in abundance, you know the ads work…
[I know about the cruises in particular because my dad combines dental CE seminars with upscale cruises and travel. Our eBay test yielded folks looking for bargains...]

Bottom line? Read, read and read some more! Add my rss feed to your reader, then check out these 30 other advanced search blogs.

Oh, and you might also like some recent guest posts of mine at Search Engine Land, Wolf Howl and Search Engine Journal. (Links go to my author profiles.)

p.p.s. I’m booked on a flight to Israel for tomorrow night. If I’ve been blogging slowly lately (or in the next little bit), that’s why!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence

]]> http://seoroi.com/specialty-services/5-surprising-sources-of-competitive-intelligence/feed/ 1 http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/how-in-house-seos-can-add-value-beyond-search/ http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/how-in-house-seos-can-add-value-beyond-search/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:48:54 +0000 Everett Sizemore http://seoroi.com/?p=1557 Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

How In-House SEOs Can Add Value Beyond Search

]]> Let’s face it – you’re only worth as much as it costs to replace you. Most businesses are going through budget cuts and lay-offs, or have at some point in the last two years, which makes it more important than ever to prove your value to your company or client.

They could hire another SEO for your salary… but they can’t hire another SEO; and a merchandising analyst; and a marketplace analyst; and a PR firm; and a blogger; and a customer service rep for your salary. Yet, a good SEO will be ALL of these things!

Be Needed Everywhere

For most businesses, Search Engine Optimization has a role to play in every stage of the buying cycle. Yet many SEOs think of themselves as only playing a significant role while someone is searching for a product or service to buy.

You can help customers become aware of their needs through various channels, including article distribution, guest posts, targeting specific industry keywords with helpful content… All of this can be done through search:

• Awareness of Needs Search – “supplies for starting a widget business”
• Assessment of Alternatives – “widgets” or “blue widgets VS red widgets”
• Alleviation of Risks search – “blue widget reviews”
• Decision Making search – “Acme blue widgets”
• Achievement of Results – “Acme Blue Widget store, Denver”

Provide Value to the PR Team

While the PR team focuses on getting news out and handling major controversies (in some cases), you are focused on leveraging PR to build links.

But when you do online reputation management (ORM) or backlink laundering to improve the rankings of an external site – you are doing PR.

When you leave a helpful comment on a blog post or answer a question on Yahoo Answers – you are doing PR.

When you network with others in the industry to build a community of like-minded SEOs who can help you build links and sway results on a day’s notice – you are doing PR.

You can further help the PR team by being their eyes and ears on the ground. Help them fight fires before fires develop. Subscribe to search engine alerts for blog posts mentioning your brand. Use them to build links, but also to monitor discussion. If a blog post or comment thread starts to go sour on your brand, notify the PR team so they can respond appropriately.

Provide Value to the Dev Team

Aside from your usual SEO duties to work with development on crawlability issues and such – provide added value by helping them spot vulnarabilities or alerting them of spam issues, cross site scripting attacks, etc… Again, Google alerts comes in handy here. For instance, use it to find out if your site has been hacked for spammy linkdropping purposes.

Provide Value to the Customer Service Team

As an SEO, you are out there every day interacting with blogs and social media profiles, and probably comments on your company or clients’ websites. When working on a give-a-way project with an industry blogger, pay attention to the comments. People often have questions about the product or service being given away: “Does that come in a different color?” “why does it cost so much?” These make great customer service opportunities. The same goes for Twitter, Facebook, forums, or your own blog. If you can help your customer service department show the public that your company cares about and pays attention to what they have to say – that’s value above and beyond your rank on Google.

Provide Value to Business Development and Merchandising

An SEO is in a unique position to answer questions like:

1. “What is selling well for our competitors?”
2. “What else are our customers trying to buy?”
3. “What is the next hot thing?”

This can be of great benefit to those responsible for sourcing new products or services.

During your competitive analysis and link building efforts, you’ve probably also developed an in-depth knowledge of the players in your industry, both as competitors and potential strategic partners. Provide ideas and links to the business development team regarding who they might want to contact.

Sure, you may not get the credit when a big deal goes down – but that business management VP will have your back when the budget cuts come around.

Those are just a few of the general ways to provide added value as an SEO in a large company.
Here are some specifics just to put things in perspective:

• Give the buyers / merchandisers a quarterly report showing which keywords were searched for internally but returned zero results. These are things your customers want you to offer.
• Give the buyers / merchandisers a quarterly report showing which non-brand, product-related keywords your competitors are bidding for and/or ranking on, highlighting those that you do not carry. If a competitor bids highly or spends time optimizing for a certain product or service, chances are they’re doing it for a reason.
• Give the business development and/or executive team an annual report called “The State of the Industry in Search” highlighting your biggest competitors in search, those who are gaining ground, those who are losing ground, and those who are not directly competitive but similar enough to perhaps be a potential strategic partner. Your biggest competitors on search engines aren’t always your biggest competitors in the industry. Search is a more level playing field than catalog or TV. The “little guys” can come up fast to catch your VPs by surprise.
• Keep an ongoing list of the top ten questions and/or top ten complaints and/or top ten compliments from blog entries, blog comments, Twitter and Facebook posts, forums… and provide it to the customer service team so they can compare it with their own lists and perhaps find some new issues to resolve.
• Provide your copywriters with a list of questions people have asked in blog comments, forums, etc… like “how heavy is this thing?” so they can make sure such questions are answered in the product or service description. This provides a better user experience, more keyword-rich web content, and lifts the load on the customer service team by answering questions before customers have to call.

I’m sure you can think of plenty of other examples yourself. I’d love to hear about them in the comments field below so I can add them to my list!

Everett Sizemore is the Manager of SEO Strategy for Gaiam, Inc. and blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

How In-House SEOs Can Add Value Beyond Search

]]> http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/how-in-house-seos-can-add-value-beyond-search/feed/ 6 http://seoroi.com/ideas/competitors-backlinks-checking-tools/ http://seoroi.com/ideas/competitors-backlinks-checking-tools/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:30:56 +0000 Gabriel Goldenberg http://seoroi.com/?p=1497 Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Competitors Checking Your Backlinks? Give Their Tools The 180 Fake Out!

]]> Are competitors mining your backlinks with tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Linkscape and Majestic SEO? Just because they can check your backlinks out, doesn’t mean you should make life easy by giving good data to their link building tools.

So here’s how to dirty the data that competitors see when using backlink checking tools or hub finders.

(Hub finder are tools that find so-called ‘hub websites’ that link to multiple sites in a niche)

The answer is counter-intuitive: build useless backlinks. Why?

Because useless backlinks can be copied until doomsday without their marginal effects won’t add up to overtaking you in the rankings.

Is it nofollow? Great! (Though note that David Leonhardt has found some value in nofollow links, likewise Mike Belasco has good arguments for nofollow links.)

Is it just a link in a comment? Perfect.

Is it a useless directory? Ok, now I need to nuance my tip.

When I started out in SEO, I got links from a boatload of free directories. It was what I knew and what I could afford to do, as a newb. Know what that did?

Got me a PageRank 5 in 3 months. That’s what.

But the killer part is that I couldn’t rank even for ridiculously non-competitive terms I wanted to rank for. Why?

Simple: I had unwittingly tied myself up in the sandbox. That’s where little sites that aren’t trusted by the biG kid go to play, isolated from all the others. You get a bunch of poor quality links like a load of freebie directories, and the net result is that you sit in the sandbox.

So then what do you do? You get a lot of trusted links first… then you make it dirty. You need to balance things out to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

By now you’re probably wondering, “What the heck is a trusted link, then?”

One that is listed along with other resources, on a page dedicated to helping people find quality resources on a topic. The algorithm is known as Hilltop.

If you thought this post was interesting, add my rss feed to your reader (that page also allows you to subscribe by email; both options are free). If you want some help doing link building, email me or call me.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Competitors Checking Your Backlinks? Give Their Tools The 180 Fake Out!

]]> http://seoroi.com/ideas/competitors-backlinks-checking-tools/feed/ 5 http://seoroi.com/ideas/how-to-find-out-competitors-conversion-rates/ http://seoroi.com/ideas/how-to-find-out-competitors-conversion-rates/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:52:53 +0000 Gabriel Goldenberg http://seoroi.com/?p=1477 Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Find Competitors’ Conversion Rates

]]> If you could find out what competitors’ conversion rates are and you can estimate the traffic value to your competition? Surely the PPC pros could use that conversion data…

Well, it turns out you can get a pretty good idea about competitors’ conversion rates.

At SMX Advanced, Addie Connor shared the tip that you could bid for traffic to your competitors’ pages. Why do that? To find out their quality scores.

The catch is that such a technique won’t tell you what they’re converting at. You still can’t access their analytics.

Let’s think about this critically.

(I’m writing a little book on advanced search marketing (mostly SEO but some PPC too), and one of the main themes is that you can get really creative if you think logically and break things down into manageable pieces of logic.)

The argument we have is as follows.

We don’t control competitors’ pages. Therefore we don’t control what analytics code is on those pages. And if you don’t place your own analytics, on the page, you can’t read the reports!

Suppose we did control the pages. We could then place our code on them, right? And we could read the reports, right?

Now I’m going to share a little secret.

Don’t go sharing it with everyone, because this is really just an inner-circle thing among elite programmers.

…

The secret’s called “View Source.”

Right click, and select “view source,” to view your competitors’ html. Then duplicate your competitors’ page and host it yourself, with your own analytics embedded.

Caveats with finding competitors’ conversion rates in this way

1) For Trademark law reasons, you can’t duplicate competitors’ branding. This obviously affects conversion rate.

2) Similarly, you can’t use their domain name in the display URL (legally), or in the destination. This affects CTR and consequently conversion rate (since the mix of traffic is different).

3) This would be a hell of a lot of work for any sizeable ecommerce competitor. It’s easier to do this with simple landing pages or paths.

If you liked this post on competitive intelligence, add my RSS feed to your reader, or subscribe to get my posts delivered by email. I’ve got 2 more posts on competitive intelligence for later this week, covering how to find competitors best performing keywords AND ad copy, as well as how to muddy your backlink tracks so competitors have a harder time duplicating your efforts.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

After my previous great experiences going to you for advice, I thought I’d ask how I should go about creating my “Best Of” page? In particular, I’m interested in 2 things:

1) What posts belong there?

2) How should I highlight the page? I used to have a best of page in my main navigation, but it got very few clicks. I’d like to perhaps try a different approach – what would you guys suggest?

Cheers

Gab

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

1) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. An excellent how to on business management as well as an entertaining read. One application I’ve been using it for is to minimize the chores I do for business.

2) The Knack by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham. I knew Burlingham from his book Small Giants, but was I ever in for a treat with Brodsky’s writing. I’ve since become a fan of his Inc. magazine column.

3) Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. This is THE classic book on usability and conversion optimization. Failing all other education on the topic, buy this book. Even though I had read a lot on usability before buying, much of what I found here was new to me.

4) Call to Action by the Eisenberg brothers. The book’s a good primer to conversion optimization, particularly for people who are new to the field. Unfortunately, I bought it after reading blogs on the topic (including the Eisenbergs’) for ages, so I didn’t learn a lot of new stuff.

5) Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. Underhill’s book was an eye opener into the world of offline conversion optimization. People who can do so-called transversal thinking – taking an idea from one field and applying it in another – should love it. Plus it’s often entertaining with the numerous anecdotes he shares. He’s often self-promotional though, and it wears on you.

6) Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash. This is a great how-to book that explains many advanced concepts in generally simple terms. One thing I really enjoyed and dog-eared was his list of things to test. Chapter ~7ish got a little dull because he explained math principles I’d seen before in school. But most folks haven’t taken a course on research methods or quantitative methods in CEGEP, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Besides which, Ash got me to understand the math principles behind multivariate testing (MVT), which are pretty important since there are different types of MVT. Note: There’s also some self-promotion that gets kind of annoying on occasion.

7) Web Design 4 ROI by Sandra Niehaus and Lance Loveday. This amazing book on conversion optimization opened my eyes to conversion optimization both figuratively and literally. Sandra was nice enough to give me a copy at SMX West, and I ate it up. This paired with Steve Krug’s book = 10% ecommerce conversion rate, guaranteed. I keep coming back to this book and lending it to family and friends.

I also owe Sandra and Lance thanks for their recommended reading list at the end of their book, which influenced many of these purchases.

Honest Seduction by Justin Talerico, Anna Talerico and Scott Brinker. I ate Ion Interactive’s book up. Partly because 80% of it was repeating the same ideas over and over, which got frustrating. But also largely because there were some brand spanking new ideas that I LOVED. These guys can convert traffic and it shows. If you’ve never created a segmentation-oriented lander, Honest Seduction will make you a true believer.

9) Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes by Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov. This is another book I blitzed through. I won’t repeat my review, but it’s a fascinating, very digestible read full of charts and consumer insights.

10) Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. This book is entertaining and educational. If you’ve ever struggled with pricing or consumer psychology, you will LOVE Ariely’s book. He’s done experiments to research how we behave, and shows that we frequently aren’t the ‘wealth maximizing rational actor’ traditional economics would have you think we are. A classic.

11) Wikinomics by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D Williams. I put this down somewhere in the middle and have yet to pick it back up. Some parts are really brilliant, but others leave you asking whether this kind of thing can apply beyond a narrow range of industries. Borrow this if you’re interested.

12) The Influentials by Ed Keller and Jon Berry. The science and research these two put together is interesting for a while … then they get bogged down in sharing numbers while forsaking analysis. I was all the more dissapointed because Seth Godin’s testimonial was on the jacket and that influenced my purchase decision. (I generally love Seth’s writing, The Dip notwithstanding.) I put this book down a long time ago and have no desire to pick it back up…

13) The Dip by Seth Godin. This book was alright, but it felt like a small pack of chips. It’s modestly substantial, but you’re still hungry afterwards. I’d borrow this one from a library.

14) Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin. Entertaining and practical, this book really does provide some actionable insights for people to use. I loved it and have dog-eared a bunch of the pages to return to as well as written in several margins.

Still to be read: Getting Things Done, Trust Agents, Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics, Waiting For Your Cat To Bark,

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Note: If you like this post, please link to this page from your blog or share it on StumbleUpon by clicking this button:

Here’s how to project the ROI you can expect on SEO. This way, when your boss asks you to predict next quarter’s SEO numbers to help him with his forecast to analysts, you predictive task will be easy. Better yet, the ROI forecast you make will be defendable.

The detailed explanation on making your forecasts follows after the flow chart.

1) Pick some short-tail or mid-tail keywords. There’s no point picking long tail keywords, because the ROI on them individually is small in absolute terms.

2) Check the keyword for commercial intent.

- Microsoft offers a keyword commercial intent estimator tool. Caveat emptor: The tool’s estimates can vary significantly by day, so just take it as another data point, another road sign along the way.

- Correlate that by asking people to do word associations with the given keyword. You can use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for that. The associations will show the intent behind a given search.

- Compare the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) estimates Google provides you with for each keyword (set on exact match). The higher the CPC, the likelier there is to be commercial value.

Note: For CPCs under $1, this isn’t very meaningful.

3) Find search volume for your target keywords.

Use Google’s KW tool on exact match to find the exact volumes on target keywords.

It’s crucial to use exact match, and not broad match data, because rankings will result in getting you traffic for your exact match keywords and maybe a few variants. It’s best to be conservative.

3.5) Don’t just accept those search volume projections at face value. Double check.

- Run a PPC campaign.

- If you’re not going to run a PPC campaign (eg if the CPCs are too high), you MUST at least correlate the data to other people’s numbers:

• Use Wikirank, if you see Wikipedia in the top 10.

• Compare with Aaron’s tool.

• Ask friends who’ve been in the same vertical about the search volume. Apparently the accuracy of Google’s numbers varies by vertical, so friends who’ve been there can provide valuable insights. (It’s not too difficult to find such friends once you’ve been in this business for a few years.)

• Also, check against competitors’ keywords. Are you on the right track or really, really clueless?

4) Find out whether you can rank. Scope out the competition:

• Look for backlink numbers and quality,

• Consider backlink growth rates,

• Calculate backlinks/referring domains to find out if there are big brands you need to be aware of,

• Look at their anchor text,

• Consider their own domain name – an indicator of anchor text past, present and future, as well as financial backing for marketing.

5) Estimate your costs including domain, hosting, site design + development, links, man hours.

Note: As pointed out by professional search marketer Simon Serrano in the comments below, certain costs are fixed regardless of whether you do SEO or not. So if you’re doing this with an existing site, then you can exclude those costs. But you’ll probably compensate with the man hours etc.

My perspective in suggesting that the domain and hosting costs be included was that of someone starting a new site from scratch, with the mentality, “I’ll rank and sell to search traffic.” For them, the exact match domain might be a big cost that wouldn’t be incurred otherwise, for example.

6) Estimate the traffic attainable from various positions. See Aaron’s big resource page on the topic and scroll down about 1/3 of the way for the breakdown of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentage by position.

Hat tip to my friend Henry Shih of online jeweler Ice.com for coming up with the idea to “make a range of projections, from conservative to optimistic” last summer. Todd Friesen has also suggested this.

Update: Given Universal search results with maps, news, videos, images etc., you may want to review these results downwards to be conservative. As Simon points out in the comments, the CTR data has changed significantly since the time AOL leaked its numbers.

7) Calculate your potential revenue.

If you’re an affiliate: i) Multiply those attainable traffic numbers by your CTR. ii) Multiply again by the merchant’s conversion rate. iii) Finally, multiply by your average commission. Take multiple values for both your own CTR and the merchant’s conversion rate, so you have a range of estimates from conservative to optimistic.

To simplify, if you know what your earnings per click will be (eg recently work in the niche), you can multiply traffic by EPC.

7b) If you’re an adcents publisher: Multiply that by your CTR and EPC if you’re selling CPC ads.

7c) If you’re a retailer / lead buyer: Multiply that by your conversion rate and then by your average if you’re the merchant.

Finally, divide your potential revenue by costs. This gives you your SEO ROI – the return on investment for each dollar you put into SEO.

I do this in a spreadsheet for convenience. If you add my rss feed to your reader, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet for your own use.

This has literally saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours by helping me avoid niches that offered a lower ROI for the same time and money investment…

p.s. If you want to know how to prove SEO ROI on past activities, that’s easy. Open your web analytics, and see how many organic visitors on non-brand keywords turned into leads or sales. Alternately, show your rankings increase if you’re not yet in the top 10, and thus not driving traffic just yet.

Found this post useful? Add my feed to your reader for more advanced SEO tips for inhouse SEOs, consultantts and independent webmasters and affiliates! If you want a price estimate for SEO services, you can get one quickly here.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Are you ready?

Drumroll please…

Get links!

Ok seriously, you knew that. What I want to suggest is a way to have both a splash page and a separate, properly optimized homepage.

And no, it’s not cloaking.

I call this the double homepage technique.

Have you ever been to a site like Ralph Wilson’s famous Web Marketing Today? He uses a dhtml rollover (or at least I think it’s coded in dhtml?) to get more newsletter subscribers. It looks like this:

Well, why not make a full-size rollover that replaces your splash page? Ask people for their age, location or whatever else you’re currently using the splash page to segment visitors by.

Similarly, my sister Maya, a Montreal make-up artist, uses a lightbox effect when people click on her pictures. The pregnant lady’s thumbnail (not shown), when clicked, shows her in full size with the rest of the site darkened in the background.

You can use the lightbox effect to present splash page stuff automatically when the page loads, and then have a normal optimized homepage.

There’s a slight catch with the Lightbox approach. It depends on javascript, and about 5% of the web population has javascript disabled. So nothing will happen for them. So if legal absolutely needs 100% of people to confirm their age, then this isn’t ideal.

But if it’s just a boss who insists on some geo or language segmentation, then it’s probably OK. Just make sure you still have another way on the homepage and throughout the site for people to pick their language.

Boom – two homepages, no cloaking, legal gets the splash, SEO brings in the cash. Everybody’s happy! If you liked this, add my rss feed to your reader for more advanced whitehat SEO ideas and techniques.

Update from the comments section:

Benj Arriola of SEO Consulting Firm Business Online tells me that their firm has presented this solution to a client and are waiting for the go-ahead.

Dr. Pete of Usability shop User Effect has suggested a valuable variation on this technique. The good doctor suggests you cookie visitors’ selection so that you don’t need to show them the splash page on subsequent visits.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

by One Good Bumblebee

“Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay[...]“

“In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.”

Actually, it appears from the Seattle Times story that I was wrong on the margins point, because Google will allow publishers to set their own retail price, while apparently Amazon is already selling e-books at a slight loss. Presumably, Google will take a commission on each sale. But Google is trying to steal market share…

This fits in with what I was saying about Google’s affiliate network and how they are going to become the biggest affiliate around in the next little while.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products. [...] Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide.”

Replace Google Base with Google Books – whose rapid rise to prominence I noted at SEO Book – and you get today’s announcement [Ed: It actually was in Monday's paper, but I didn't have time to edit this post].

This isn’t the first time I’ve been ahead of the mainstream seo community.

Longtime readers will recall how, I picked up on Google’s new submarine crawling, 4 months before the announcement that they were querying site search forms.

Others will remember my presentation of how to use trusts to buy sites at SMX Advanced last year – which also came months after I shared the technique on this blog…

And my SMX Advanced presentation was based partly on a year-old post! Yet people loved it…

So if you want to stay ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage, you should add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

What’s a persona?

A persona is an imaginary user who is representative of a user group. The main thrust of their representativeness is in terms of their objective in visiting the site and/or using any given page, as well as their demographics and tech savviness.

Creating personas will help me to:

• plan my site’s redesign with users in mind,
• scope it better and avoid scope creep,
• create a better information architecture,
• tweak small things in the interim, until the big redesign.
• And when I do user-testing, I can aim to get more accurately representative testers.

Some people talk about having more empathy for visitors by creating personas. Empathy helps you serve users’ needs by tailoring your site to their behaviour. If you can do that well, accurately, thoroughly and on a consistent basis, you’re going to be very successful.

Read on to find out why people visit my seo site, find out about the personas I’ve built around those purposes, and the action items that I’ve derived from creating these personas. I’ll summarize the persona-building and action-item development process at the end of this post, and give links to more reading on the topic.

The 5 big reasons people visit SEO ROI Services are as follows. The links lead to a section on each persona, lower down on this page.

1. To read my blog. (Thanks guys, I’m flattered !)
2. To do “research.”
3. To seek “technical support.”
4. To “buy.”
5. To “Other, please specify.” (Personally, I’ve always wanted to “other, please specify”…)

There’s some overlap between categories – e.g. blog readers and researchers – but that’s OK. That doesn’t affect the principles of creating personas, except perhaps to the prominence you accord one of your visitors’ purpose.

Blog Readers

As a traffic source, you guys often type in my domain name or use other “loyalty” navigation (bookmarks, feedreaders). Another primary source is other blogs that link here and some social media traffic, such as Sphinn, Twitter or Facebook.

Amongst those visiting to read my blog, user satisfaction is generally very high. I get comments like

“Genuine, personal SEO advice from Gab, who seems to know his stuff… this has been invaluable to me,” or “A very creative legal approach to an important internet marketing issue.”

From further discussions I’ve had with you, you’re often looking for advanced ideas for both the sake of entertainment and gaining a competitive edge. A number of you like that the content gets you thinking. This is education as intellectual recreation.

Based on the readers I know personally, those of you reading my blog tend to be young, roughly 20 – 45 years old, with perhaps skew towards the early-mid career web professional or independent webmaster.

In plain English, that means lots of SEOs and internet marketers ages 27 – 35. Plus some bloggers, web designers and developers thrown in for good measure.

In that respect, you’re fairly representative of the industry, I’d say. Therefore, I can also make an educated guess that demographically, most of you are guys and not girls.

Additionally, based on age, you’re most likely to be at the stage of your life where you’re looking to get married within the next 3-4 years, or else recently married. If you have kids, they’re probably in the babies – infants range, and thus you likely are overworked, underslept, but very well supplied with affection. Of course, if you’re a search vet, your kids might be a bit older.

As to technographic savvy, you guys are above average. You’re fairly comfortable with your browser, which is probably customized with a few extensions, as well as a blog, social media profiles and involvement, perhaps an RSS reader, almost certainly a cell phone and/or multi-purpose mobile doodad like an iPhone. You’re on broadband internet or faster, shop and buy online, and perhaps have some tech-oriented hobbies like video-gaming or digital photography.

Last minute addition: Per this data from SEOmoz, most people reading SEOmoz’s blog are owners/webmasters for small-midsize sites. Guys like Willy Franzen, who runs a site on entry level jobs. The next most popular answer was seo consultant/agency worker, followed by inhouse SEM. See also SEOmoz’s Industry Survey Results.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, which doesn’t need to change that much, luckily…

To this point, most of these things have been educated guesses. Let’s see how accurate they’ve been. I’m searching Flickr now, for a creative-commons licensed picture of a “tech geek.”

Meet James Wilcox, whose picture showed up in said search. He’s a male in a relationship, who looks about 30 years old.

by clompers

He has several pictures of his Motorola Razr2 cell phone and video game screenshots in his Flickr profile. Flickr is a social media network whose purpose is to allow people to share their photography…

He has a website under construction, and an interest in Flock, the “social browser” powered by Mozilla.

Pretty accurate first attempt at creating a persona, wouldn’t you say? It’s obvious that searching for “tech geek” helped find someone with the right technographics, but there are still numerous other points I was on the mark with. Also, I repeated the experience with a few more relevant keywords, and came up with similar profiles. I’m pretty proud of what I came up with, anyways. (Interesting note: I was actually going to call the persona Jim, before finding James… scary close!)

Action Items for James:

• As a savvy user, I can have him do the online version of card sorting by tagging my posts. This will create better content organization – the way users would see it – either in the immediate future or once I redesign. In design-speak, this creates superior information architecture.
• Incentivize him to return / leave comments / be a brand evangelist by providing sneak preview access to tools before public release.
• Write content oriented towards his worldview. How To Deal With Slacking Teammates. Get The Boss’ Buy-in For Social Media. “Why Great SEO Works Like Marriage {Subhead: The client/husband should always get the last two words: ‘yes dear!’}”
• Survey blog readers to find out what topics they find most interesting. (While we’re at it, I’m listening, guys – let me hear it ! )

Researchers

You guys are more likely to be referred by Google. I know that because you

1. Have said so in 4Q,
2. Make comments that directly or indirectly indicate you’re new here, like ‘nice website’, or ‘first time visitor’, when I know that the majority of my Google traffic is new here
3. Make comments reflecting queries I know I rank for.

Also, you tend to be slightly less satisfied than other users. For better or worse, I get a fair amount of traffic on keywords that are either irrelevant to my content or else poorly articulating the user’s needs.

For example, this post on disguising your text link ads as adsense gets a bunch of people looking for things like “disguising links” or variations on that. One person wrote:

“I wanted to know how to disguise my domain with text but just didn’t understand what i was supposed to do It was n’t [sic] made simple enough”

Uh, I don’t know how to disguise your domain either. Do you want to cloak it? Do you want to redirect it? Do you want to hide the destination of your links? Something else?

For those of you running forums, these visitors are your easy wins to convert searchers into members. Hide the answer behind a registration form. Anyways, the result is that this large segment of my visitors more often leaves unsatisfied, relative to my average.

Shouldn’t I create relevant content for those pages, even if it’s not related to my main theme? Maybe – I’ve made changes this weekend to that effect on my top 5 bouncy pages (tip from Maki). And for those where I just can’t create that content for legal reasons, how can I unrank for the keywords whose traffic I’m not interested in?

For now, I’ve edited the titles and meta-descriptions to better qualify the visitors who clickthrough. Some keywords have included ‘advertising presentation’ ’serps’ (a foreign pension acronym, apparently) and ‘how to disguise links’). I’ll probably add some content where it’s relevant, though I can find better uses of my time for now.

Who are you?

Like the blog readers, I’d say you’re young, generally. Let’s say that you are 18 – 26. Perhaps even younger than the average, as my visitor feedback and search queries indicate a certain number of people who are plausibly looking for information to use in college.

For example, I’ve had the following feedback: “I’m writing a term paper for my statistics class on the role of Facebook as a marketing tool. Was hoping for some charts etc.”

Others are likely entry-level employees preparing presentations for their bosses. “My purpose is still a bit vague but I would like the most up to date information on social media user stats.”

Another item which came up fairly frequently was that you guys are internet marketers with either some knowledge of the blogosphere – as indicated by comments that you’d return later – or of SEO in particular, as seen by a reference to Dan Thies, of SEO Research Labs.

Finally, because “research” is such a vague term, it’s not all that helpful at indicating to me how I could better satisfy you guys. I wish 4Q would let me define specific objectives so I can see what exactly people have in mind when they say that. But your comments are indicative, as quoted above.

Meet Danny Dover and Rebecca Kelley, guys! I’ve actually met and hung out with them both in person, and they’re pretty cool, bright folks. In his mid-20s, Danny’s an SEOmoz employee “currently attending the University of Washington” who says, “I like to spend a lot of my time simply studying the internet.”

Rebecca graduated from the University of Washington in Arts, with a Spanish minor. She writes, “I compete in triathlons and marathons. I like to think of myself as a mediocre yet stubborn athlete.”

Both Rebecca and Danny have got a bit of a fun/playful side to them. Rebecca’s recent post on getting a massage had me laughing out loud, hard. It’s not the first time, either. And Danny writes in the ‘Fun Facts’ part of his bio:

“Every year I try to do one good act of revenge. My favorite ones have been tin foiling all of my friend’s possessions and filling a different friend’s room with packing peanuts. I spent a year secretly collecting packing peanuts before filling the room. My friends don’t play pranks on me anymore. ”
Lisa “I wannabe in the foreground” Barone and Rebecca Kelley by Tamar Weinberg

Action Items for Danny and Rebecca:

• Write better titles and descriptions, then refine them periodically, when I notice above-average bounce rates.
• Make use of the Table of Contents plugin, as I keep telling myself I’ll do.
• Create comprehensive, Wikipedia style posts so that I can not only satisfy loyal readers, but the “vague intent” searchers. This relates to better category SEO.
• Feature charts, statistics and broad-appeal images when writing/editing for this group.
• Target these visitors to turn them into subscribers, since many are internet marketers.
• Try and please this segment with humorous, wise-ass content.

Tech Support Seekers

Similar to researchers, my intuition tells me you guys visit from Google.

However, there’s one big difference with researchers, and that is that you tend to know less than people who are “researching,” based on the depth of feedback I’m getting and some of the behaviour I’m seeing. For example, one person used it as a contact form.

Some other comments have included:

“26.03.2009 too early for any answer”
“22.03.2009 i don’t know, too early to say”

This tells me that the technographics – that’s fancy talk for tech savvy – of this user group is less. Kind of obvious in hindsight, but I initially thought these were my savviest users looking for help on advanced, thorny issues. Those guys probably fall more into the researchers category.

From personal experience with clients, I’d argue that this group is most likely to be composed of the mid-career business owner or marketing expert, who’s now learning about the web. You know a lot about business and are comfortable promoting offline, but you’re not entirely up to speed on social media, web technologies (and buzzwords!) like Ajax, and creating search-friendly websites.

You’re 40 years old with a wife and 3 kids, a dog, a nice house in suburbia that’s mostly paid off and are probably a college graduate. Meet Ewell Smith, Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board Executive Director!

by lsgcp

“Smith got involved in marketing and promotions about a year after earning an MBA degree from the University of New Orleans. He also has a psychology degree from Louisiana State University.

He says he came to the realization that marketing was his strength when he worked for New Orleans Publishing Group. He became involved with a company that promoted concerts and special events.

He later signed on as marketing manager for Southern Forest Products Association, the trade organization for southern pine timber. While there, Smith conceptualized the first branding of a wood species, coining the slogan “Southern Pine By Design,” for which he earned national accolades.” (Source: All Business)

Action Items for Ewell Smith and other Tech Support Seekers:

• Use plain English, rather than SEO jargon. Review previous posts for jargon and minimize its use (without compromising search traffic from savvier researchers who know the jargon).
• Add an SEO jargon glossary and expand the FAQ section, orienting it towards business questions.
• Link the jargon to the glossary.
• Expand the SEO FAQ.
• Tie things back towards their experience
• Promote my one-hour consultation service more prominently, while keeping a balance to offer tech support for quickie questions.

Buyers and “Others”

But for buyers, I’ve still sold SEO services to a number of folks, and there tends to be a certain ‘profile’ that emerges when I think about it.

Demographically speaking, buyers tend to be in the marketing director or business owner type of segment described above, under tech support seekers. They also often rely on the advice of [often younger] assistants, which makes catering to the blog reader and researcher segment equally important. I’ve seen that a few times already, in my interactions with clients.

Their household income is low 6 figures, speaking generally, and they’re generally college-educated and have serious business skills from a decade or two or work experience.

These aren’t the guys you can fool with promises of “guaranteed rankings,” but they are a bit anxious about not knowing all the technical side of stuff. (Note: It’s not like I’d recommend making that promise anyways, since it’s a blatant lie … you can’t guarantee that a girl will go out with your friend, so how can you guarantee Google will like any given site?)

I call this persona “Sam,” after the friendly hotel owner in his late 40s or early 50s who was my first ongoing-services client. He relied on his marketing director, Dino Santelli, for help with web design (Dino also handles a movie extras agency of his own) issues and was fairly anxious about getting SEO done right.

My first meeting with them I showed them rankings I’d achieved on my own sites as well as an SEOmoz PageStrength report (as the tool was then known) and after some hesitation, we started working together.

I wrote the above from personal experience. And as it turns out, this profile was pretty spot on, as per this research on who “internet executives” tend to be.

Action Items for Sam:

• Educating these people builds trust, so aim to get in-person meetings by offering to create an on-the-spot a free “5 action item” to-do list they can take away from the meeting. Limit this to eligible people – those that fit this persona.
• Come in to said meetings with background research done, and also leave them with bonus material that will both educate them and build trust. See SEOmoz’s Trifecta reports, for example.
• Prepare analogies for common SEO questions that can be easily referred to and understood in verbal communication. K.I.S.S.
• Aim to meet people in this group when networking at shows like SMX.

Unfortunately, 4Q visitor surveys hasn’t collected much feedback from you. All I know is that you’re visiting. Thus neither that nor my web analytics are especially useful for building personas as with the other groups.

That’s where it ends for you “other purpose” visitors, except for the time I found out you were looking for a contact form and I had none! Fixed !

How To Build Your Own Personas

1. Focus on BIG audience segments! You need to prioritize the biggest groups in your audience first, to make the most effective use of your time.

Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get bogged down into an eternal sea of insignificant changes because this or that person had a unique view/purpose when visiting.

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, Stephen Covey Jr. gives the analogy of a bucket that you fill with small rocks, then little rocks. The sea of pebbles fill the bucket and block out the few big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, the pebbles can fit around the pebbles. That’s true of optimizing your site, too – focusing on individual users won’t get you anywhere fast.

For example, my Toys.com post attracted someone looking for Toys R Us locations and contact info in South Africa! Obviously, I’m not going to bother updating the page for that person (sorry!).

So what size should your user groups be? How many personas should you make? It depends on your resources for acting on the information, firstly, and the diversity of your audience, secondly. The more resources you have available to take action, and the more diverse your audience (esp. as seen by traffic sources), the more personas you can use.

For a relatively small site like mine, a handful of personas is just fine, because I couldn’t handle optimizing for more. On a Fortune 500 ecommerce site, you’re likely to have more diversity in your audience visitors and more resources to deal with different customer types (hence “for him” and “for her” type navigation and ‘women’s clothes’ search queries).

2. Discover visitors’ intent.

(i) Use 4Q Visitor Surveys to have them verbalize to you what their visit’s purpose is. It’s free! If you’re a bigshot company, I’d speak to iPerceptions about getting a custom solution with better reporting and that deals with the problems I’ve identified in my 4Q service review.

(ii) Check your web analytics for your top volume search phrases, since these also indicate intent.

(iii) Finally, look at your bounce rates to get implicit communication of where your website isn’t matching visitors’ intent. I give the hattip to Maki of DoshDosh for tipping me off as to how he finds pages to improve on his site.

He looks at his top entry pages, defined as those pages getting the most traffic from outside his site. Then he selects the 10 with the highest bounce rates amongst those pages and works to improve them.

3. Compare intent with demographics and technographics.

This is personal! Essentially, you want to get an idea who this person is, as that can inform what content you show them, how you phrase the content, and your site’s functionality. This means knowing your site’s demographics and technographics.

Demographics means personal traits, usually the kind you can stereotype someone by. (Not that you should stereotype people, but it’s possible to make some practical assumptions relative to your audience’s traits. For example, a site about getting out of debt can assume that promoting sports cars won’t hit home with its audience.)

Demographic data includes:

1. Age
2. Gender (See: What women want in websites, hattip this post at seomoz)
3. Education
4. Location
5. Income
6. Career-level
7. Marital status
8. Interests & Hobbies
9. Race
10. Religion
11. Politics

Obviously, some of these are more relevant than others, depending on what site you run. Race is irrelevant to building my reputation in SEO, as are religion and politics. But if you’re running a political blog, obviously those three matter a lot. Conversely, a politics blog doesn’t have that much use for knowing someone’s income, unless they’re making an advertising rate card.

To figure out demographics, I encourage you to use Quantcast demographics on a site you’re curious about, or another site with similar content but more traffic. You can correlate it to Microsoft’s demographics tool. Very handy sites, both of them! See these social media demographics, for instance.

Technographics means tech savviness. How knowledgeable is your target audience relative to computers? How experienced are they? Steve Krug’s famous usability book, Don’t Make Me Think, will have different applications depending on your audience. Sites oriented to graphic designers or women can afford to be more subtle with their calls-to-action. FOR MEN, MAKE THAT CALL TO ACTION OBVIOUS. “CLICK HERE FOR OUR PENIS ENHANCER PILL.”

(Fun aside: Referral data tells me that people from the competitive [read: spammy (porn, pills, poker)] parts of the web use and recommend my internal link building plugin. If the spammers use it for SEO, I think that’s a pretty strong testimonial that it works. Not to mention it’s patterned off Wikipedia…)

4. Name the personas, and refer to them as you create your site! Steve Krug suggests that this helps you empathize better, as do Tim Ash and the Eisenbergs, all of which names are tops in the conversion optimization industry.

—

What are your site’s personas? Can I add other action items to the personas I’ve created for my site above? Do you have any other comments, questions or constructive criticism? I’d love to hear anything you can share, and will add dofollow links here for quality comments – you can choose the anchor text .

For more on personas, try the following:

1. http://www.uie.com/articles/mulder_interview/
2. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/adhoc_personas_em.html – “Thus, a major virtue of Personas is the establishment of empathy and understanding of the individuals who use the product. It is important that each Persona seems real, allowing the designer to ask, “how would Mary respond to this?” or Peter, or Bashinka? “
3. http://deyalexander.com/resources/uxd/personas.html
4. http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas

If you liked this post featuring my ideas on personas, you’ll want to come back in the future for more of the same. To save yourself browsing time later, why not add my rss feed to your reader now?

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

by Florin Hatmanu

What I was going to write was based on a navigation example Steve gave where a store might have these three categories: “Power Tools,” “Hand Tools” and “Sanding and Grinding Tools.” Wouldn’t some of the Sanding and Grinding Tools be properly found in Power Tools? And vice versa?

Some people like me would hesitate to click anything before knowing for sure which was the better choice! And they might leave if the first link was unsatisfactory.

So what I was thinking is that you could create a script that would show a help message that would activate depending on user behaviour.

“Having trouble finding an item? Some items in this category as well as related items are also categorized as “ABC Cat” (linked) and “DEF Cat,” which you might have what you’re looking for.”

For example, someone visits your store and goes to a category page. They browse around for 20 seconds and click nothing. Your script notices this, and then makes that phrase appear, with the related categories. Another behaviour might be what Avinash calls “pogo-sticking,” where a visitor goes between a category page and several detail pages without adding anything to cart. It often indicates that they’re not finding what they wanted.

Anyways, I read further on in the book, and on page 157 (Second Edition of the book), Steve has exactly this kind of situation in mind in a footnote. He writes:

“You may be thinking, Well, why not just put it in both categories? In general, I think it’s best for things to ‘live’ in only one place in a hierarchy, with a prominent “see also” crosslink in any other places where people are likely to look for them.”

While I’ve advocated putting things in only a single category before, for the sake of better indexing, it’s something I’m seriously rethinking. To me, from a usability perspective, it makes more sense to help someone find something right away, by putting it everywhere they might look.

Steve’s point is that them trying, something, not finding it, then going back and getting it right on try 2 is just fine as well. I guess that works for some sites (more news/ecommerce sites, I would guess), but I think most blogs won’t necessarily have it that way where the second click is any better than the first.

Anyways, perhaps you might still make better use of screen real estate by making the phrase’s appearance and links’ appearance conditional on user behaviour that indicates confusion. Anyone have a clue how to code this without tripping search engine filters for hidden content?

Another solution to this is to look at the intent of visitors coming to that page, by comparison to competitors’ interpretations of that intent. As Steve describes in this interview with Marketing Sherpa:

“SK: I haven’t done enough with analytics. I’ve read a lot but I’ve never really done enough with them to have a sense of what’s most useful with one exception which is that I always tell people you really wanna look at your search logs. The search logs are enormously valuable and mostly neglected. So, people should look at their search logs.

I tell them you should have a routine where, once a month, you look at the search logs and you look at the top five or ten things in the search logs and execute that search yourself and see what you get in the search engine. You can usually figure out what people are looking for from those top five or ten searches.

“You wanna make sure that when you execute that search, the first search that shows up in the search results is the best page that you have that meets that query. And if you have to rig the results, if you have to hard-code your search results or add keywords to the page or whatever then you should do it so that, when people execute those searches, they’re guaranteed to get the information they were likely looking for. But you should also, then, look at those five search queries and say, “Well, why do people search for this? Should they have been able to find it by looking at some link on the homepage? Is it important enough that we actually need to have a link on the homepage that would take people to this information and that would also then show up hopefully in Google searches?”

“And you do it once a month. So next month you’ll probably have some of the same queries and some different ones.

Genius! I’ve been having trouble with some of the visitors Google sends, and this “compare to the SERPs” monthly review sounds like just the solution.

A third solution, which would probably be more precisely effective – since competitors are also only guessing at intent and may not be guessing well either, like a game of charades – would be to just survey visitors. “It seems this page is having trouble satisfying visitors. Would you mind helping us help you and others like you, by answering two short questions?

a) How did you get here? This can help us solve the problem for other people visiting based on a similar context.
and
b) What were you hoping to find or do here? The more detail, the better.

A Wordpress plugin and general script for non-Wordpress sites that could do this would be awesome. I’m thinking a little adaptation of 4Q would be enough… Just have it add a checkbox to your Wordpress pages and posts that you check when you see it’s very bouncy. Heck, this could help with StumbleUpon traffic too. The only thing is that it would need to appear with the javascript “onunload” event – when someone is trying to close the tab, window, click elsewhere on your site (can it work for when people type in a new address in the address bar?)

And that’s how you meet the needs of visitors that found a real page, but didn’t see what they wanted on the page because the page didn’t have it there.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

On that note, why not check out my press, which includes CNet, About.com and many large search marketing sites?

2. Dan Zarrella is KILLING IT with his awesome research. Best new internet marketing blog I discovered in 2008 imho. Check out his piece on retweets. He teaches you viral marketing, and as per Dosh’s bit on infographics, which I coincidentally read earlier, Dan makes it very easy for us to consume his content and thus want to share it. Highly impressive site for all the research he’s sharing research, which is often tedious to compile.

3. This is interesting, on classification systems in information retrieval. The language is mostly English, for us non-IR-whizzes-and-geniuses. Also, if you missed it, check out Bill’s interview with

4. Hat tip to this lady for getting me into the whole information retrieval search geek mood, by sharing access to 10 free papers on the semantic relatedness of words.

5. Back on the social side, you’ve probably experienced communifaking. That’s a cogent analysis on why people do it.

6. Sticking with social, and getting into its relationship with relationship management… I was just talking last night about how I left this comment on Sphinn ages ago about some email spammer bothering me to buy their services, then threatening to ruin my reputation when I told them I couldn’t get rid of the Sphinn comment even if I tried.

Today, I googled a reputation management search for a client and found Yahoo Buzz ranking. I’d already gotten the blogger to remove the client’s name from their post, so at least it wouldn’t rank, but now the Yahoo Buzz stuff is there … and I kind of sympathize with that email spammer I flamed, ironically. Of course, the Yahoo Buzz item is on page 2 or 3 (The Borgle likes toying with us SEOs) but still – it’s annoying. And something to consider before you flame someone on social media – you can always edit your blog, but not other people’s websites…

7. I had another idea but forgot it. Always have pen and paper at hand!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

by joelogon

Ariely’s book highlights that behaviour is often motivated by one of two contexts – the social context or the market context.

The social context is where people do each other favours because they like one another and want/have/are building a relationship. It’s your mother in law’s Thanksgiving meal, for which she obviously doesn’t expect compensation and would be insulted if it were offered.

The market context is where people pay each other for products or services. The behaviour is motivated by this exchange of value, not some warm feelings towards the other party.

Ariely goes on to point out that companies have a difficult time trying to get into the social context, yet that the loyalty and latitude afforded such companies can be very valuable. Think of the employee who does unpaid overtime because his boss gave him 2 months paid vacation, without a second thought, when the employee’s wife was sick after giving birth.

(That’s actually a true story I read in a book called Sales Superstars, about someone in the courier industry.)

Well, generating that kind of loyalty and strong relationships exist between an employer and its employees is exactly what human resources is devoted to. Consider Sodexo’s excellent, succinct summary as to why companies offer benefits.

by rolandThe aim of every successful company is to attract the best employees and to maintain their loyalty, satisfaction and motivation at and outside work.

A good chosen system of remuneration added by a good working system of benefits will increase your competitiveness by recruiting employees, will balance the steadily growing price of manpower in a flexible way and will help to motivate and stabilize the key company workers.

Similarly, my friend Tony Adam writes of the relationships he has built,

The people that I have established relationships with have led to great career opportunities, partnerships, knowledge, and most importantly, long lasting friendships.

And this is not just the way warm-and-fuzzy HR or social media people see things. Consider the responses to McKinsey’s survey of US executives.

The vast majority of US executives say that employee benefits help their companies attract and retain talent and that benefits are important to competitiveness, a new Quarterly survey finds.

This is as valuable as knowing your competitors’ keywords! Heck, it’s even more valuable because the best people will find you the best keywords and other seo strategies before the competition figures them out! Let them play catch-up!

Ironically, I should have known this myself, since I’ve been an advocate of building relationships for the longest time, as a direct driver of SEO success. But what I think is novel about this post and the reason I wrote what might otherwise be dismissed as another “benefits of building relationships” piece, is the human resources angle.

This isn’t something companies aren’t familiar with. As the McKinsey survey respondents said – this attracts talent and keeps top companies competitive. If you’re not necessarily taking that talent inhouse, you’re still getting valuable business opportunities from those relationships.

Dan Soha, of Five Mill PPC, told me about a moderately successful affiliate campaign he created, which made him $400/month. Through a better relationship with the affiliate network, he got double the payout, which allowed him to scale. The campaign now does $10,000+ a month! How’s that for relationship ROI? You can read any affiliate marketing blog, and they’ll all tell you that relationships are what takes you from little league to pro sports.

Tony highlighted the same thing – opportunities have come his way via relationships. Not developing these relationships – literally, social networking – carries with it a heavy cost in lost opportunities.

Not an opportunity cost in the traditional sense of options that were on the table but neglected in favour of alternatives, but rather opportunities that never made it to the table. Because there wasn’t that connection there. There was no social context. And short of running an ad campaign saying, “We are looking for partners and new business opportunities, so come pitch us,” you won’t have friendly contacts approaching you. Because you won’t have those contacts. (Also, as Ariely notes, money is typically the most expensive way of paying for things (e.g. those that might otherwise be had free in a social context.)

by nicholas macgowanHere are some of the lost opportunities if you aren’t engaging in social networking, and measuring the relationship strength to ensure you’re doing a good job.

• At the enterprise level, this means partnerships that can add millions to the bottom line.
• This creates the (i) motivation and (ii) stability necessary for others to help you. To repeatedly top social broadcast media (e.g. Digg), you need the relationships to keep up.
• For businesses of every size, this means getting fed crucial information. For example, I got a tip at an SMX Advanced party from these CMS guys about some reputation management a client needed, which we then acted on.

If you liked these ideas on social media and web analytics, why don’t you add my rss feed to your reader?

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

In short, we’re going to give bots different instructions than we give to humans. The bots don’t yet recognize and decode audio. Likewise they don’t yet handle video. And presumably they don’t crack every image on a page. So what you can do is record audio/video instructions or draw some instructions that the bot won’t be able to figure out – only the humans who understand you will make it through your form.

Some possible implementations of this :
1. Include several captchas on the page and indicate, via an audio recording, which one needs to be cracked. If they’re all cracked, or the wrong one is cracked, you know a bot did it.

by herzogbr
2. Include captchas, logic questions and some other security device, and indicate via an audio recording that plays after a few seconds, which puzzle needs solving.
3. Again, include captchas but make a separate custom image/animated banner pointing to a random word or string on the page. The word or string is what needs to be entered in the captcha box.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

More seriously, here’s a neat little workaround.

Step 1: Make the handsome, branded-font pictures of text and use whatever copy the conversion guru wants. Use alt text for the blind, and Googlebot. Not because it’s part of this technique, but as a courtesy to those users and to maintain good habits.

Step 2: Edit your CSS so that your header text is displayed in all browsers like normal copy. It should be the same size and have the same stylings (i.e. none) as your regular paragraph text.

Step 3: Write your SEO headers into the copy and tag them with the normal h1s, h2s, and h3s.

What’s the final product look like?

Here’s one example from my friend Sandy Niehaus, of Closed Loop Marketing – SEM / Conversion / Usability experts. It’s a screenshot of one of her slides from SMX West.

That was a remake of the previous page, which looked like this:

My buddy James Zolman, of SEMvironment PPC shop had this lander to share from back when they were starting out. The blurred portion at the top was where a nice graphic acted as the logo and beside it was the pretty header. The dynamic keyword insertion shows Googlebot was happy too.

P.S. I know I said I’d only be blogging later after my other work was attended to. I’m making an exception cuz this idea struck me and I had to share it before I forgot.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

“Now what we see is a period where you have Internet components, where you have software, protocols, languages, and capabilities to combine these component parts in ways that create totally new innovations. The great thing about the current period is that component parts are all bits. That means you never run out of them. You can reproduce them, you can duplicate them, you can spread them around the world, and you can have thousands and tens of thousands of innovators combining or recombining the same component parts to create new innovation. So there’s no shortage. There are no inventory delays. It’s a situation where the components are available for everyone, and so we get this tremendous burst of innovation that we’re seeing.”

Hat tip to Claude Malaison for allowing me to discover the interview. Check out what he has to say on it (in French).

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

• widget ecommerce, where people can buy directly off an affiliate’s site through secure, embedded widgets,
• price match guarantees on shipping to avoid folks abandoning their cart at checkout to go see if other retailers ship for less,
• alternative payment methods such as cell phone minutes and how cell phones may become the credit cards of the future.

The audio’s not perfect because I had to re-record it due to a little lag between the video and audio in the original, where my lips moved a split second before the audio was heard. (I’m faster than the speed of sound! )

Would love to hear your reactions!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

I thought at first that the issue might be with my poor archiving, since I was using a plugin to suppress the ‘category’ part of category URLs, which broke the links to page 2 onwards of my category pages.

Well, I reverted to normal archives and haven’t yet seen a change. Google analytics is missing the past week of my data for some reason, probably because I added a filter that I thought would just generate a new report but in fact eliminated all my traffic. So I can’t look at things more granularly in GA. Sitemeter shows that I did have traffic during the days Google Analytics is showing things to be flat though, so it’s not like everything went poof.

And unfortunately I didn’t record the date I first activated the plugin. Within the past 30-60 days though, for sure. And my search referrals have all been at about 2000 month for each of the past three months.

Anyone else experiencing this plateau effect and finding solutions? I’m thinking partly it’s a boost from ‘query deserves freshness’ factors but still… I want to keep that traffic! I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments. Each successful idea  will win an hour of link building work from yours truly!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data