Search Engine Optimization

Posted by shor

^{Photo Credit - Steve Webel}

China. Even in this day and age, sensitive information rarely leaks out of the Great Internet Firewall.

Fortunately for Western pundits, China toots its horn every six months with the release of a half yearly report on Chinese internet development. The July 2008 edition was recently released in English but to save you from reading through 27 pages of dry research and occasional Engrish, SEOmoz has summarized the report for you.

Here are the top three facts that China wants you to know about the internet: 

1. China has the most internet users in the world 

• "…by the end of June 2008, the amount of netizens in China had reached 253 million, surpassing that in the United States to be the first place in the world."
  

2. China has the most broadband users in the world

• "This report, the 22nd Statistical Report on the Internet Development in China, also indicates the number of broadband users has reached 214 million, which also tops the world."

3. China has the most cc-TLD domain names in the world

_{Source for charts: CNNIC, Nielsen Netratings, ITU}

• "…by the time of July 22, the number of CN domain names, which was 12.18 million, had exceeded .de, the country-code Top Level Domain for Germany, thus becoming the largest country code Top-Level Domain names in the world."

So that’s what the Chinese government wants you to know about their internet but SEOmoz couldn’t resist creating a top 10 list, so we humbly suggest seven more nuggets you should know about China.

4. China’s internet penetration rate continues to grow and grow and grow…

• US internet usage has hovered around a 70% penetration rate in the last five years, while Chinese internet penetration has jumped from 7% to almost 20% in the same time period.
• Translation: China could plausibly reach a similar penetration rate to the US within 20 years
• What impact would a single nation of almost one billion Internet users have on internet activities such as blogging, creating videos or online commercial transactions (i.e. buying stuff)? How much additional user generated content would Chinese users unleash on the world wide web? What Western companies are ready to take advantage of this flood of internet usage?

5. China loves instant messaging QQ

• IM usage is more popular than email and using search engines in China
• 195 million Chinese (an incredible 77.2% of Chinese internet users) have used an instant messaging service in the last 6 months, compared to just 40.0% of US internet users who have _ever_ used IM
• Once online, 39.7% of Chinese internet users cite IM as the very first thing they do, more than any other internet activity

_{QQ client (look familiar?)}

• Tencent’s QQ program is the leading IM program with 77% market share
  
• Who? A bit more about QQ from their website:
• QQ has 342 million active user accounts
• QQ has 42 million peak concurrent users
• QQ has 26.1 million paying internet subscribers & 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers - wow an IM program with 40 million paying subscribers  (envious, MSN and Yahoo?)
• QQ.com is one of the biggest websites in the world, ranking in the top 3 web properties in China, alongside Baidu and Sina

6. China loves mobile phones

_{photo credit: gizmodo}

• China has 601 million mobile phone users according to the latest government report
• From January 2008 to June 2008, there were 53.3 million new mobile phone users
• One carrier, China Mobile, has over 414 million mobile subscribers, ranked #1 in the world
• However, bad news: only 12% of these users have accessed the Internet. Because of the lack of proper 3G network (none of the Chinese telcos have a 3G license) an estimated 73 million had accessed the internet from a mobile phone
• Good news - the Chinese government plans to issue 3G licenses to the major telcos within the next 6 months, which means…
• A potential bonanza for phone manufacturers around the world as someone has to come good with 601 million new 3G handsets (the sheer size of the Chinese market will be beneficial for all as economies of scale ensure global prices for 3G handsets/accessories will fall)

7. The Great Firewall of China is alive and well

_{photo credit - charles.hope}

• Think you know how to game social networks? Try going head-to-head with the "Fifty Cent Party" - an estimated 280,000 strong army of government-trained social networkers
• The Far East Economic Review says the Fifty Cent party has one objective - "To safeguard the interests of the Communist Party by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Chinese Internet"
• According to the Feer.com’s source, high authority Chinese websites are forced to have their own in-house team of government goons patrolling content for political correctness… ouch!

8. China’s Tier II & Tier III cities - wait, there’s more to China than just Beijing and Shanghai?

Tianjin, a Tier II city in full construction mode. Photo credit - yakobusan

• According to this fool.com article, 93 cities in China have more than 1 million population, compared to just 9 in the US
• Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau (and sometimes Guangdong and Shenzhen) are usually referred to as China’s Tier I cities.
• Tier I cities are already saturated by foreign companies and foreign direct investment in just about every market you could think of…
• Which is where Tier II cities come in - boasting huge populations, transport hubs and booming economies, most Tier IIs fly under the radar despite having lower barriers to foreign entry. For example, Chongqing is a Tier II municipality with a whopping 32 million residents and more than 3 million internet users
• Check out the big 30 Tier II and Tier III cities showcased in this April 2007 China’s 30 Rising Urban Stars

9. There are no girls on the Chinese internet

• Not sexism, as Chinese women are as likely as their male counterparts to go online -  the internet gender ratio corresponds almost exactly with China’s actual gender imbalance of 53% Male, 47% Female

• Included the above chart because I’m stumped, pretty sure the disparity has nothing to do with the infamous One Child policy (it was introduced in 1979) so what’s going on with the over 50s?

10.  The rise of Chinese superbrands

• Q: What does China Mobile have in common with Google, GE, Microsoft, Coca~Cola?
• A: They represent the top 5 brands in the world, as measured by the dollar value of their brand
• From the way this dragon has risen from its slumber it may not be long before the first Chinese superbrand goes global - in 2007 four of the world’s 100 most powerful brands were from China (five if you include HSBC bank)

So there you have it folks, 10 things you should know about China - I hoped SEOmoz has helped lift the red curtain enough to unveil the potential in the East.

What do you think are the big opportunities for online marketers in China?

If nothing else, the first question I’ll be asking of our next generation of entrepreneurs is, 你会说中文吗?

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Posted by randfish

It should come as no surprise that having a widget or sidebar element on a news, blog or articles website is great for traffic and page views. Online outlets have been using them to boost readership, email-a-friend features and page views per session counts for years. But, did you know that they’re also great for SEO?

Let’s take a look at some examples, and investigate the myriad of benefits "most popular" sections provide:

Slate.com

Slate’s most popular widget isn’t the best designed or most fully featured, but it provides the basic concept - display a list of stories from your site, ordered by a popularity metric. In this case, Slate’s offering both "most emailed" (stories that have had lots of people use the "email a friend" feature) and "most read" which I’m assuming they calculate on raw page views.

Newsweek.com

Newsweek’s widget has the clever slider at the bottom, allowing you to see popularity on a granular time scale from as little as 12 hours ago to as much as 7 days. If it were me, I’d increase the granularity option all the way up to the last 1-2 hours, just so bloggers can get their hands on the very freshest stuff. The "most viewed" vs. "most emailed" is smart, too, as is the opportunity to share the widget on your own website (which I’ve done below).

My only complaint is that all those beautiful links are contained in an object the search engines won’t parse, and thus, Newsweek doesn’t get any credit or juice from them. At the least, placing a straight HTML link below the object would be a smart way to increase link popularity in a natural and search engine approved way.

Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News does things a bit differently and features an entire page (linked to in the top, tabular menu) labeled "most popular" that lists the stories from the day getting the most attention. It’s not a bad system, and I imagine that a lot of folks really enjoy having a full page of content that displays the most popular news, but losing the widget format means those stories don’t enjoy the ability to tease right from another story page, one of the big draws of having the "most popular" widget.

NYTimes.com

The New York Times is putting a lot of the best practices together. Not only is their widget shown on the vertical sidebar half to three quarters of the way down the page (in a spot where the eye falls during or just after reading a story), it’s got three tabs showing the most e-mailed, most searched and, in a move of shear genius, most blogged. Bloggers love this stuff - it’s a tab just for them, showing what they’re talking about and what they think is important. Just as pandering in politics can win you elections, pandering to bloggers, particularly if you’re a big media outfit, can win you blog links. Finally, NYTimes also a link off to the "complete list" for each section, so those heavily into the popular news can browse from there. Once you’re there, you can then use a time sort feature to see stories from different time periods.

So, while the user benefits are pretty clear, why is this so great for SEO?

• Quick link juice - the links, so long as they’re HTML links the engines can parse, send a flood of juice to the top stories; which are often the ones most likely to benefit from Google’s temporal rankings push (for hot search terms) and the inclusion of "news results" in the SERPs.
• Helping to earn links - the most popular stories can convert someone who wasn’t interested or had only a passing curiousity in one story into a fervent reader, and often, inspire the sharing behavior. After all, if a story is "most e-mailed" or "most-blogged," there’s a fair chance you’ll email it or blog it, increasing the ROI for the site.
• Ongoing internal link juice for big stories - Having a most popular page that links to all the stories generating the most buzz for the last week or month continues to send link juice in to stories that are likely to attract the most searches.
• Opportunity to better know your audience - If you personally play around with and pay attention to your most popular stories on a day-to-day basis, the results can help you learn more about what your audience likes, what earns links, attention and sharing behavior. This can also help you generate stories and content for the future that will continue to leverage these strengths and earn greater links and traffic.

I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback and potential suggestions for how to leverage these features to even greater degrees.

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On Wednesday October 1st, about ten of TopRank’s finest will be making the trek from the Western suburbs to downtown Minneapolis for the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s (MIMA) “sold out” Summit.

As in years past, MIMA Summit will take place at The Depot with a new focus on the subject of “mutualism”. Mutualism centers on the open use of material in the online world, in which web marketers and users alike participate with one another and share information together. In that spirit, I’m going to take the information provided by MIMA about the Summit and share with our readers.

The MIMA Summit is an all-day event including two keynote speakers (Rebecca Lieb & Ze Frank), numerous breakout sessions on just about every interactive marketing topic you could wish for and of course, a happy hour. Here are a few sessions I’m planning on attending to give you a taste of what the MIMA Summit 2008 has to offer.

Opening Keynote: “The Decline of Advertising and the Creative Renaissance” Rebecca Lieb, former Editor-in-Chief for the ClickZ Network, will kick off the MIMA Summit looking at the shift from ‘advertising’ to ‘marketing’ in the digital sphere. You can read our recent interview with Rebecca here.

“Creativity: Bridging Traditional to Digital Adrian Ho and Christian Erickson of Zeus Jones explore the creative divide between traditional advertising and digital marketing. Using real-world examples, this digital marketing duo will give advice on blending creative messaging into the value-driven digital landscape.

What Conversation? The Summit’s second keynote address will be given by Ze Frank, online performance artist, humorist and composer. Ze will be examining how brands can successfully participate in online conversations. The MIMA description assures that Ze will most likely avoid the difficult questions and instead focus on his own experiences. Who doesn’t love tangents?

Corporate Blogger: Angel or Demon? Director of Marketing Communications and Blogger Valeria Maltoni explains the interesting phenomenon that is the corporate blogger. Valeria will draw on her personal experience to give advice on blogging effectively about an organization while maintaining an authentic voice.

Happy Hour with Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal.  While I don’t know much about this comedy duo from North Carolina, what I saw on their website gives me hope that their show will be entertaining. I also like the fact that one of the comedian’s last name contains the word ‘laugh’ and the other’s first name is ‘link,’ which is only fitting for a digital marketing event.

There are many more sessions taking place at Wednesday’s MIMA Summit. Between all of us, the TopRank crew should be able to attend most of them and bring our newfound knowledge into play with both officemates and clients. Plus with all the humor on the schedule, we should have a new set of interactive marketing jokes to share.

If you’re attending the MIMA Summit this week AND you’re a Twitter enthusiast, be sure to tweet @mimasummit about the event happenings, questions and observations during sessions. To follow the MIMA Summit conversation, click or subscribe to this MIMA Summit Twitter Search .  MIMA Summit info is also on Facebook.

You can read our past coverage of MIMA Summit events here.

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Posted by randfish

It’s been a few weeks since I last posted a headsmacker, but this topic has been begging for some exposure. Recently we’ve worked with some fellow SEOs who’ve felt the harsh constraint of overly eager, impatient management. They’re campaigns followed solid tactics, stuck to best practices and even had some smart, creative elements, but after a month of middling results, the execs requested that our friends move on to "higher ROI projects."

To be fair, I’m an executive myself (chief something-or-other, I think), so I understand the need for fast, visible results. However, SEO doesn’t function in this fashion - never has, and I doubt it ever will. Rare, in fact, are the sites who can make sweeping changes, launch viral content, start some link building campaigns and see immediate success. Why? Lots of reasons:

• The engines need time to re-crawl your site. For a lucky few, this might take only days or a couple weeks, but for many large sites and even for smaller sites that aren’t terrificly high on Google’s "must crawl" list, we’ve seen as much as 3-4 months pass before a site’s pages are fully updated.
• The engines have to crawl all your link partners, too! If you’ve recently launched some great widgets or viral material or a new content licensing system, it’s going to be a solid wait before you experience the full impact of that work.
• The algorithms reward patience. Even if the engines start to see those links right away, it might be a few weeks or months before the algorithm rewards the full weight and heft of their existence. Why? Because search engines learned years ago that manipulative link building is often temporary, while high quality links stand the test of time. This issue is particularly true of new domains (or newly moved domains), so be aware that you might have to earn some trust over time before you feel all the positive ranking impacts of links.

  Want a great example? Remember our SEO Expert Quiz? In the first week after launch, we saw hundreds of new links pointing to that page, almost all with the anchor text "SEO Expert" included. But guess what? It took almost 6 weeks before we climbed the rankings ladder to page 1 for the query - SEO Expert (at Google, at least - Yahoo! had us ranking there much faster, though I’ve seen other examples where they lag behind, too).

• It takes time to attract links. Last, but not least on our list of reasons are the growth of links themselves. If you’ve just started new content, design and promotion strategies to attract links, you not only need time for those campaigns to reach their targets, you need to wait for the links to start rolling in (and then get counted by the engines). This can be a long, tough slog, and understandably, a lot of site owners and SEOs give up without ever getting the full benefit of their work.

Patience can be a challenging quality to find in a manager, particularly in nervous economic times. Just remember - if you’re spending money on PPC, which receives something between 12-20% of the clicks on the SERPs, those organic listings can produce a lot of value. Give your SEOs and your campaigns a minimum of 3-4 months to show positive effects and make sure you watch total search referrals (not just rankings for your pet keyword search phrases). Once you start to see increased traffic from the engines for long tail and related phrases, you know you’re on the right path.

"Not far. Yoda not far. Patience. Soon you will be with him."

Now if I could just take my own advice and settle my nerves for another 5 days until our big launch…

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If you’ve been marketing online for any length of time, you’ve no doubt seen the brand “Duct Tape Marketing“. John Jantsch, the guy behind that brand is a true, “marketer’s marketer” as you’ll see in the interview below. Because of John early in my blogging experience, I was able to pick up a lot of great insights and secured blogging gigs with Business Blog Consulting and AllBusiness.com which lead to a number of media opportunities and consulting engagements.

In this interview, John talks about getting started, branding, blogging, SEO, outsourcing marketing and tips, getting referrals, specialization and a few of his favorite tools and technologies.

You’re well known, heck you’re famous, for many things related to small business marketing. Tell us about yourself. How did you get started blogging and where did the idea for Duct Tape Marketing begin?

I’ve owned my small business for over 20 years and have always been into marketing, but about six years ago discovered I loved working with small business, but man was it hard to make a living doing it the traditional way. So, I decided to turn marketing into a product and call it Duct Tape Marketing because it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the small business reality.

There are a significant number of small businesses started each month, meaning a tremendous marketing opportunity both for and to those new businesses. What advice do you have for small businesses thinking about outsourcing their marketing?

It’s a great idea to delegate but don’t abdicate. You’re got to know more about your ideal customer and more about what makes what you have to offer valuable than anyone ever will - your job is to help a marketing coach or consultant understand what makes your business tick and let them leverage that.

We are no doubt experiencing some uncertain economic times and marketing is often the first to go when budgets get cut. What advice do you have for marketing agencies that want to reach small business marketplace in this kind of environment?

Buy more market share now but narrowing your focus. Get really good, right now, at serving the narrowest possible market like nobody ever dreamed of.

You’ve written a lot about the importance of referrals within business, a tactic that I think, is often overlooked by many online marketers. Can you offer a few of your best tips for getting referrals from clients?

Ask. I know, brilliant, but the fact is nobody does it systematically. The best thing you can do is build the expectation of a referral into your lead conversion process. In other words, tell a  prospect that you know they are going to be so thrilled with what you have promised to do that, if in fact, they are thrilled, they agree to introduce you to two other who need this type of solution - sounds too simple, but works every time.

Search engine optimization can play such a huge role in a small businesses marketing plan, but it’s not right for every business. What are your thoughts on small businesses relying on SEO?  Any tips on outsourcing SEO or keeping it in-house?

SEO for the small business is properly formatted HTML, good updated content and relevant links back - a lot of SEO folks can help you do that, but a lot of small business owners can do that part DIY. I think the trick is to understand your objectives - what role does your web presence play?  Are you in highly competitive turf where it’s cut throat to get search traffic? If you outsource anything learn enough about it to be a good buyer.

Over the past year or two there’s been a lot of buzz over Social Media as a marketing channel. Yet most businesses still don’t really know what it means for reaching new and existing customers. What’s your advice for companies just starting to make sense of social media? What are the best social networks, media sharing sites and web 2.0 sites for small business?

I always say start with a blog because I think it’s the front door to social media and can do a lot of really positive things for most small businesses. After that I would say get involved in the local and social search sites that are indexing businesses and allow user to rate and recommend local businesses. I think that’s a hot space and will get bigger.

You’ve done an amazing job of branding yourself and Duct Tape Marketing. How important is branding to a small business. Are small business branding efforts wasted in lieu of direct marketing and sales?

All businesses have a brand. A brand is simply the collective impression of your business by folks who have heard of you. So, the question is, was the brand built intentionally or accidentally. I like to say marketing is getting someone who has a need to know, like and trust you - branding for the small business is the act of becoming knowable, likable and trustable. It may not make the phone ring, but it sure attracts the right customer when done right.

It’s highly likely you’ve posted this on your blog, but what are 3-5 John Jantsch marketing tips that every business needs to consider?

• Differentiate - find a way to define your value as different in a way that matters to your market - even if you have to make it up.

• Partner - every single day spend some time developing strategic partners - the right one can inject 500 customers into your business tomorrow.

• Harness the Internet - start with a blog, learn how to tap RSS technology, use email marketing

What are some emerging marketing opportunities for businesses marketing online that you’re seeing? Mobile, social, new forms of advertising?

(iPhone applications - today anyway) - mobile has promise but it’s still learning. I think maybe the emerging marketing opportunity that I find most useful for small business is offline/online integration Remember, most of us still sell to real people

You’re pretty much everywhere on the web and clearly a very busy guy. How do you stay current with marketing news, strategy and tactics? What are your favorite online resources?

I am a huge fan of RSS technology. I stay current because I am curious and because technology makes it easy for me to filter and aggregate. I think it also helps that I actually do everything I write about and I am my target market - what a killer combo that is.

I love Jott

Thanks John!  Get more John Jantsch insights on the Duct Tape Marketing Blog.

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Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

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Posted by great scott!

This week Rand discusses some oft overlooked factors one should consider when preparing (or revisiting) a corporate blogging strategy.  We all know a blog can be a huge asset to improving a company’s web presence and rankings, but if approached carelessly it can cost you.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Corporate Blogging Tips from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

NEW!  We’ve also got a new PRO Video Tip up for our PRO Subscribers.  It’s all about using JavaScript to selectively display content. Very cool stuff, go download it!  We’re going to try and start adding more PRO Video Tips every week from now on, so you can look forward to more PRO Only video content in the future. Don’t worry though, we’ll still bring everyone Whiteboard Friday on the main blog.

Not a PRO Subscriber and want access to the PRO Video Tips? Join SEOmoz PRO and get PRO Video Tips and tons more!

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Posted by Jane Copland

Whoa! It’s Jane! Yes, SEOmozzers, your regular Roundup Thursday schedule will resume next week when Rebecca gets back from a half-ironman competition in Mexico.

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• If you have a problem with seeing people dressed as Lyrca-bodysuited butterflies, I suggest not viewing the Search Engine Rap Battle videos. They’re awful. It’s wonderful. I personally think that Yahoo! pwnd MSN but Google handed it to Yahoo! in the final round.
• I am almost too young to remember when Napster was relevant, and it seems even more irrelevant that Best Buy is set to buy the company for 1 million, but this article from PaidContent highlights some of the other lackluster purchases in the online-download industry as well as this recent acquisition.
• In "holy crap, the Internet is a good place to run a political campaign!" news, Valleyway and Did-It have both dived into the U.S. Presidential nominees’ usage of paid advertising. Did-It looks at the breakdown of how people receive their political information, and Search Engine Land sums it up here.
• Technorati steps up from "nearly useless" to "slightly more useful" with this report on the State of the Blogosphere. Do you dislike the word "blogosphere?" I don’t like it at all. Technorati makes some interesting claims in this post, such as hypothesising that I should be wealthier than I actually am, but one claim I related to is the idea that the lines between "weblog" and "other website" continue to blur. I put together the comparison data (which I need to fix, as it is out of date) for our Trifecta tool and the most difficult part of compiling the blog data was deciding whether or not a site was a blog. It’s harder than you’d think.
• Who likes analytics? I like analytics! I like installing analytics packages and looking at the same data in different ways. Thus, I enjoyed this post by Dennis Mortensen, comparing the analytics dashboards provided by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!
• To quote Rand, "I’m not sure if it’s weird and useless or awesome and valuable." The Media Bloggers Association plans to provide resources, both monetary and legal, to bloggers who have fallen victim to a range of online violations.
• Ever had the feeling you’re part of something bigger than yourself but you can’t figure out what it is? Maybe you were one of the 10,000 people who contributed to the digital drawing of this US one-hundred dollar bill, receiving one penny for your troubles.
• Did Rebecca ever tell you that these roundups take a long time to put together? Perhaps Berocca, which Kiwis, Aussies and Brits know as a hangover curer and all-around legal form of crack, should send us a blogger relief pack. Does this put Berocca in a paid post situation? Ciarán doesn’t think so.
• How did Seth Godin become so successful? BusinessWeek investigates the marketing mainstay.
• Have you ever closed a dialogue box on your monitor and then thought, "I wonder if that warning about a critical error was important?" Nearly fifty smarty-pants college kids did the same thing over and over again in a study conducted by North Carolina State University’s Psycology Department. One assumes that NCSU’s campus is rife with viruses, and I do not mean the sort you can catch at a Friday night frat party.

• We’re big-time now, kids! The upcoming SMX East conference in New York City will include a panel featuring real-live online campaign workers from the U.S. Presidential race. Organisers have secured a representative from the Republican campaign and are "still working" on a Democratic representative to talk about their strategies. Even given his campaign’s decline, it would have been interesting to see what a Ron Paul representative would have said as well. Panel details are listed here.
• Peter Da Vanzo writes a really smart article at SEO Book about using keyword research, amongst other methods, as a market research tool. The post is great for highlighting some alternative keyword research options, such as Twitscoop and DiggLabs DigSpy, as tools which pull from meta search engines often return crazy results. Nope, I refuse to believe that 1,836 people searched for "chlorine all purpose denist dog cleaning minnesota" yesterday, Wordtracker.
• Black text on a white background looks awesome, unless you begin to read it. My eyes still hurt. Discoverd via Bryan Eisenberg at Grokdotcom, please read the entire page in order to get the point. Now think about this in a commercial sense: that white-on-black landing page starts to look a bit nasty now, yes?
• Fantastic picture of zebras fighting. Followed by an article addressing some search engine and corporate-friendly title tag ideas. An SEO who has never had a debate with a client about the structure of a title tag is missing out BIG time. It’s seriously one of the best conversations you’ll ever have.

• Dharmesh Shah comes right out and says it: pissing people off and creating a passionate community of fans go hand in hand and, if you dare, you can try it as a promotion model. It’s the equal and opposite reaction effect, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t know. We’ve never enjoyed a passionate community or group of haters at SEOmoz. That doesn’t sound at all familiar.
• It’s my round up this week and I can similtaneously make fun of Australians and Americans*, allbeit from a British point of view, if I want to.

YOUmoz entries:

• What I Learned from a Fishmonger in Seattle. Marty Martin details what he learned during the SEOmoz PRO seminar in August… although one of the things that really stuck with him came from his trip to Pike Place Market.
• YOUmoz Newb Pwns Spammer. I laughed to the point of giggle-tears whilst reading Darren Slatten’s chronicle of his dealings with a now-infamous private message spammer.
• How to use Robots.txt and Redirects the Wrong Way. Michael Sparer draws from Rebecca’s "Newbie Mistakes" series to detail some common errors with the robots.txt protocol and permanent and temporary redirects.
• 21 Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation. Reputation management is best begun at home, and Vaidhyanathan’s list is a great resource when you’re looking for ideas as to how to start.
• Selling SEO: Tips on How to Act, What to Say, and How to Sell to Clients. sly-grrr provides a detailed list of how best to sell SEO services to clients.
• What Food Taught Me About Internet Marketing. A formerly silent reader of SEOmoz, Franz compares his learning experience in SEO with his experience working in a kitchen.
• How Flash Affects Your Website’s Rankings with SEO. What is says on the tin: Indy Media Group looks at some SEO issues you’ll come across when working with Flash.
• Help a Reporter (And Yourself) Out. tom6a profiles HARO, where journalists post questions and subscribers can step up as sources.
• Adwords hackers - what a nightmare. Web Design Adelaide had a nasty experience with is business’ Adwords account being compromised.
• Joomla Users: Stop Wasting Your Link Juice. The owners of Joomla-powered sites used to have a hell of a time nofollowing their links, until Alledia released a menu module to help out.
• Define: - A Solid Natural Traffic Generation Strategy. petrosianii noticed that some rather random pages on his site were receiving a growing amount of traffic. It turned out that Google had picked his pages up for some "define:" queries.
• SEO for Video. The Lost Agency talks about Google’s plan to index the content of videos, rather than just videos’ meta information.
• How to Run Your SEO Business from the Thought Leaders of SEO. Marty Martin provides a roundup (roundup within a roundup, Russian doll like, yeah?) of some recent valuable SEO posts.
• Dinosaurs and bunk beds and widgets, oh my! saffyre9 stumbled across a widget from BunkBedsPedia this week and shares his findings.
• Who’s Afraid of RSS Feeds? Me… Jdeb has some concerns about the information he sees surrounding RSS feeds and asks the community for advice and contributions about RSS best practices.
• Is A Link Buyer An SEO Expert? Gunjan Pandya writes a controversial post about what should define an SEO expert and whether those who predominantly buy links can call themselves true SEOs.
• Selling Services and Shoes: Some Copywriting Tips. Webwordslinger compares selling services with selling products, highlighting the different marketing tactics required for each.
• IIS Case Folding, Robots and Results. After working almost exclusively with Apache servers, Jeremy Chatfield sees some potential SEO problems with the way IIS servers handles different cases in URLs.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Mike Piker can’t eat anything containing Gluten for fear of becoming extremely ill, so he was less than impressed when Pillsbury’s careless Adwords offered him "Gluten free pizza crust" that contained Gluten.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

• Melbourne SEO Meetup on October 11 at 12:30pm. The monthly Melbourne SEO Meetup takes place at 213-215 Blackburn Road, Mt. Waverly / Sydnal, Victoria, Australia.
• International Search Summit, London takes place at the Conference Centre, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, St. Pancras, London on November 20. The event focuses on international and multilingual search and will be hosted by WebCertain.

Upcoming events:

• UK SEO Seminar / Workshop, October 3 at 10:00am at the Clarendon Centre, Brighton, East Sussex.
• SMX East October 6-8 in New York, New York.
• Scary SEO, October 24 - 25, Hilton Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, Florida.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• Internet Marketing Manager at Speakeasy in Seattle, Washington, US.
• Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Stone Interactive Group, Ann Arbor, Michigan, US.
• PPC/SLC/CPC Account Manager at Marcel Media Inc., Chicago, Illinois, US.
• Online Marketing Manager / Specialist at Rental Markets Inc., Houston, Texas, US.
• PR / Online Reputation Specialist for contract work at Basis, Ontario, Canada.
• SEO Specialist at Human Bridges, Boulder, Colorado, US.
• SEO Consultant for contract work at LincolnLoop, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, US.
• Internet Marketing Manager in Yeovil, UK.
• Paid Search Marketing Manager at Onward Search, Seattle, Washington, US.
• Entry Level Organic Marketing Analyst in Dallas, Texas, US.
• Head of SEO at Gaming Media Group Ltd., in London, UK.
• Independent Sales Manager (Text Link Ads for Link Building at Ask2link, Redwood, California, US.
• SEO/PPC Analyst/Specialist at HZDG, Rockville, Maryland, US.

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• Speakeasy in Seattle, WA
• Empowered SEO in New York, NY
• Rental Markets Inc. in Houston, TX
• Verecom Technologies Inc. in San Francisco, CA
• Morrill Technology Group in Greenville, SC
• Working The Magic, LLC in Bellingham, WA
• Prestige Design in Bergen County, NJ
• Closed Loop Marketing in Roseville, CA
• RedAlkemi in San Francisco, CA (also with offices in the UK and India)
• PilotOutlook.com in Bellevue, WA
• Digital Cataplult in Port St. Lucie, Florida
• SEOGroup in Chicago, Illinois
• Ocean Online Group in Chicago, Illinois

UK / Europe

• Oban Multilingual Strategy Ltd in London, UK
• BlackDog in Munich, Germany
• STANDOUTMEDIA in Denmark
• Gaming Media Group Ltd in London, UK
• INBYTE Internet Marketing in the Netherlands

Asia

• HopHigher.com in Dubai, UAE
• OOm (Optimal Online Marketing) in Singapore
• Rumah Outlet - IT in Bandung, Indonesia

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Bruce Gibbs has over ten years of experience working with online projects, including large eCommerce web development, marketing and publishing. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Levi Wardell has a decade of experience in information architecture, content creation, analytics and all facets of search marketing including paid and organic search. He is based out of Maryland.
• Mike Harmanos has worked as that National Distribution Sales Manager for a large manufacturer and is now branching into online marketing.

* It so does happen.

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Gary Koelling at a MIMA Event

It’s social media interview week here at Online Marketing Blog and we have another excellent interview with a social media sage just for you.

Gary Koelling is a blogger, Twitterati, public speaker and a social media pathfinder. He’s also Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy. Best Buy is undoubtedly one of the “best” known brands in retail and in particular with many of the gadget-geeky readers of Online Marketing Blog. After seeing Gary speak at a MIMA event (pictured above) I thought it would be interesting to get a few of his insights as a social media evangelist within a large company as well as advice for others.

For the uninitiated, can you describe your creative and writing background as well as what you do in your current position as Senior Manager, Social Technology for Best Buy?

I’m a J School grad from the University of Minnesota . Unlike many of my classmates I took the low road and went into advertising. I worked as a copywriter for many years, most recently at Carmichael Lynch. I came to Best Buy in 2003 as a creative director. In the fall of 2006, six months after the launch of BlueShirt Nation, my day job changed. Most days my job involves building and maintaining social technology tools like BlueShirt Nation, Best Buy’s internal social network. And more recently Giftag.com, a universal gift registry slash wish list. With increasing frequency my job involves education, trying to help others understand what social media is and what it means to a corporation.

How would you define “social media” to someone not fluent in interactive or online marketing?

I hesitate a little to use the word education to describe the process of explaining to people what social media is. For one thing, what it is is constantly changing. New technologies and new ways of using them are being introduced all the time and this changes the tone and depth of our online and offline social interactions.

The other reason I hesitate is because it’s not so much education as it is re-education which often means having to unlearn a lot of what they think they know about how to act. A lot of people say to me “I’m completely ignorant about this stuff” or “I’m totally dumb when it comes to this stuff.”  What I hear is “This scares me.”

What are some of the common issues large organizations encounter when trying to evaluate and adopt social media technologies? Are you seeing more internal or external facing applications? (ex: building a private social network vs engaging in existing/public social networks)

From about 1994 to about 2005 or 2006 our relationship with interactive media had been pretty much identical to the relationship we’ve had with mass media for about the last hundred years. The few create and the many consume. The how, what and why of the message is controlled and sometimes vetted by journalistic standards. Social Media doesn’t hew to this model because the center of control has been moved from the few to the many. This does not compute with our current math, our current approach of even calling it ‘media.’

As a result I get a lot plaintive if earnest looks from people who have either been sent to me by their bosses to get smart about this thing or who understand that something fundamental is shifting under feet and they’re terrified. In both cases they feel helpless. And there’s the tragedy. The corporation, as a way of organizing group activity, has little room for what is social; trust, thoughtfulness, vulnerability – human. It’s required that we suppress these things and substitute policy, process and ambition.

So when I tell people, “Be human” I get, “What does that mean?” or “Can we do that – who has to approve it?” At that moment I find myself having to help people remember what it was like to interact with real people. Could you get fired for acting human in this context? I suppose you could. The handicap that we’re running up against is that as a person, the corporation, or more specifically the brand that is presented internally and externally, behaves like a sociopath.

The external or customer facing effect (as well internal) is that when in normal conversation brands tend to act paranoid, or narcissistic. “Nice day today” begets “Compared to what?” Or “How’s the weather?” begets “Beautiful day …  to buy some of my stuff.” To be fair, it’s not easy being social. It takes work. Even as “social” animals we have our struggles so is it really surprising that an abstraction that wants to be human struggles with it? Nah.

What kind of impact has Best Buy’s internal social network, BlueShirtNation.com had and how did you come about creating it?

The impact or value of social technology, like most ubiquitous technology, is hard to measure. You know a phone system has value but it’s hard to even know where to begin to take a measure of that. I truly wish I had a better answer but like any relationship, if you want to keep it healthy, you have to pay attention. You can’t just monitor it. You have to really pay attention. In paying attention the two things I tend to collect are 1) stories from users about how the technology failed them or helped them win and 2) admissions of fear. You can tell a lot by watching those two things.

Can you share a few high level tips for companies that are in discovery mode when it comes to tasks such as deciding on social platforms and applications, internal management and success measurement?  Or should they take a less evaluative approach and just jump in?

If you’re ready to count more failures than wins and if you can get honest admissions of fear – you’re almost ready to jump in. But first ask yourself “What kind of relationship do I (not We) want to have with my employees or customers? Give yourself an honest answer. If it’s a purely transactional relationship that’s fine. If it’s something else, try to plot it on a line of intimacy somewhere between “Someone I see a couple days a week in the elevator” and “Soul mate.” Hopefully, for their sake, it’s somewhere in the middle. Then practice. Keep it small. Say hi. Get to know each other. Try things. Learn. If a jaded old ad guy like me can figure it out, the rest of you should be fine.

What are some of the resources (sites, blogs, books, events, networks, applications, etc) that you rely on for information on social media best practices?

Here are  couple of books that have enlightened me:

• The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan
• The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

And here are a couple of sites I keep up with: readwriteweb.com and techcrunch.com

Thanks Gary!

You can catch Gary in person speaking at next week’s Social Media Marketing Summit in San Francisco.

Sponsored By: Digital Publishing & Advertising DPAC II Next wave of digital content & ads October 27th & 28th NY Marriott Marquis

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Posted by Jane Copland

What’s the deal with all this advice that Google employees like to give us, then? Of all the search engines (and of many companies of Google’s size and scope), Google appears to be the most open with its distribution of information, its interactions with its users and its willingness to give us advice. The other search engines are catching up, but Google has always seemed to lead the way in its interactions with the public, especially those members of the public who want it the most.

Taken at face value, the interactions of people like Matt Cutts and Brian White on blogs, forums and social networks are fantastic. You can’t expect to write a blog post or submit a thread about Facebook and have a high-ranking employee show up to correct a misconception or answer a question. Of course, Googlers can’t and don’t weigh in on everything, but the fact that they’re there is awesome.

However, it’s healthy to avoid taking everything at face value, and some people are better at that than others. A true Google fan will say that the information and advice dispensed by Google employees is dispensed 100% in good faith, that it is for our own benefit and that if we can trust anyone, we can trust a search engine worker. A true conspiracy theorist will say that every utterance from a big company employee’s mouth, no matter whether that company be Google, Microsoft, Apple or the Bank of America, is filtered through a carefully-planned corporate agenda.

People read a lot into the public situations Googlers get involved in. The most recent debate surrounded whether Twitter had nofollowed users’ profile page links because a Googler told them to. The public message Matt Cutts sent to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams linked to David Naylor’s post on the subject of followed profile links and said that he’s "dropped (Evan) an email" about it. According to Matt, he did not tell Evan to remove or nofollow those links, but only pointed out that Twitter could fall victim to spam attacks because of a PageRank-leaking loophole.

I haven’t read the email Matt sent and it’s likely that you haven’t either. However, you’ll undoudtedly have your assumptions about it. The conspiracy theorists will have you believe that Twitter was pressured into removing its users’ links under threats of lost PageRank. The believers will tell you that Matt dropped in like a friendly genie to alert Evan of a possible problem. I envision that hypothetical email beginning with "Oh noes!"

In reality, it’s probably going to be somewhere in the middle and I believe that goes for most of Google’s interactions with the public. Search engines have long advised against linking to "bad neighbourhoods": we know both inherently and factually that linking to spam does not make a site look more trustworthy. However, it would seem that Twitter has little to gain from search engine rankings and that nofollowing those outbound links benefits Google and its use of PageRank more than it does a site whose growth hardly relies on search traffic. Then again, Google could just have easily discounted followed outbound links from Twitter. Given the ease with which they could have done this, surely Matt’s actions could be seen as pretty philanthropic? It isn’t as though Google hasn’t turned off sites’ ability to pass PageRank in the past.

I’ve speculated on both sides of the theory here, but I always end up in the middle again. Google offers advice for a number of reasons and one of those is good will. Another seems to be making its employees’ lives easier. Take Monday’s blog post about URL rewriting which Rand covers here: I walked away from that article feeling that although Google would like to help webmasters avoid rewriting screw-ups, they’re quite invested in the idea that we should make their lives simpler. A third reason behind some Google actions is also going to boil down to corporate agenda. It’s doubtful that a company can become that big and successful without one.

People who write for Google have a responsibility to take the utmost care in the advice they give and Monday’s URL rewriting post somewhat neglects this responsibility. The post seems to look out for Google’s interests more than it does the interests of website owners: it is misleading to experienced webmasters who knows how to effectively rewrite URLs… which they often do for purposes other than search engine crawling and ranking.

Nothing that comes out with a Google stamp on it, and nothing that Googlers say on their own time, is taken lightly. Matt can send Evan Williams a two-line email that says something along the lines of:

"Hey dude, those links from Twitter profile pages under "Bio" are passing PageRank and there are some nasty spammers signed up to your site. It’s going to show up badly on your outbound link profile. Catch you later."

and it means a lot more than it says. Google doesn’t have to threaten a webmaster with anything; a message like that is enough to spur action. Similarly, Google’s publication of any material, including Monday’s URL rewriting post, carries a lot of weight and usually shapes how webmasters conduct themselves and their businesses.

The conflict of interest happens when Google combines its interests as a company (in this case, easiest, most effective web crawling) with advice to webmasters. On Monday, it appears that commercial interests won out and Google dispensed less-than-ideal advice to an enormous community.

Google’s employees know this, which is where goodwill and power come together. I am absolutely sure that the things I’ve seen Matt tell webmasters is imparted in good faith. Many of us have received great advice, clarification and information from Googlers. However, they know that they hold a huge amount of power. People who’ve been around this space for a fairly good amount of time will have seen the annoyingly polished, corporate-approved statements and posts. The language is deliberately chummy but ends up being condescending. We recognise this because we’ve also seen their genuine voices. We have seen them get pissed off and call us out.

I don’t have my tin hat on. The title of this post is a bit sensational because I neither believe that the public-facing side of Google is a godsend or a controlled gimmick. I believe that you can rely on the advice you hear and read from search engines, especially from the ever-vocal Google, not to get your site banned, hurt your rankings or be deliberately detrimental in any way. However, always remember that they’re going to misspeak and they’re going to publish posts and comments that are in their own interest. They are also aware of their power, and so we should pay close attention to the meaning behind the messages we hear and find the middle ground between faithful servant and irate conspiracy theorist.

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