SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

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Your Profile Just Got a Whole Lot Snazzier Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:33 AM PST Posted by jennita Disclaimer: This post has absolutely nothing to do with SEO or even online marketing. You've been warned. Please keep reading to see the awesomeness that is your new profile. *happy dance* :) Before I jump into the new profiles and what's so great about them. Let's take a look back, a look at the profiles of yesteryear. Back in the day when the profile functionality was created, Twitter didn't even exist yet (I know... WHAT?! There was a life before Twitter?). The profiles were quite simple really, you could only post one link and design wise there was a ton of whitespace. Old Profile Layout It is definitely time for an upgrade! So, let's take a look at some of the changes to the profiles. Lookin' Good With this redesign you have the ability to show us a lot more information about yourself! You have all the same functionaity you had before, but with a ton of additions. For example, you no longer have to add your Twitter name to the "additional contact info" section, there's actually a place to add you Twitter name! So let's take a look at a few screenshots with some of the changes. New Profile Layout More Links + Social Profiles Not only do we show your community stats but you can see here we have direct links to your social profiles and the ability to add more links! (although only one will have the nofollow removed after 200 points). Community Stats + Social & Other Links More Profile Information Now you get more bang for your buck and can display more information about yourself. Remember that you can earn up to 20 MozPoints for having a fully complete profile. Profile Information Comments and Blog Posts Yea! This is information you had before, but now it's in a much cleaner, prettier format. Plus you get more options to see the post someone commented on and who wrote it. This will make it much easier to navigate around. Below is a screenshot of Casey Henry's latest comments. Comments & Blog Posts Earn MozPoints Yes, that's right. You can earn MozPoints just for filling out your profile. As you update your profile you'll notice that you points just for filling in simple things like your name, title and bio. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how MozPoints will be added. MozPoint Changes Along with the changes to the profile and the upcoming changes to PRO Q&A it made sense to take a look at how MozPoints are calculated, why users would want to gain more and the ways to do that. Take a look at the new MozPoints page for all the details. Ways to gain points YOUmoz - You'll now get 20 points when you get a YOUmoz post published (it used to be 10). Plus if the post makes it to the main blog, you'll get an ADDITIONAL 30 points. Which would give you a total of 50 points just for the post, plus still continue to earn points for every thumbs up and comment received on the post. Filling out your profile - More on that above. :) Comments - You continue to earn 1 MozPoint for each comment you write and 1 Mozpoint for every thumb up on your comment. New PRO Q&A - Right now this is in beta and only 100 users have access, but in the coming months all PRO members will be able to use this forum to ask and answer SEO questions. Free members, you can gain access by reaching over 500 MozPoints. Participating in PRO Q&A is a great way to gain points. Benefits of having MozPoints Other than just looking cool, and being at the top of the list, there really are benefits to earning MozPoints. A few of the highlights: Earn 200+ MozPoints in one month and you'll be considered for one free month of PRO. After 200 Mozpoints your first custom URL in your profile becomes followed. Currently you only need 100 points to get this nofollow, which means there are some members who used to have a followed link and no longer do. I'd encourge you to check out the ways to earn MozPoints above. Earn 1,000-1,999 points and you get an SEOmoz T-shirt Earn 2,000-4,999 points and you get a MozBot Guru Trophy (more info on this soon) Over 5,000 points?? Well we'll find something super-duper awesome for you!  Go Update Your Profiles Now, stop reading this, and go update your profiles! I want to see new smiling faces and filled out profiles by the end of the day. Go on now, I don't want to have to tell you twice. ;) (Sorry, the mom in me kicks in every now and then). Oh! There is one cookie issue happening when you go to your new profile for the first time. You may get logged out without knowing. So if you try to update your profile and get an error. Try refreshing, logging back in and trying again. You should only have to do this on the first around. Happy profile updating! Do you like this post? Yes No

A Tweet's Effect On Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study Posted: 15 Feb 2011 01:52 PM PST Posted by jennita Let me tell you a tale of an unexpected case study on the value of a tweet on a page's ranking and traffic. This tale will mostly be told using graphics, as the images tell the story better than I can. Let's begin... Last Monday while I was checking the morning tweets, I noticed a ton of tweets about our Beginner's Guide to SEO. It didn't take long to realize that Smashing Magazine had tweeted about it and the retweets were seriously rolling in. (And yes, they really did spell Beginers wrong ;). Exhibit A - The Initial Tweet I quickly emailed the marketing team, with a "Sweet! Smashing Magazine tweeted about the Beginner's Guide, let's watch for the traffic bump." Not long after Rand in his infinite wisdom realized that all of a sudden we were actually ranking on the first page for the term "Beginner's Guide" (without SEOmoz or SEO) and he tweeted. Exhibit B - Rand's tweet as we realized we were ranking for general keyword Whoa. Now, previously we weren't tracking that keyword as we hadn't really thought about trying to rank for such a general term (by the way, it is now a keyword we watch in our web app campaign). Most of the traffic to the Beginner's Guide usually comes from keywords like seo guide, seomoz beginners guide, what is seo, beginners guide seo, seo keyword research, etc. which are all directly related to SEO and the guide.  Rand had searched on "Beginner's Guide" about a month or two earlier and it wasn't anywhere in the SERPs, and we definitely weren't getting any traffic for that term. So we were obviously quite interested to see that now, after hundreds of retweets we were showing up on the first page for that term. HOLY WOWSERS. At that point I wasn't sure how long it was going to stick around so I took a screen shot, thinking "this will make for a great case study." Exhibit C - The SERP Sure this was really interesting but the question was "will it last?" or is this just an example of QDF? Over the next week I watched the ranking and traffic every day. The ranking seemed to fluctuate between the first and the second page for "Beginner's Guide" throughout the week. I even tweeted about it one day last week to see where others around the world were seeing our guide rank for the term. The response was overwhelming that most people in the U.S. saw it on the first page still (at various spots) and most international folks saw it on the second page (in the 11th-13th spots). All pretty interesting but we all know ranking isn't everything right? So let's take a look at happened with our organic traffic for that keyword. Exhibit D - The Traffic Sure, the traffic hasn't been huge, which is totally expected since our guide to SEO probably wasn't the user's intent if they searched for "Beginner's Guide." Plus, the fact is, that's not a highly searched term, so getting a ton of traffic for it wouldn't make sense. What IS interesting though is that before the tweet, we had absolutely zero traffic for that keyword and after the tweet, we have traffic. It has obviously died down since the initial tweet but we're still getting traffic each day for it. Just like our initial test we ran a few months ago, we'll continue to monitor the traffic and ranking for "Beginner's Guide" to see if the tweets only helped in the short term or in the long term as well. Until then, if you have any similar case studies or "random awesome tweets that fall into your lap" as we did, I'd love to hear about the outcome. Oh, and one last little bit of info. Below is a screenshot of the data about the bit.ly URL that Smashing Magazine used in their tweet. It's pretty dang exciting to see how many clicks it generated! Some takeaways: A high quantity of tweets from "real" users on Twitter has a pretty substantial impact on rankings in the short term (take note sources seeking rankings during high search volume periods - holidays, news events, etc.) It appears likely that Google (and Bing) are using the concept they described in the interview on SELand of "Author Authority" to help weight the value of tweets (as we've seen that bot-repeated tweeting in similar quantities doesn't have this affect) There seems to be some long-term, nascent value carried by tweets in addition to the short-term effects. If this is consistently observed, expect a lot more SEO activity around engaging and incenting tweeting to key URLs. It's still unknown whether and how much the text of a tweet impacts the SERPs in a way similar to anchor text. That will be an excellent next test for us to observe. Ah... the power of tweets. :-) Would love to hear your experiences and feedback on tweets influencing rankings in the comments! Do you like this post? Yes No

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