luni, 12 martie 2012

Link Building Tools We Use at Distilled

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 01:33 PM PDT

We recently gathered up a list of all the link building tools and resources we turn to daily across the company at Distilled. In the "TAGFEE" spirit of generosity, we thought it might be useful to others and we thought we'd share it here.

Link building is on our minds a lot of the time anyway, but even more so at this time of year in the run up to our Linklove link building conferences in London and Boston (it's in less than a month and yes, there's a discount for SEOmoz PRO members in the discount store, see below for more details or check out the trailer and a testimonial).

We have a variety of people helping our clients get more links in different ways and in different roles at Distilled. We have:

SEO consulting focussed on strategic changes
SEO execution and creative focussed on content creation and relationship building
Digital PR
Outreach

We also just have an ever-increasing number of people spread across three offices and eight timezones!

It's therefore inevitable that people will do things differently and use different resources. Over the years we've talked about a wide range of tools and resources in blog posts, at conferences and in client work - but the ones below are the ones that seem to have stuck around (or that we're trialling at the moment) and that came out in the canvassing of the team. In that spirit, I hope you'll find something of use here.

When we recently got our whole company together in London for the first time since Rob moved to Seattle to open our first US office in early 2010, part of the objective was to improve our processes and share knowledge across the company about how different consultants work. On one of the days we ran a (cheesily-named) ship-a-thon where we each aimed to "ship" things in a single day to improve Distilled. To give credit where it's due, Hannah decided to collate this list - I've just added some of the commentary and formatting. Thanks Hannah!

So, without further ado, here is the list of link building tools people in Distilled are using right now:

Data, Analysis and Research

Raven [Paid]

I'm sure you're all familiar with the Raven toolkit - it's great for reporting and analysis as well as having a bunch of tools to make your actual link building efforts more effective.

Excel [Paid]

Yep. The big X. You'd be amazed how many link building problems still need Excel.

Open Site Explorer [Paid & Free Versions]

Another tool that needs no introduction. Personally, between this and the moz toolbar, I cover off the majority of my day-to-day link data needs.

Ontolo [Paid & Free Versions]

I love what the Ontolo guys are doing with their toolset. This is one we are actively looking into to work out how we can get more out of it.

Majestic [Paid & Free Versions]

Just like you should always read two newspapers, you should always have two sources of link data. Majestic complements the SEOmoz data nicely. I most often find myself turning to Majestic data when I want to spot unnatural spikes in link growth, lower quality links (Majestic discards less of its crawl) or link growth comparisons over time.

Tom Anthony's Link Profile Tool [Free]

It's funny how little hacked-together tools can make it into your core toolset and especially in the competitive analysis (or pre-sales) phases, it's great to get a quick gut-check about a link profile.

JavaScript Bookmarklets [Free]

JavaScript bookmarklets FTW. Getting better at JS is one of those things I keep meaning to do, but in the meantime, why not just nick the ones Tom put together?

Citation Labs [Paid & Free Versions]

There are a bunch of useful tools here - go and have a poke around if you haven't already.

Link Diagnosis [Free]

Depending on how you're looking to slice and dice a link profile, linkdiagnosis gives you another view over the data.

Link Builder from Wordtracker [Paid & Free Versions]

When you're analysing link target data, there are a bunch of things you'd ideally like to automate and Wordtracker's tool makes a bunch of those manual steps easy.

My Blog Guest [Free]

Depending on the level of client and content available, we take a variety of approaches to finding guest post targets. My Blog Guest has a genuine community element to it and is definitely worth a look.

Blogger Link Up [Free]

Similar to My Blog Guest is another source for guest posts and guest post targets.

Haro [Free]

Although its effectiveness has declined as its popularity increased, HARO is still a good source for breaking into the PR game. Pro-tip: follow them on twitter to jump on breaking opportunities. Pro-pro-tip: build your own list of journalists on twitter to really take this to the next level.

Email and Outreach

Boomerang [Paid & Free Versions]

John wrote a post recently about gmail tools for outreachers that spells out in more detail why we love Boomerang and Rapportive (below).

Rapportive [Free]

The link building benefits of Rapportive are outlined above, but even if you're not building links day to day, if your job involves building relationships (and whose doesn't?) I strongly recommend using Rapportive. I'm great with faces and terrible with names, so it's good to see people's photo alongside their emails if nothing else.

Quick-n-dirty in-browser scraping

Multi Links for Firefox [Free]

Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than having to do them all individually.

Chrome Web Scraper [Free]

Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets. For all those times when it's not worth building a dedicated tool, but you need to grab a bunch of data off a page.

Chrome Link Clump [Free]

Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time in Chrome. Choose your browser, choose your poison.

Social networks

Twitter [Free]

It sounds stupidly basic, but we're increasingly seeing the social networks as link building tools. The power of private twitter lists in particular shouldn't be underestimated! I'm also a big fan of hacking around with the streaming API both to gauge "demand" (i.e. the number of people talking about different topics) but also for building quick monitoring and response tools.

Google+ [Free]

With the novelty of G+ and its high penetration in the world of webmasters and web marketers, it's a great way of building relationships with the "linkerati" at the moment.

LinkedIn [Paid & Free Versions]

Pro-tip with LinkedIn - get your executives and sales guys (or anyone in your organisation with a well-connected account) to trawl their account for the contacts you need. Bonus points if they'll let you work through it with them.

Facebook [Free]

Although of course links from Facebook are rarely even scraped / republished elsewhere (unlike Twitter), we've seen people increasingly using it for work (presumably as they get slightly more comfortable with the privacy options that G+ seems to have provoked). Relationship building and outreach can be surprisingly effective through Facebook with certain demographics.

CRM and contact databases

Buzzstream [Paid]

We are currently building our entire outreach CRM into Buzzstream. It's the most effective tool we've found for collaborating on shared contacts and keeping track of the links they give you.

GroupHigh [Paid]

Along with more PR-oriented solutions like Gorkana and Meltwater, it's sometimes nice to have access to blog data sources as well.

Advanced Search Operators [Free]

It's an old one, but still totally relevant (apart from the search engine naming!). Don't forget about the basics!

Google Docs Import XML [Free]

As we try out new search queries or ad-hoc tactics for clients, we need agile tools to go with them. Google Docs gives us one of the easiest platforms we've found for that kind of thing.

Followerwonk [Paid & Free Versions]

Mmmmm. Followerwonk. You've no doubt heard about it from all kinds of sources, but if you haven't checked it out yet, you should do that right now.

We Follow [Free]

WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users organized by interest. It's probably not rocket science to work out how to use that...

Blog Dash [Paid]

A permission-based blogger database. You get a different kind of opportunity out of this kind of directory, but you can also promote things in a different way when expectations have already been set.

Content promotion

Zemanta [Paid]

Zemanta suggests your content to relevant bloggers. We've made no secret of loving the concept and rating the service. We recently ran a meet-up in NYC in partnership with the Zemanta guys. For certain kinds of content and in the right niche, it's very effective.

Seeded Buzz [Paid & Free Versions]

Seeded Buzz allows you to promote your content to relevant bloggers.

Creative inspiration

Pinterest [Free]

The more we work on creative content, the more inspiration we need. Pinterest is great for this. When sharing internally, we use a combination of G+ (private) and Tumblr (public, great visual archive pages).

Creative Review [Free]

When I spoke to our creative team about where they get their inspiration from, the first two answers were CR and ffffound (I never know how many "f"s to put in that!).

ffffound [Free]

A great combination of on and offline inspiration.

Up and coming candidates

We're always trying out new tools and evaluating existing ones. Our current evaluation backlog (not all of which are for link building) looks like this:

Searchmetrics
Ginzametrics
Ahrefs
Toplocalsearch
Chartbeat
Niels Bosma's SEO tools for Excel
A variety of outreach / PR monitoring tools

What did we forget?

I'm sure there are both obvious tools that we should be using that we aren't and tools that we are using that we forgot to include in our list. Got some favourites? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

If you'd like to learn more about how we (and other link building experts) go about things, we'd love to see you at Linklove.

We're running our dedicated link building conference in London on Friday 30th March (costing £449 - or £349 with the SEOmoz PRO discount) and in Boston on Monday 2nd April (costing $699 - or $549 with the SEOmoz PRO discount). You can check out the speakers and schedule here.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : The extraordinary software development manager

The extraordinary software development manager

Being good at programming is insufficient qualification for becoming a world class software project manager/leader. Too often, we take our best coders and turn them into incompetent managers because it seems like a logical next step, and because we don't pay adequate attention to what we really want from these critical executives. (Hint, this is about many fields, not merely software).

1. Clients want useful visibility into the future in terms of costs, timing and deliverables

in fact, it's almost impossible to be too clear, to benchmark enough and most of all, to overdo the work of identifying forks in the road when it comes to decision making. When a client hires a developer or a company embarks on a software project, they are lost. Even something as complex as building a house is dwarfed by the rapid change, shifting priorities and most of all, the requirement for the new, that's involved in even a simple software project.

The indispensable software development manager is aware of this and lays it all out for us.

2. Code is going to be used, reviewed, updated and inspected by people other than the person writing it

At some point in the next [insert time frame], a dozen people we have never met will either be updating or using this code, whether they are people we hire or people we partner with. It's tempting to question the value of an organized architecture and clear code commenting, but again, it's almost impossible for an organization to overdo this. We don't have time to do it over so we have to spend the time to do it right. In software programming only the amateur's approach rewards speed over long-term usability.

3. A great programmer is worth thirty times as much as a good one.

Which means that hiring a good programmer in a competitive field is a killer error. It also means that managing a programmer in a way that accepts 'good' will lead to a fail as well.

4. Programming at scale is more like building a skyscraper than putting together a dinner party

Architecture in the acquisition of infrastructure and tools is one of the highest leverage pieces of work a tech company can do. Smart architecture decisions will save hundreds of thousands of dollars and earn millions. We'll only make those decisions if we can clearly understand our options.

Or, you can have some newbies hack something together real quick. Up to you.

• Email to a friend •

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

ECB Calls for "Naming and Shaming" of EMU Budget Violators; Public Warnings, My Goodness!

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 02:19 PM PDT

After years of violating the 3 percent maximum budget deficit restriction as stated in the Maastricht Treaty, Germany is finally a solid citizen.

The Spiegel Online notes German Budget Deficit Plunges to 1 Percent of GDP.

Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain may hog most of the negative press when it comes to debt in Europe. But Germany too has been in violation of European Union budget rules in recent years, posting a deficit of 4.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, well above the 3 percent maximum imposed by the Maastricht Treaty.

On Friday, [February 24, 2012] though, Germany's Federal Statistics Office announced that the country's deficit plunged in 2011 and, at 1 percent, is now well within EU limits.

Toot the Horns, Blow the Whistles

Now that Germany has gotten its act together, it's time for "Naming and Shaming" of everyone else.

The Financial Times reports ECB calls for tougher rules on budgets

The European Central Bank has sharpened its hardline stance on eurozone fiscal policy by urging the still-tougher policing of member states' public finances, including by "naming and shaming" the worst offenders.

Europe's newly agreed rules provided "the 'pillars of trust' between countries". "This trust is essential for the monetary union," Mr Draghi told reporters in Frankfurt last week. "In order to continue, the monetary union needs . . . the willingness to be subject to a discipline that cannot be changed by any government whatsoever."

Among the proposals in the report dated March 7, the ECB suggests the surveillance of countries that run into difficulties in the future should be strengthened by public warnings for the most recalcitrant.

"The threat of publicity, if a member state is unco-operative, may provide an incentive to the member state to take more action," the report says.

Where a country under surveillance is threatening the eurozone's financial stability, there should be an automatic recommendation that it seeks financial assistance, the ECB says. It also backs the EU sending a "permanent resident adviser" to countries in difficulties.

Public Warnings, My Goodness!

Obviously these fools do not know how ridiculous they sound and how useless their proposals are. The Maastricht Treaty was useless and the Merkozy Treaty is just more of the same. Moreover, French presidential candidate Francois Hollande (and likely next French president), has vowed to make changes to the treaty.

Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy has already announced his own budget target of 5.8% of GDP in 2012, ignoring the EMU mandate of 4.4% on the way to an alleged 3% in 2013. Rest assured 4.4% will not be met, nor will 5.8%.

Last year's deficit was 8.5% and with Spain heading into a monster recession, 7.0% might be a more reasonable expectation for 2012.

"Naming and Shaming" will not do a single bit of good, but it does make for a good song.

Shame, Shame

Link if video does not play: Shame, Shame - Magic Lanterns

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Congressman Norm Dicks, Ranking member of House Appropriations Committee, Steps Aside Following Allegations by Tacoma Lawyer, Doug Cloud; Corruption and Influence Peddling Explain Why Deficit is Out of Control

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 12:24 PM PDT

I am pleased to report that Republican candidate Doug Cloud has finally brought down Democrat Congressman Norm Dicks, ranking Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Scandals surrounding Norm Dicks are long, and deep. However, it was a Freedom on Information request by Doug Cloud, involving FBI files from the lobbyist PMA Group that finally caused Dicks to step aside.

Here is a bit of background on the now defunct PMA Group:

In return for campaign contributions, PMA group clients received over $200 million in contracts.
In November, 2008 FBI agents raided PMA's offices and removed records of the firm's political action committee and files from some of its employees.
In January of 2011, Lobbyist Sentenced to 27 Months in Prison for Role in Illegal Campaign Contribution Scheme.

Guess who else is in those FBI files.

If your guess is Norm Dicks, your guess is a good one according to Official Wire, in their version of the story One Of America's Most Powerful Congressmen Suddenly Retires.

At the sentencing U.S. District Court Judge T. S. Ellis III called the scandal "one of the most extensive and long-running campaign finance schemes ever," telling [PMA Group Lobbyist] Magliocchetti, "You made this choice for one reason: greed."

This scandal took down Rep. John Murtha, but, miraculously, Norm Dicks skated again.

And it would have likely stopped then and there if not for the tenacity of a Tacoma lawyer and opponent of Dicks by the name of Doug Cloud. Cloud filed a Freedom of Information Act request that the Obama administration denied during the 2010 congressional race to get more of the records.

But Cloud tenaciously responded to the denial with a lawsuit to compel release of records and files pertaining to the FBI investigation of Congressman Norm Dicks.

Powerful, Corrupt Officials Not Easily Dislodged

At long last, and only out of fear of what is in FBI records on the PMA Group, Norm Dicks decided to throw in the towel and step aside at the end of his term.

I supported Doug Cloud in the last election. He was one of only a handful I gave free space to on my blog.

It was not to be. Corruption and power are not easily dislodged.

Doug Cloud Press Release

I am pleased to report Doug Cloud is once again going after the seat of Norm Dicks according to his this press release.

Doug Cloud today announces his candidacy for Congress in Washington's sixth Congressional District. Doug is seeking the position currently held by retiring 18 term incumbent Norm Dicks.

In 2010, Cloud received 42% of the votes cast in his race against Dicks. The 2010 campaign, and its aftermath, ended Dicks career. During the 2010 campaign Cloud hammered at Dicks' frequent practice of rewarding campaign contributors and family members with beneficial legislation. He made the link between Congressional "bailouts" and Congressional corruption. Cloud pinned our economic problems on this type of Congressional arrogance.

"Rewarding your favorites in return for campaign cash is bribery. Allowing people like Dicks to take money from those who earned it and give it to those who didn't has ruined our economy. If Congress picks the winners and losers in our economy, we all lose."

In September, 2011, Cloud filed suit against the Department of Justice, seeking to force release of the agency's FBI investigation files pertaining to Dicks' involvement in the huge PMA lobbying and influence buying scandal. Cloud knew that the Department of Justice position, that the files were not a matter of overriding public interest, was indefensible. The only possible way Dicks could keep the files sealed was to return to private life. On March 2, 2012 Dicks made the only decision he could. His career was done. Cloud explained as follows:

"Dicks was no doubt informed by the Department of Justice that they could not keep the files secret while he was the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee. He had two choices, stay in Congress and wait for the files to be released, or leave Congress and claim there was no longer a public interest in the investigation reports. He chose the latter."

Doug Cloud knows what our country and economy needs to prosper. Our country needs honest leaders who understand that our economy cannot thrive by stealing from the public and rewarding political insiders.

"True wealth comes from ingenuity and work. Why make the effort if Congress is just going to steal it from you? If you let people thrive on their own, we will all thrive together," Cloud said yesterday.

Personal Message From Doug Cloud

I was aware of much of this in advance of the Cloud's press release, and asked for for a couple of statements. Here are a few select quotes.

Hello Mish

The reason I was so persistent on this issue is because this type of corruption is what is really ruining our economy. Selling Congressional votes to the highest bidder leads to economic disaster because our wealth is given to con men and political schemers instead of naturally flowing to those who innovate and create the goods and services the rest of us desire.

The confidence game run on the public by senior members of Congress goes something like this: "Vote for me so I can keep my seniority. If you don't, the federal money spigot will close to this district. You are beholden to me, and don't forget it."

Mr. Dicks was no exception. Today, the type of blatant influence peddling practiced by Dicks, can no longer be tolerated. The economic injustice of bailing out failing businesses on the backs of productive citizens and businesses has nearly brought this country to its' knees.

Corruption and Blatant Influence Peddling is Why Deficit is Out of Control

Doug Cloud is correct. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, no one is served by those taking bribes for votes.

It's time to put an end to corruption and vote buying. Please Support Doug Cloud for representative of Washington State U.S. Congressional District 6, Tacoma and the Olympic Peninsula.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

duminică, 11 martie 2012

The Web Developer's Interactive Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 02:13 AM PST

Posted by Ray Grieselhuber

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A couple of months ago, I came across Danny Dover's excellent Web Developer's Cheatsheet for SEO. It was great for web developers whether or not they had experience with SEO because there is inevitably something that you end up Googling if you don't use it on a daily basis.

After spending a little time with Danny's cheatsheet, I realized that I wanted something interactive so that I could play with the different snippets it offered. So, I decided to build an interactive cheatsheet that lets you enter in the values for the page title, keyword, URLs for links, etc. and would automatically populate the relevant tags for your HTML document.

The finished product is the Web Developer's Interactive Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph. (Finished may be too strong of a word because there is more that I'd like to do with it. :-) ).

Web Developer's Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph

In addition to the traditional metadata recommendations included in pretty much every SEO guide, I wanted to also make sure people had an easy way to start including Open Graph tags on their pages. Ensuring that these tags are set up and structured correctly has a big impact on the shareability of your content across social networks, especially Facebook. This, in turn, has an impact on SEO. So, in the cheatsheet, I also automatically generate correctly formatted Open Graph tags.

So, the way it works is this: you specify the desired values in the form at the top of the page. Some of the fields, such as title and meta description have a character counter that automatically decrements as you enter your text. This gives you a simple way to ensure that you're exceeding the recommended characters for each one of those fields.

I've also been using this tool to explain to beginners how to set up metadata and the importance of optimizing for search engine crawlers and social sharing.

Once you've set up your fields, just scroll down and copy-paste the metadata you want into your own HTML document.

Here is an example of the HTML tags that are generated:

Cheatsheet SEO Tags

And some sample Open Graph tags:

Cheatsheet Open Graph Tags

There are few things that didn't make it into this original release, but things that I plan to add soon. These include:

More explanation on each of the fields / tags
Ability to download a boilerplate HTML5 document populated with your data
More explanation around other related topics such as setting up redirects, etc.

I'd love to hear from people with suggestions for improving this tool. Thanks for checking it out!