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miercuri, 16 februarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Your Profile Just Got a Whole Lot Snazzier

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:33 AM PST

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
Screenshot of a Public Profile

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
Comments on new profiles

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.

Screenshot of Earning MozPoints

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!

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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
Smashing Magazine's Tweet about the beginner's guide

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
Rand's Tweet response

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
Beginner's Guide in the SERPs

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
Traffic for Beginner's Guide

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!

Bitly Data

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!

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Raven SEO Tools Review – Getting Started With Keywords Graywolf's SEO Blog

Raven SEO Tools Review – Getting Started With Keywords

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:44 AM PST

I’ve been spending some quality time with Raven Tools, and I thought I’d turn it into a tutorial series to help you get more out of using the tools as well.

I’m going to assume you’re starting from scratch here; if you’re not, just skip the steps as needed. The first thing you need to do is set up a profile. A profile allows you to keep “related” sites together. For example if you had 3 travel sites and 3 gadget sites, I would set up two profiles–one for travel & one for gadgets. If you have client work and your own sites, you can divide it that way as well. Just think of it as a big drawer in a virtual filing cabinet. For this tutorial, I’m going to be using one profile for this website. After you have named the profile, it asks you to enter the domain and choose which search engines you want to track rankings on

Raven Tools Website Setup

For this tutorial I’m going to do things manually, but you can feel free to use setup wizard if you like. Once that’s done, I like to hook in Google analytics. You do that under the analytics tab. If you are logged into Google Analytics, the account will show (sorry about the redaction); if not, it will promptyou to log in. Then you will choose which site from that Google profile it should use.

Raven Screen Analytics Setup

If everything worked, you should see your analytics data which looks something like this:

Screen Analytics Data

f your website has been running for a while, there will likely be some keyword data. You can access it by pressing the “keyword” link at the top of the page. In the lower part of the page you will see keywords you already rank for. If you would like to track your position for one of the words, click the “add” button on the right.

Raven Keyword Analytics Import

It’s likely you’ll want to track more than one word, but (to keep things simple) I’ll just be using [seo blog] for now. Once I’ve added all the words from my analytics, I want to find some new keywords. I’m lazy … err efficient … so I like to start by looking at what others in my space are doing. For the purpose of this tutorial I’m going to look at Sugarrae.com. So Head on over to Research > Keyword Analyzer and put in the domain you want to scan.

research tab

In a minute or so you’ll see the results, which look something like this:

Keyword Analysis

You’ll notice symbols next to the words. Raven tries to tell you what it thinks those words are. [Advil] for example is a product. [Christine Churchill] is a person. It thinks [internet marketing] is a company (hey it’s not always right), and it thinks [affiliate sales] is a keyword. If I wanted to start tracking my rankings for any of those words, I would just use the “add” link on the right.

Next you’ll want to try the SEM Rush Keyword Tool, which is located under Research > SEM Rush. SEM Rush is a paid keyword tool that’s included with your Raven subscription. What’s nice here is it gives you a a lot of extra data like what the CPC is for adwords (this helps you identify high value or high conversion keywords), traffic volume, number of results, and so on. You can add the words to your tracking report with the “add” link on the right.

SEM Rush Keywords

Next up is the Wordtracker Tool, which is another paid SEO keyword tool included in your Raven subscription. Access this tool by going to Research > Wordtracker in the menu. This works a little differently than the the tools we have looked at so far. It asks you to put in one or more words then gives you back a list of suggested or related keywords. Again you can add them to the tracking with the “add” link on the right.

Wordtracker Raven Tools

Last is the Google Adwords Keyword tool located under Research > Adwords Research. It works the same way the Wordtracker tool does, using one or more seed terms to build a list of similar or related keyword suggestions. It gives you prior months’ volume, last month’s volume, and competition. Again add keywords to your tracking list with the “add” text on the right.

Raven Adwords Keywords

Next you want to head over to the Ranking > Competitors tab and enter in any competing websites. I put those websites in for example purposes only. Let’s not start any Gray hates Rae/Aaron/Rand rumors okay …

Raven Competition

Let’s do one last check of all of the keywords we have decided to track using the Rankings > Keyword tab.

Raven Master Keyword Tracker

Now it’s time to look at where we rank for our keywords and compare ourselves to the competition. You can change competitors using the drop down on the right.

Keyword Ranking

Raven Competition Keyword

The last thing you’ll want to do is add the analytics, keyword, and rank tracking to your dashboard.

Raven Dashboard

There’s a lot more you can do with Raven Tools, which I’ll take a look at in future posts.

To be clear I am a current paying customer of Raven SEO Tools. If you sign up from my link I will get a commission. However I feel that this is a tool that can help you be more productive and make more money, which is why I’m comfortable recommending it. Feel free to try Raven Tools for 30 days for free. You don’t even need a credit card to sign up …

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Raven SEO Tools Review – Getting Started With Keywords

Race to the Top Commencement Challenge

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011

Race to the Top Commencement Challenge

The Race to the Top Commencement Challenge is back and we’re asking public high school students from across the country to tell us how their school is preparing them for college and a career. In return, we'll make sure one high school has a graduation they'll never forget – including a commencement address by President Obama himself.

The deadline for applications is February 25, 2011. Learn more and apply today.

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