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miercuri, 8 august 2012

Is Your Linkbuilding Working? How to Easily Check Using Webmaster Tools and a Pivot Chart

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 02:15 PM PDT

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.

Is all that time spent doing linkbuilding helping you acquire links faster than you would acquire them without linkbuilding? This guide will help you determine if the rate with which your site is acquiring links is any different than the rate your site acquires links naturally.

Pulling the Data

To start this process you will need to have already verified your site in webmaster tools. Once verified, navigate to the Traffic>>Links To Your Site section of webmaster tools.

Webmaster Tools Links to your Site

From here you will see three sections: who links the most, your most linked content, and how your data is linked. Click "More>>" under the who links the most section.

Who links to your site

Once you have clicked for more, you should see a list of domains that are linking to you, the number of links, and the number of linked pages. What you will also now see is the ability to download the latest links.

Download the latest links from webmaster tools

While I love Google docs, for this example I recommend downloading a CSV and using Excel.

Select download format of CSV

Using the Data to Identify if You are Picking up Links Any Faster than Before You Started Linkbuilding

You should now have a CSV file open in excel with two columns, one with the linking domain and the other with the date the link was acquired (or spotted by Google). The first thing I recommend is formatting the data as a table.

What you are going to do now is split up the list of links into pieces based on the date you or your SEO company started doing linkbuilding. If you stared linkbuilding six months ago, select the last six months of links and cut and paste them in a new column.

Copy to new Column

This New Column will be the links after you started linkbuilding (or hired someone to do linkbuilding) The next step is to create another new column that has a date range equal to your date range for your "linkbuilding" column. We can call this column "Just before Linkbuilding". In this column you will cut and past the links from the original "links" making sure that you do not get out of position vertically within the list.

Link Columns

You now have three columns of links all in alignment with their corresponding dates. It's time to turn this data into a Pivot Chart.

Creating a Pivot Chart

With you data all setup you can now insert a pivot chart.

creating a pivot chart

Pivot Chart Settings

You should now see a blank pivot table and chart. In the lower right corner of the screen you will see an area that has four sections ( Report Filter, Column Labels, Row Labels, Values) Drag the items from the Pivot table Field list into each of these boxes as you see here.

Pivot Setup

As you do this you will notice your pivot table and chart come to life. The next step is to group the dates by month to make the pivot chart a bit easier to read. To do this, within your pivot table, right click on any date and select group.

Group Pivot bt Date

Now Select Years and Months and hit Ok.

Group pivot Table by years and Months

You should now have a nice easy to read chart with your links broken into three sections and organized by year and month. Mine looks like this:

Link Graph without Trendlines

The next step is to add trendlines to each of the three sections (data series), to really identify any changes in link acquisition rate. I find the easiest way to do this is to right click on one of the columns in the chart and select "add trendline".

Add trendline

You will be presented with a set of trendline options. There are two options I suggest changing, the first option is I suggest selecting set Intercept, this will result in all of your trendlines intercepting the x axis at 0, the second recommendation is setting the trendline color to match the series you are creating this trendline for, it just makes it easier to look at.

Set Intercept trendline color options

The Results

You now have a chart that clearly shows the liner trend with which your site is acquiring links broken down into segments based on your time linkbuilding (or hiring someone to do linkbuilding), just before linkbuilding, and historically before that. If you don't see a change in slope between the trendline for before linkbuilding and during it, something is probably not working with your linkbuilding campaign.

Link Acquisition rate Graph

Note: for greater accuracy, you would NOT set intercept to zero and you would compare the slopes of the lines, but for a quick view and more organized graph, this gets the job done.

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An Administration-Wide Response to the Drought

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, August 8, 2012

An Administration-Wide Response to the Drought

Throughout much of the country, communities are struggling with one of the worst droughts to strike the U.S. in decades. And President Obama has directed the federal government -- from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the Army Corps of Engineers -- to provide assistance to farmers, ranchers, and small businesses wrestling with this crisis.

The President has described this as an "all-hands-on-deck response." Yesterday, he said, "We're going to continue to solicit ideas from state and local organizations, faith-based organizations, not-for-profit groups, the private sector, and most of all, the farmers and ranchers that are directly impacted, to find additional ways that we can help -- because when there’s a disaster like this, everybody needs to pull together."

Learn more about the administration's all-hands-on-deck response.

President Barack Obama meets with the White House Rural Council to discuss ongoing efforts in response to the drought, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Aug. 7, 2012. Among those attending with the President were, from left, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Karen Mills, Administrator of the Small Business Administration. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

How and What to Write for Twitter

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 05:13 AM PDT

It’s only 140 characters, so it should be easy – right? Well, not necessarily. Twitter’s ‘microblogging’ approach has become well established in the last few years, and many companies are finding it an excellent way to keep in touch with customers, while reducing the administrative burden of doing so. After all, typing 140 characters can be much faster than typing out a full email – as long as you know what you’re saying.

A New Format

Twitter isn’t just about saying the same things in fewer characters – it differs from everyday language in some very specific ways. Back in 2009, Oxford University Press looked at almost 1.5 million random tweets, and found some interesting distinctions between their content and that of text in general usage. For instance, unsurprisingly, each sentence in a tweet is less than half as long as an ordinary sentence, at 10.69 words compared to a ‘normal’ average of 22.09 words.

Each tweet contains an average of 1.4 sentences, or 14.98 words in total, and verbs – ‘going’, ‘getting’, ‘watching’ and ‘eating’ – are particularly popular in the top 100 words used on Twitter. All of this means you need to think carefully about what you type – every character counts, and you’re working in a whole new language, even if the words it uses are familiar to you.

Learning Brevity

Learn to be brief.

That doesn’t mean using text-speak or missing out articles (‘a’, ‘the’), conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’) and modifiers (such as adverbs). Rather, you should learn to order your thoughts, pick out the key point, and write it as plainly as possible. Don’t just use fewer words – use shorter words – and trim the unnecessary text completely.

It helps to be assertive, as adding doubt to a sentence usually increases the character count too. And if you’re hoping to be retweeted, leave a good 20 characters or so free for retweeters to add their own comments if they wish.

Twit Tricks

Make sure you know about Twitter – how it works, what features you can include in a tweet, and so on. Know that, if you place a person’s @username at the beginning of a tweet, it becomes a ‘mention’ and will usually only be seen by that person, and by anyone who follows both of you. For publicly visible tweets that include a mention, make sure the username is later in the tweet, or add a full stop before the @ sign (be careful with this though, as some users don’t want other people’s mentions littering their timeline).

Spend some time familiarising yourself with hashtags, how they work, what happens when you click on one, and where they usually go in a tweet (almost always at the end, but there are some exceptions to this). The more you learn the tricks and techniques of Twitter, the more you can use them in your own tweets, increasing your arsenal of options when it comes to getting your message across in the fewest characters possible.

Be Yourself

There are few things more annoying to regular Twitter users than dry, bland, corporate accounts using what is meant to be a social network as a marketing tool. You should try to avoid this approach – instead, make engaging with your customers your priority, and let that boost your sales naturally. Let your customers guide you in terms of what to write – run searches for your company name or industry area, and start replying to people in positive, helpful terms.

Often, Twitter works better as a customer service platform than for direct sales, so if you find it better for customer retention than for acquiring new customers, recognise the value of this and make sure your tweets reflect it on your account’s timeline.

Image credit: Slava Baranskyi

Seth's Blog : 2 new articles

What's your average speed?

My car informs me that I've been averaging 26 mph over the last month. Much lower than I would have guessed.

It's low not because we don't drive on the highway, it's low because there's also a lot of time spent sitting still in traffic and at lights.

When we remember our journey and our work, the highlights are the fast parts, the thrilling moments, the peaks (and the valleys). It seems, though, that we spend most of our time in preparation, or circling, or considering. Probably worth investing some effort into our performance there, and enjoying those parts as well.

• Email to a friend •

Analogies, metaphors and your problem

Innovation is often the act of taking something that worked over there and using it over here.

Your problem, whatever it might be, probably has a solution somewhere in the world. And your organization is probably stuck because they don't know what to do, and more important, don't have the guts to do it.

An example in the real world that's precisely about your particular problem, then, is fabulous because it not only shows you what to do, it gives you the confidence to do it.

Louis CK had the same problem of many comedians--too much time, not enough money. His pay-on-the-honor-system internet special was a huge success, and of course, dozens of comedians (ostensibly creative risk takers) rushed to follow in his precise footsteps.

What were they waiting for? After all, Radiohead did a similar thing years before Louis did. Of course, they make music and he makes comedy.

"Oh, that's a fine example of how a company in the hockey stick industry grew, but we make lacrosse sticks. Do you have any case studies of how a lacrosse stick company has succeeded?"

If you're waiting for a proven case study, directly on point, you're going to wait too long.

The skill, it seems, is having the desire and the guts to seek out examples by analogy instead of insisting on being a follower of someone with guts.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 8 august 2012

Is Your Linkbuilding Working? How to Easily Check Using Webmaster Tools and a Pivot Chart

Is Your Linkbuilding Working? How to Easily Check Using Webmaster Tools and a Pivot Chart

Pulling the Data

Using the Data to Identify if You are Picking up Links Any Faster than Before You Started Linkbuilding

Creating a Pivot Chart

The Results

An Administration-Wide Response to the Drought

How and What to Write for Twitter

How and What to Write for Twitter

Seth's Blog : 2 new articles

What's your average speed?

Analogies, metaphors and your problem

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

miercuri, 8 august 2012

Pulling the Data

Using the Data to Identify if You are Picking up Links Any Faster than Before You Started Linkbuilding

Creating a Pivot Chart

The Results

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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