As 2010 comes to an end we've got a lot to celebrate at SEOmoz, so today we've decided to take a little break and do something completely silly: we're having a pie eating contest, and you can watch the recording now it live today at noon.
Pie Eating Contest Live Stream
The stream is now over but the video recording is below. We're sorry to those who missed or weren't able to watch the video due to the user limit; we'll make sure that doesn't happen next time. Watch the contest and chat live with other viewers: Noon Pacific Time, Today, Friday, December 10th.
The winner is the person who can eat the most amount of pie before the end of a predetermined song. (The song will be roughly 3 min 14 seconds)
No Hands!
You must get the nod from Christine before moving on to the next pie. (Lord Christine will be the sole judge of whether or not a person is done with their pie.)
All pies are approximately the same consistently and size*
* - Except for Aaron’s pie. He went out of his way to get a Vegan friendly pie (respect!) but chose a Pecan pie (wait what? Please someone explain density and sharp nuts to him ;-p)
I don't know about you, but I have an incredibly short attention span. Well, actually, I do know about you - I read about 1/16th of those articles about human attention spans, until I got bored and watched Conan's rendition of Oprah's secret plan for world domination. Oh, Conan! Now there's a man who knows how to share his content. This week, Rand helps the rest of us figure out how to do the same: create content that's not only interesting, but is easy to read and share. We all love sharing interesting, funny, and topical content (look at me, of all people - I'm sending people to videos of Oprah!), so why not play to that instinct by making your articles, images and pages as easy to share as possible? Rand explains how below!
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Of course, last week's big announcement around Google and Bing sort of saying publicly, yes, we use data from Facebook and Twitter, specifically sharing data, like data, tweet data about links that influences the link graph and influences our rankings in both web search as well as in real time, possibly news search and these types of things. With that announcement, I figured it would be a good time to talk about some of these social sharing types of things.
For a long time, SEOs have been playing a game of putting together content that has the maximum virality. They can be shared across the Web and earn links. We've also been playing that game very well in the social sphere. You could see SEOs were early adopters of social technologies, particularly in the social sharing spaces like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and StumbleUpon and those types of places. Now that's evolved a lot on Twitter and Facebook as well. The interesting thing about this, of course, is that there are some particular things that you can do to tweak and tune and make your content more shareable. That's exactly what we're talking about today. Let's walk through some of these techniques.
First off, content structure and formatting. Similar to when you're crafting link bait kinds of things, you want to make sure that the content that you're attempting to make shareable, that you want that audience to help get out there for you, is easy to consume and universally accessible. This one's very important. What I mean here is that a lot of people are going to be on mobile devices when they're using Twitter and Facebook, Twitter in particular but Facebook a lot too. For that reason, you'll get a lot of likes, shares, retweets -- retweets are very big -- via mobile. That means that that accessibility factor becomes critically important. If you have content that doesn't download fast on mobile, 3G and 4G networks are still not that fast, this could really impair the ability of that content to perform as well as it might otherwise. Certainly if people can't see it on all those devices, or I'm making stuff only for Chrome and it's not as accessible for Internet Explorer and that kind of stuff, again that's going to frustrate some folks as well.
I know this is a little bit western-centric, but because of the language usage particularly by powerful people on Twitter and Facebook, people who have big accounts who can share lots of this stuff and the retweet or reshare ability, you want to have at least, if not originally written in English which is certainly fine, an English version. If you can do that, particularly if you're producing content in other languages, it can be really helpful because it can mean that there's an extra virality from the English language speaking countries, which really dominate at least the Twittersphere today. Facebook is a little more international.
Single page versus multi-page, this is fairly important. When you see a lot of those articles that are on big news sites and they're split into multiple pages, sometimes you will see it perform well, but oftentimes you'll see the print version or the single-page version do well. That's why I really recommend having at least those options. If your CMS or content management system forces you to split it into multiple pages, at least make sure there's that single page option for the social sharing types of people. Make it relatively prominent. That might even be the one you want to seed into the social sharing community so people get that content. Your advertising manager is going to be like, "No, no, no. I want the one with the maximum ad clicks because it really matters." But if you care about SEO, rankings, the maximum number of people sharing it, being branded with it, and those kinds of things, bringing new people to the site, this is the way you're going to want to go. For that reason, you also want to do minimal advertising when possible.
In addition to this content structure formatting stuff, the content that you write, the stuff that you attempt to make valuable and visible in these social sharing platforms can perform particularly well if it's topically relevant and timely. I mean two things here. By topically relevant, I mean relevant to what you do. There's this system that's been going on, almost a meme that's been going around the Web of people, particularly in the SEO field or in the social media marketing field, attempting to put link bait kinds of articles or types of content that has nothing to do with their business, nothing to do with their audience on their websites and just trying to share it to gain this authority or branding. You can see that those really don't perform well. They didn't perform well in Digg or Reddit, and now they're starting to get frustrated users on Twitter who won't share them and Facebook as well. There's that disconnect between, "Wait, why does this exist on this domain?" If people are asking that question or if you think people might be asking that question, probably not topically relevant.
Timely meaning that it has something to do with events that are current. We see that a lot of stuff that gets shared socially has to do with an ongoing conversation in your niche, in the broader social sphere, or in the broader news of the world or the country. Having that timely relevance can help your content spread a lot farther and wider than it would if it were produced six months after the event, after the hubbub has died down around it.
The thing that everyone is talking about now, and I've got pics of that thing, new data about that thing, charts and graphics and this kind of stuff helps a lot. If you're trying to figure out what those hot things are right now, there are a lot of sources that aggregate this type of information. Popurls is a good one because they sort of put everything together from all these places. The news site, Bitly News, which is essentially like a Hacker News clone, but it shows you the things that are most clicked on through Bit.ly links, all types of Bit.ly links, which is huge. It gives you a sense of what's being active on Twitter right now. Twittersphere is similar. You can read things like the New York Times Most Read and Most E-mailed list and a lot of other papers do that. Obviously Reddit, Techmeme, and Memeorandum aggregrate technology and celebrity news. There are tons of these.
If you read these on a regular basis, every day for a few weeks, once a week for a few months, you'll get a really good sense for what kind of content is timely and relevant and gets shared. Without that, I think you're going to really miss out. You can feel that from people who are in the social space, the SEO space, and they try to put this stuff up but they don't have that sixth sense around what's going to perform because they haven't spent the time researching and learning the other things that make it in those worlds.
If you can, I really like doing something new about the new thing. By this I mean essentially if you have a new perspective, that's great. If you have new data, that's even better. If you have new news about it, some new development, something that other people don't know, something that's heretofore been secret, that's the best. That kind of stuff can just go huge around a story particularly if you're doing it right when that story is hot. Something's happening around WikiLeaks and someone has new information about what's happening with their DNS hosting or where they're moving to or what's the founder's legal status and they put it out right when the WikiLeaks story is hot, boom, it explodes. Thousands of people share it, hundreds of thousands of clicks, all that kind of stuff. Three weeks from now when the story's died down, you're not going to get those clicks.
Finally, when we talked about that relevance, it doesn't necessarily need to be relevant to what your business sells, but it needs to be relevant to the audience that would be buying what your business sells or that would be a consumer of what your business does. For example, if you are in the office supply space, and you have content around hiring, there's relevance there. The kind of people who would be buying office supplies maybe have some overlap with that. If you're in the digital camera space talking about new visual design techniques, that has some relevance. When you get outside of that space, you lose that relevance. Once you're in that space, what's great about it is you capture people who will then be branded or remember your brand, and then when they think to themselves, "Oh, I need this type of thing," they'll come back to you for it. This is a great way to do that sort of branding thing. Television commercials and advertising buys and guerilla advertising and guerilla marketing have been doing this for years and years.
Last piece, final one, playing to the psychology of the sharing and social spaces. You want to get in their brain. Make those people feel good about sharing the stuff that you do. With whatever content you have, the title is the thing that matters the most. The title of that content is really going to determine whether it lives or dies. You can have some great content, something that's really interesting, hit on all the stuff I just talked about, but if the title is boring or non-compelling or just doesn't describe the story well in those few words, and remember you've only got a few words in a status update or particularly in a tweet to get that message across. We know that tweets are more shared, more clicked, and more retweeted the shorter they are. Likely the same is true for Facebook status messages. That title has got to rock. Using things like pic, image, chart, or infographic, those words in that title or suggesting that those things are in there means this is going to be very easy for you to consume. You can quickly and easily get through this as opposed to things that are long essays or lengthy videos, that kind of stuff is very time consuming and people who are at work or in their browsing stream or those kinds of things might skip them over and not consume that content instead of click it and share.
The timing is very important not just in terms of what you're publishing but in terms of when you hit that publish button and when you start spreading the social message. Getting things out there when you know your audience is online, hopefully in front of their computers or mobile devices, browsing these social sites in that social mode, that's a great time to hit. That's why you see that spike in some of the data around the science of retweets, right around midday Eastern when the Pacific Coast is waking up and the Midwest is already at work and the East Coast is around hitting lunchtime, that's when you have your maximum number of people online, and you have London and Western Europe ending their day at work. That time there's the most amount of people online, on these social sites, and have that big potential to share.
On Facebook you have this concept of "I Like This" versus "I'm Sharing This." People are going to like the things that they agree with. You're going to post something. It could be humorous. It could be expressing a political opinion. It could be expressing an opinion about a current event. You'll see a lot of likes, but you might not see shares and tweets unless people also think that sharing that thing is going to make them look good.
In the social world, it's all about ego. For that reason, people want to share the things that will make more people want to follow them, that will make them feel, "Oh my gosh, I have to share this with my followers. I have to share this with my friends because then they'll think more highly of me. It'll define who I am as a person. This represents me well." Those types of things, that playing to ego, is critical to being successful in the social space. It's the reason why when you share things that are not just compelling but are going to make more people follow you, then other people will share those again and again and again because they'll think, "It'll make more people follow me too."
All right. Hopefully this is helping to improve your content shareability. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
I use the term internal link hub and link nexus here with some frequency, but I haven’t actually done a post to explain them, to show how/why I feel they are important, and to show how to use them to your advantage. This post should solve that problem.
Simply put, a link hub or link nexus is a concentration of external links to a deep page in your website. It could be one level off the home page or several levels from the home page. IMHO the more link hubs you have, the more natural your website is going to look. Think about it: if you are a search engine, does it make sense that all of the links to a website are going to go to the homepage or does it look more natural if the majority of the links go to the home page but a percentage of links go to other pages? At the far end of the scale are websites like wikipedia, which probably has more links to deep pages than to the homepage.
A secondary benefit of having these deep link hubs is going to be a wider distribution of inbound anchor text. For example, people will link to your homepage with your name, name of the site, name of your company, or primary service. However, people will also link to the internal pages with anchor text that relates more closely to the content of the page. if you were a search engine, which do you think looks more natural: a deep page with 100% focused anchor text like “cheap hotels in las vegas” or anchor text spread amongst “cheap hotels in Las Vegas”, “las vegas hotels”, and “Las Vegas Strip Hotels”.
So what are your link hubs, how do you identify them and how do you use them to your advantage? Hopefully you could pick out your top 10 most linked to pages on your website. But, if you can’t or aren’t sure, here’s a quick and easy way. Go to Google Webmaster Central, go to “your site on the web”, then “links to your website”. You’ll get a page that list the pages on your sites, number of links, and links from source domains. You’re really concerned with the source domain column.
Source Domain Links
Now, a word of caution: just because Google shows a link from a domain doesn’t mean it counts but, unless you have some questionable history, the relationship will be pretty close. The pages that have the most links will generally be your strongest link hubs. However if you have a page that has only a few links, but has them from trusted/well crawled sources, it can be more powerful than a page with more links. Personally I would always prefer fewer links from trusted sources than more links from untrusted sources. Just my two drachmas.
Now that you have identified your linking hubs, you want to make sure you use that incoming link equity to your advantage. Look at those pages and make sure they are linking to other key parts of your website with optimal anchor text from the main body(not the sidebar!) (see how to silo your website, the content and how to silo your website, the sidebar). If the page is an informational page, it’s ok to interlink high level keywords wikipedia style, bit if it’s a commerce page, interlink with caution: usability and conversions are the yin and yang of websites.
If you have looked at your website and have decided you don’t have enough linking hubs and want to build more, what’s your best strategy? Linkbait and social media is the way to go. Create pages with compelling content that people want to link to and promote the content on Twitter, Stumbleupon, reddit, or wherever else makes sense. I have found that pieces with a lot of internal links don’t do as well with social media off the bat, so I wait till the piece has run its course, then I go back and add internal links in. In some cases I have left the URL intact and changed the content entirely, but that’s up to you. I would really caution you against 301 redirecting the URL after the fact because it just throws some funky mojo into mix, and you can never be sure it will always work the way you want.
Lastly, there are some people who are wondering how many link hubs they should have and what’s the magic percentage range they need to shoot for. I’d caution you against playing that game: it just never works in the long term, and it is way to sensitive to algo fluctuations. However, if you are so inclined, read a post from the glory days of Threadwatch (a moment of silence) about the Golden Ratio, including some of the comments.
So what are the takeaways here:
Look at your website’s link profile and identify any link hubs
Make sure you are using your link hubs wisely with internal links
Look for ways to create more link hubs with compelling content or social media content
If successful, add internal links after the social media content has run its course
West Wing Week is your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Walk step by step with the President as he visits Afghanistan to celebrate the holidays with our men and women in uniform, announces a free trade agreement with South Korea, attends a series of meetings at the White House and holds a press conference to answer questions about the tax cut compromise, signs the Claims Resolution Act of 2010, and more.
A Trade Agreement That Works For American Businesses And Workers Ron Kirk, the U.S. Trade Representative, explains the ways that the trade agreement between the United States and Korea will increase exports of American goods and services and support American jobs at home.
Yesterday I read a very good article on Problogger which looked at 10 tips for a flawless link strategy. There’s some great ideas in there for anyone looking to strengthen their website’s reputation in Google.
But… It did lead me to ask the question; does a perfect link profile look too natural?
Obviously everyone wants to aim to do everything perfectly, but the reality is that as close as you might get, you probably still won’t consider it to be perfect. If you think of this from an SEO perspective, even if you’re number one in Google for all of your top ten target keywords – why aren’t you number 2 and 3 as well? What about the other keywords? Where are you in Yahoo? Etc… There’s always room for improvement.
The same applies for link building – a link profile is never complete, it’s always a work in progress – even if you dominate market share in your industry, there’s always that bit more you can do.
But thinking about how link profiles are built up, something you might think is the perfect link profile, Google may consider to be unnatural. So in theory, building high-quality links which boost your website’s credibility, should help to build Google’s trust in you – and let’s face it, it’s not a bad start! But if you’re competing at the top end of Google for competitive keywords and you’re looking for that extra 2% or so to push you forward, perhaps the fact that you have very few nofollow links will appear unnatural to Google and could be the difference between being first and second or third.
Let’s have a quick look at how some UK brands backlink profiles using Open Site Explorer. Clearly these sites will have had at least some sort of link building activity (maybe even Google?!), but I’m basing this on the fact that they are well known brands who should naturally attract links.
So firstly, lets look at Boots which has 8% of its links nofollowed:
Next, it’s Next – with 7% of links nofollowed:
John Lewis has a lower figure, but this still accounts for 2% of their backlinks:
And finally Google UK (who knew they were comment spammers?!) have 7% of all links nofollowed:
So if we agree that all of these sites have strong backlink profiles, which help them to rank highly – perhaps it’s safe to assume that a perfect link profile will not just consist of SEO perfect links.
What do you think? Would this change your link building activity? Do you ignore building all nofollow links, or would you still look to build them anyway?
As 2010 comes to an end we've got a lot to celebrate at SEOmoz, so today we've decided to take a little break and do something completely silly: we're having a pie eating contest, and you can watch the recording now 
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