Central Perk

luni, 21 martie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Posted: 20 Mar 2011 02:05 PM PDT

One of the first things to figure out for an SEO campaign is who your site is competing against in the SERPs. If you are consulting for a client, just asking what they know about their competitors might not be enough. Many clients will have a good handle on who their business competitors are, but these may differ substantially from the sites ranking for competitive terms. If you are running your own site, or are doing in-house SEO, you’ve probably spent a good deal of time getting comfortable with how strong the site is and for which terms it is ranking well. Either way, a more systematic approach to this preliminary competitive research can do wonders for prioritizing your SEO efforts.

Why Competitive Research?

It is true that competitive research can provide a survey of competitive link building tactics, many of which may be replicable for your own site. But more importantly, competitive research can show you which of your potential strategies is most likely to provide your site unique value, value that your competitors will probably have a harder time getting or which they seem to have neglected so far. For more on the nitty-gritty of competitive research, check Justin Briggs' guide to competitive backlink analysis.

A First Look At The SERPs

We all know what we’re here for: rankings! traffic! And rank is directly related to click through rate. We've all seen the pretty charts from place like Eyetools:

These eye-tracking studies are great for measuring usability, and they make really pretty pictures. But for what we're trying to accomplish here, some more concrete numbers will be useful.

In Kate Morris' blog post about predicting site traffic she cited a source of click-through rates from Chitika which I still use. There are probably more recent studies now; if you have numbers you trust more feel free to use them instead. The click-through percentage drops off very steeply as rank increases—note that the first position has about twice the click-through rate of the second:

Click Through by Rank

It's easy enough to see which sites are in the SERP and which rank higher or lower than your own site—just load up the search page! But often a site will have multiple pages listed in the SERP. So, on a per-search-term basis, I like to add these together per-site. Take the following SERP, which I put in a spreadsheet to make it easier to work with (check out Tom Critchlow's post if you'd like to speed up your own result scraping). The search is "the clash guitar tabs":

So I would say to myself at this point that www.ultimateguitar.com is receiving 51.31% of the traffic for this search query (or 62.73% if I wanted to include tabs.ultimateguitar.com in the figure). On the other hand, www.guitaretab.com, though occupying three places in the SERP as well, is receiving 18.75% of the traffic. Simple enough?

Taking It To The Next Level

This is all very straightforward so far, but also intuitive, simple, and not exceptionally useful. But...

...what if, instead of restricting myself to a single SERP, I was to aggregate data from multiple searches and sum the click-through rate for each domain across these searches? Searches for "the clash guitar tabs" and "pink floyd guitar tabs" are listed below, one atop the other. I've highlighted www.ultimate-guitar.com and www.guitaretab.com for reference:

Using the magic of pivot tables I can then sum these values per-domain (if you need a pivot table refreshed, check out Mike's Excel for SEO guide):

The most powerful domains rise to the top of this list quickly. This is, of course, a very small data set. It is also a market that a few sites have dominated. If you want an interesting data set to practice this method with, try a market with many different brands ("vacuum tubes" works well—"svetlana vacuum tubes", "groove vacuum tubes", "ehx vacuum tubes" and so forth).

Get Creative

Once you've collected ranking data, you can organize it in any number of creative ways to navigate the data more intuitively—and hopefully make the data more actionable. Here is one of my favorite pivot tables, which shows how much strength each domain is receiving from results in each position (rank 1-10) in the SERPs:

This makes it easy to see which sites aren't meeting a certain threshold (e.g. never rank above position five), even though they show up in the SERPs frequently. You can also limit the list of sites in question to those with at least one page in the first page of search results.

Where Do I Go From Here?

There are many ways to tweak this process. You could use only results for hight-traffic terms, or only for long-tail terms. You could throw in a representative sample of both. I also like to get the standard devation from the average for each domain and set a threshold (e.g. any site greater than 2 SDs above the average is a competitor worth looking in to).

I’m sure there will be criticisms of this method based on my disregarding accurate search traffic numbers in my assessment. I know that the more perfect solution would seek out such figures, or other ways of assessing quantitatively how important individual search terms are. In fact, traffic aside, click-through rates can vary widely based on other factors like stacked results, mixed search results with maps and videos and images, and so forth. There is a trade off to be made, though, between the time this process takes and the power of the data it provides.

When I’m looking for a quick overview of the competitive landscape, I want my method to work fast so I can start digging into competitor’s practices and backlink profiles. Does it really matter exactly where my competitors stand against each other? Isn’t it enough to be able to find the top five or ten competitors quickly? I recommend finding the balance of detail and time, that you are comfortable with. A solid ROI, if you will.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Link Building London: Absolutely Remarkable

Posted: 20 Mar 2011 12:14 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

I have attended an extremely large number of SEO-focused events in the past 7 years, planned and run seminars and training myself, contributed keynotes and sessions to major conferences and yet, I believe Distilled's Link Building day in London has just, in my opinion, grabbed the title of "best single day of content" ever at an SEO event.

In the past, I've been impressed in particular by the more expert-level shows like SMX Advanced, SES London and SEOmoz's own PRO Training (now officially MozCon), but this one took the cake. I'm, apparently, not the only one who thinks so:

I obviously can't give away all of the phenomenal tips and content from the day, but I can share a few of my notes:

Martin MacDonald of SEOForums showed the remarkable power of updatable, embedded widgets and how these can be remotely controlled to shift link locations, anchor text, etc. on the fly. He ran a specific experiment to show it off that had the crowd gasping and Tom Critchlow tweeting:
_

_
Wil Reynolds, founder of SeerInteractive explained a tactic his team's put to remarkable use over the years. First, check pages 10+ of the SERPs for your target keyword and you'll often find sites that have been abandoned or largely neglected. Use the top pages functionality from Open Site Explorer or Majestic to find the resources those sites built that earned links, then remake modern, updated versions on your site (or for your client). Now, simply contact the sites/pages that linked to the old version and presto - a huge opportunity for the revitalization of great content and a direct path to links.
Jane Copland, link specialist and SEO extraordinairre at Ayima talked about the problems with aggressive anchor text links, even if they come from good sources. She explained that risk can be mitigated by diversifying with branded anchor text and "click here" style links. Her recommendation, strange though it might seem, is to use the trusted, relationship links for non-optimized anchor text to help build a greater profile of trust. Even good links from partners and completely white-hat endorsements can look suspicious if they constantly use your top keywords as anchors.
Russ Jones of Virante looked deeply into how to leverage classic "linkbait" now that Digg has (mostly) died. His findings with regard to Reddit are remarkable - even a few votes on a medium-popularity subreddit have sent him 35K+ visits (which is as high as Digg in the past). What's more, though links are hard to come by, Facebook shares/likes and Tweets aren't, and these can help with rankings, too.

And there's good coverage from a few bloggers, too:

Link Building Summary 2011 from Mike Essex at Impact Media
Backlink Building at #LinkLove from Andy Morley
Takeaways from LinkLove London by Tom Baldwin

Tickets are still available for New Orleans this coming Friday, but sales close Tuesday, March 22nd around 12 noon Eastern (less than 40 hours away).

I can promise you'll get more value and link building goodness in that one day than anywhere else, and at a great value. I just checked Kayak, and many US cities have roundtrip rates under $400 for a ticket.

p.s. Just to be wholly transparent, while SEOmoz does not benefit financially from these events, we do have a long-term partnership with Distilled. I really do feel that this was the best day of content at a conference I've attended, including ones I've organized. Suppose I'll just have to step up my game :-)

Do you like this post? Yes No

President Obama and the First Family Visit Latin America

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, March 21, 2011

President Obama and the First Family Visit Latin America

Seth's Blog : Reject the tyranny of being picked: pick yourself

Reject the tyranny of being picked: pick yourself

Amanda Hocking is making a million dollars a year publishing her own work to the Kindle. No publisher.

Rebecca Black has reached more than 15,000,000 listeners, like it or not, without a record label.

Are we better off without gatekeepers? Well, it was gatekeepers that brought us the unforgettable lyrics of Terry Jacks in 1974, and it's gatekeepers that are spending a fortune bringing out pop songs and books that don't sell.

I'm not sure that this is even the right question. Whether or not we're better off, the fact is that the gatekeepers--the pickers--are reeling, losing power and fading away. What are you going to do about it?

It's a cultural instinct to wait to get picked. To seek out the permission and authority that comes from a publisher or talk show host or even a blogger saying, "I pick you." Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you--that Prince Charming has chosen another house--then you can actually get to work.

If you're hoping that the HR people you sent your resume to are about to pick you, it's going to be a long wait. Once you understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound.

No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.

• Email to a friend •

•

duminică, 20 martie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Alliance for Main Street (Walmart and Target) Press Amazon on Taxes; In Praise of Amazon
Qaddafi Pledges "Long War"; Photographs of the Wreckage; Usurpation of Legislative Power
Ben Bernnake Ponders Food Prices

Alliance for Main Street (Walmart and Target) Press Amazon on Taxes; In Praise of Amazon

Posted: 20 Mar 2011 06:43 PM PDT

Mom and pop bookstores and other retailers have had enough. They cry foul on Amazon for not collecting state sales taxes. Moreover, Walmart and Target have now entered the battle and have sided with mom and pop against purported evil-doers like Amazon that have an unfair advantage.

The Wall Street Journal reports Retailers Push Amazon on Taxes

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and other large retailers are ratcheting up a political campaign to force Amazon.com Inc. to collect sales taxes, sensing opportunity in the budget crises gripping statehouses nationwide.

The big-box stores are backing a coalition called the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, which is leading efforts to change sales-tax laws in more than a dozen states including Texas and California.

Until now, the group has been largely associated with mom-and-pop stores, spotlighting stories of small toy shops and booksellers who argue Internet merchants that aren't legally required to collect sales taxes enjoy an unfair advantage with shoppers.

"The rules today don't allow brick-and-mortar retailers to compete evenly with online retailers, and that needs to be addressed," said Raul Vazquez, Wal-Mart's executive vice president of global e-commerce.

Amazon has feverishly fought efforts to compel it to collect sales taxes. The Seattle-based online retailer says it complies with the law. Under a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, only merchants who have a physical presence, such as stores, in a state have to collect sales taxes. Amazon currently gathers those taxes in just five states: Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, its home base of Washington, and New York.

U.S. Sens. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, are considering more direct legislation to force online retailers to collect sales taxes, people familiar with the matter said.

Hours after Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, signed the Internet sales-tax law last week, Amazon cut ties with its roughly 9,000 Illinois affiliates to avoid collection there. Amazon took similar actions in Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island after those states passed legislation similar to the New York law, which Amazon is challenging in court.

Wal-Mart, Sears and other store chains publicly offered to work with the Amazon affiliates. A group representing the affiliates estimates they paid $18 million to Illinois in the form of income taxes, and are likely to see that amount drop by 25% to 30% this year.

Targeting affiliates is just one of the tactics retailers are supporting to pressure Amazon.

In states including Texas and Arkansas, store chains are also backing legislation that seeks to make clear that Amazon must collect sales taxes if it controls in-state warehouses through related companies.

Amazon last month said it would close a Texas distribution center amid a tax dispute with Republican State Comptroller Susan Combs, who contends that Amazon owes $269 million in uncollected sales tax because of the facility's physical presence in the state.

"Amazon is choosing to be a bully" by dropping affiliates instead of collecting taxes, said California Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, a Democrat who is carrying legislation supported by Wal-Mart and other retail chains, similar to what became law in New York and Illinois.

I Commend Amazon

I commend Amazon. The real bullies are the states raping taxpayers and handing money over to pubic unions for untenable pension benefits.

Regardless of how you feel about that statement, mom and pop stores are for the most part dead. Ironically, most blame stores like Walmart, Target, and Amazon.

However, If you want to blame someone, blame consumers. They are the ones shopping at Walmart, hoping to save a buck. They are the ones using a Kindle or an iPad instead of buying a book. They are the ones shopping at Amazon.

I happen to think Walmart is a godsend. The country needs lower prices. Walmart provides them. If you disagree, you are free to shop elsewhere. For the record, I generally shop elsewhere, but my vote is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I am outvoted by Walmart lovers but I am with the Amazon lovers.

Affiliates Dropped, Including Me

If anyone is entitled to speak out as to who is the bully is, then I am. Every month I get an affiliate check from Amazon. Rather I used to.

Here are my last three checks.

$214.99
$356.47
$246.62

The average of those is $818.08 or $3272.32 annually. Thus, I expect this move by Amazon will cost me somewhere between $3,000 and $4000 a year.

Do I feel bullied? Yes, I do, but not by Amazon. I feel bullied by California Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner and by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn.

Am I going to stop linking to Amazon? No I am not, unless Amazon service degrades or some other issue props up.

Meanwhile, I will be out $3000 to $4000 annually and Illinois will be out taxes on that amount (multiplied by everyone who feels the same as I do). Thus, instead of Illinois getting any benefit from my affiliation with Amazon, the money will all go to Amazon because I am still going to promote them unless and until I have a reason not to.

Amazon provides excellent service to me (I use them all the time) and I assume they provide excellent service to everyone who orders from my book list on the left as well. That is what matters to me, not $3,000.

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

Qaddafi Pledges "Long War"; Photographs of the Wreckage; Usurpation of Legislative Power

Posted: 20 Mar 2011 12:24 PM PDT

Once again the New York Times leads the way with excellent coverage of happenings in the Mideast and Africa. Please consider Qaddafi Pledges 'Long War' as Allies Pursue Air Assault on Libya

A day after American and European forces began a broad campaign of strikes against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader delivered a fresh and defiant tirade on Sunday, pledging retaliation and saying his forces would fight a long war to victory.

He was speaking in a telephone call to state television, which, apparently for security reasons, did not disclose his whereabouts. The Libyan leader has not been seen in public since the United States and European countries unleashed warplanes and missiles in a military intervention on a scale unparalleled in the Arab world since the Iraq war. On Sunday, American B-2 stealth bombers were reported to have struck a major Libyan airfield.

In a first assessment from Washington, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the first day of "operations yesterday went very well," news reports said. Speaking to NBC's "Meet the Press," he said a no-flight zone over Libya to ground Colonel Qaddafi's warplanes — a prime goal of the attacks — was "effectively" in place and that a loyalist advance on the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi had been halted.

Despite those major setbacks, Colonel Qaddafi said his forces on the ground would win in the end. And he repeated an assertion made on Saturday that he had opened military depots to his supporters and the Libyan people were now fully armed. Instead of an image of the Libyan leader, state television showed a statue of a golden fist clutching a crumpled American fighter plane, a monument to an American strike on his compound in 1986.

Speaking of a "long war," Colonel Qaddafi said: "We will not leave our land and we will liberate it."

In a Field of Flowers, the Wreckage of War in Libya

Please consider In a Field of Flowers, the Wreckage of War in Libya.

Rebel fighters watched burning vehicles belonging to loyalist forces after an air`strike near Benghazi on Sunday. Image by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

The attack seemed to have come out of clear skies onto a field of wildflowers.

Littered across the landscape, some 30 miles south of Benghazi, the detritus of the allied airstrikes on Saturday and Sunday morning offered a panorama of destruction: tanks, charred and battered, their turrets blasted clean off, one with a body still caught in its remnants; a small Toyota truck with its roof torn away; a tank transporter still on fire. But it did not end there.

For miles leading south, the roadsides were littered with burned trucks and burned civilian cars. In some places battle tanks had simply been abandoned, intact, as their crews fled. One thing, though, seemed evident: the units closest to Benghazi seemed to have been hit with their cannons and machine guns still pointing toward the rebel capital.

To the south, though, many had been hit as they headed away from the city in a headlong dash for escape on the long road leading to a distant Tripoli.

"They were retreating," said Col. Abdullah al-Shafi, an officer in the rebel forces, which had clamored desperately for the allied air help that arrived on Saturday. "Soldiers had taken civilians' cars and fled. They were ditching their fatigues."

"This is all France," a rebel fighter, Tahir Sassi, told a Reuters correspondent as he surveyed the devastation on Sunday. "Today we came through and saw the road open."

The monuments to the loyalists' last maneuver were not the victory so often trumpeted in their propaganda. Empty ammunition boxes lay discarded among the flowers. Armored personnel carriers still smoldered alongside wrecked rocket-launchers. Craters pitted the fields, as if there had been multiple strikes, apparently by the pilots of the French warplanes that took credit for firing the first shots in the international, American-backed effort to contain Colonel Qaddafi's forces.

There is much more information in the above articles that inquiring minds may wish to read.

Images of War

Here are a few images from Detritus of War, an excellent slideshow series of 10 images on the allied attack.

A bomb from an allied aircraft exploded among vehicles belonging to forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi during an airstrike Sunday on the highway outside of Benghazi. Credit: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

The air strikes seem to have halted the loyalist advance on the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Rebel fighters celebrated along the highway. Credit: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

A rebel supporter waved the rebellion flag atop a burned tank. Credit: Patrick Baz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Usurpation of Legislative Power

However just this course of action may be, bombing airfields in another country is clearly an act of war. However, only Congress has the power to declare war. For a discussion please consider Declaration of war by the United States

Missing Pieces

What makes this war different from President George W. Bush's war in Iraq is an outright request for action from the Arab League, a buy-in from the UN Security council, a buy-in from neighboring countries, and a request from Great Britain and France.

It is near-miraculous to get a buy-in from Russia and China on this. Five Nations abstained but neither Russia nor China vetoed the action.

However, where where was the debate in the US? How are we going to pay for this? How long will it last? How much can we spend?

Questions abound.

We were not attacked and there was clearly enough time for the president and Hillary Clinton to make the case to Congress and the citizens of the United States.

Slowly but surely, powers granted Congress in the constitution have been steadily usurped by the executive branch. This sad state of affairs applies to Republican and Democratic president alike.

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

Ben Bernnake Ponders Food Prices

Posted: 20 Mar 2011 10:28 AM PDT

It's been a while since my last Sunday Funnies. Here is a timely submission from reader Bill regarding Ben Bernanke, bank bailouts, and food prices.

If you wish to contribute, please do so. The cartoon must be yours, not something you saw elsewhere.

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

Seth's Blog : Idea tourism

Idea tourism

It's possible for a tourist to visit Times Square in New York City, see nothing new or unexpected, and leave the city unchanged.

Same with the Eiffel Tower in Paris or a shopping mall in Dubai. Tourism doesn't always open your mind, but when it works the way it supposed to, it sure does.

Which brings us to the notion of idea tourism.

It's possible to do a drive-by of some of the big ideas of science or politics or technology and see only what you want to see. I don't think there's a lot of point in that. If you want to truly understand Darwin, then go to a lab and do some experiments. If you want to understand a gun lover, go to a shooting range for an afternoon. If you want to see how social networking will actually change the way ideas spread, go use it. Intensely, and with a purpose in mind.

Only when we try the idea on for size and actually use it do we understand it. With more ideas offering visitation rights than ever before, learning how empathize with an idea is critical.

• Email to a friend •

•

luni, 21 martie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Why Competitive Research?

A First Look At The SERPs

Taking It To The Next Level

Get Creative

Where Do I Go From Here?

President Obama and the First Family Visit Latin America

Seth's Blog : Reject the tyranny of being picked: pick yourself

Reject the tyranny of being picked: pick yourself

More Recent Articles

duminică, 20 martie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seth's Blog : Idea tourism

Idea tourism

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

luni, 21 martie 2011

Why Competitive Research?

A First Look At The SERPs

Taking It To The Next Level

Get Creative

Where Do I Go From Here?

More Recent Articles

duminică, 20 martie 2011

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

Subscribe to