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luni, 16 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Posted: 15 May 2011 12:11 PM PDT

Good link builders are a special breed of SEOs. There are a lot of solid SEOs in the industry, but effectively building links is much different from keyword research, copywriting, and technical analysis. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes an effective link builder.

Whether you’re an SEO looking to improve your own skillset or a manager looking to hire a new link builder, these are the characteristics of an effective link builder.

Internet Culture

SEO is one of the few industries where my history as a competitive video game player, an epic geared raiding Warlock, forum admin and hacker became a marketable skill.

I’m an effective marketer online, not because I have formal marketing training, but because I understand online communities intimately.

A link builder should keep on top of memes, read Reddit daily, use StumbleUpon, engage on Twitter, and read Hacker News. They should follow in-depth analysis about these communities.

Internet Culture

Creativity is one of the things that is difficult, maybe impossible, to teach. It can be encouraged through culture and environment, because everyone has some level of creative genius, but creativity is something I’d hire for.

SEO, especially link building, is moving closer to being inbound marketing, which is starting to become difficult to distinguish from pure traditional marketing. Creativity is a driver of holistic marketing strategies.

The creative process can also be inspired.

At Distilled, we have a culture and structures in place which help inspire creativity. It’s important to create boundaries and modes of thinking that help creativity. Having the ability the stop, separate, drink a beer, and invest full mental power allows your brain to free itself up to the creative process.

Analytical Skills

Creativity isn’t enough for an effective link builder. Technical chops are also a requirement. Distilled carries resident math, computer science, and engineering majors. Prior to leaving college to pursue a career in SEO, I was studying engineering and worked at Vanderbilt where I did pharmacology research.

Analytical skills are indispensible as a link builder. A link builder should have a basics understanding of data analysis to conduct competitive link analysis, to dig deep into a website’s information, to perform research, and bring insights out of large sets of information.

This also includes skills on using the right tools, such as Open Site Explorer, Excel, and Google Analytics.

Analytical skills allow a link builder to do two things really well:

Scale processes by evaluating data effectively.
Recognize changes and trends, which can be reapplied to your marketing efforts.

Technical Skills

Although a non-technical link builder can build links through the process of business development, content creation, outreach, and PR; they don’t have the capability to develop products or agile tools without leaning on a team.

Technical Skills a Link Builder Should Have

Intermediate knowledge of (X)HTML/CSS
Basic understanding of at least one modern programming language (no need to code, but hack at least)
How to build agile tools in Google Docs
Ability to upload files via FTP
Ability to execute 301 redirects using .htaccess and how to create robots.txt files
Sufficient coding skills to “get” tools like Firebug

I agree with Dan Cristo that every SEO should have a side project, and I like to see this in the form of a website where they’ve done at least a basic level of code / design tweaking.

Sociable Geek

A link builder is not the same as a technical SEO. The SEO who loves indexation and crawl analysis may absolutely hate talking to people. A link builder must be comfortable talking and engaging with complete strangers.

A sociable geek is the valuable combination of the introverted developer and the extroverted sorority girl.

I believe people like Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds are the epitome of sociable geeks.

I do believe being sociable is a skill you can learn. By nature, I’m exceptionally introverted, so I find people describing me as an “affable, personable search marketer” a bit odd. I’ve improved my skills as a link builder by constantly presenting, facing clients as often as possible, going to networking events, and talking to strangers on the bus (this is actually true). Reading books also helps. I personally enjoyed reading Never Eat Alone and The Exceptional Presenter.

Sales Experience

Few job experiences taught me more about link building than the three months I worked in-house as an internet marketing coordinator and was placed into the sales department. I worked on a 9 person cold calling sales team and was exposed to their tactics and culture during my time working with them.

Manual outreach is not too different from cold calling and business development.

Recommended Sales Reading for Link Builders

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Ingenuity

By ingenuity, I mean something different from just creativity.

Ingenuity is intellectual hustle.

Ingenuity allows link builder to create well thought out, systematic and clever solutions. Ingenuity is seen in careers like scientists, engineers, artists, developers, and musicians. I relate this with INTP, INTJ, and ENTP personality types.

Ingenuity leads to agile tools, scrapers, and custom search engines. Link building ingenuity leads to building indexes of the internet and scalable link building tools. Effective link builders are willing to intellectually hustle to solution.

Hustle

A link builder isn’t just placing links on websites, they’re building businesses. They’re creating the differential between a business and its competition. As a link builder, you should be bringing hustle to your work every day. A link builder with hustle can dominate large brands and companies with large budgets by simply outworking them.

Enormous Talent is Not Enough
(Gary's language is a bit flavorful, but great video on hustle)

If any of this sound like you, I want you to come work with me at Distilled in Seattle. We’re hiring. You can also connect with me on Twitter.

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Photostream: Behind the Scenes in April

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, May 16, 2011

Photostream: Behind the Scenes in April

Pete Souza, Chief Official White House Photographer and Director of the White House Photography Office, releases a new series of behind-the-scenes photographs from the last two weeks of April 2011.

View the slideshow.

President Barack Obama shakes hands with a young girl after arriving at Miami International Airport in Miami, Fla., April 29, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Do you know someone like this?

Good morning,

Last year I asked the public to help identify outstanding Americans I should consider for the Citizens Medal, the nation's second-highest civilian honor. After receiving more than 6,000 nominations, I invited 13 outstanding Americans to the White House to receive the medal and be recognized for their service.

It's time to do it again.

Like last year, we're looking for Americans who have performed exemplary deeds of service outside of their regular jobs and provided inspiration for others to serve. You can view the full criteria and get started on a nomination here:

Now I know there are thousands of citizens out there who meet these criteria -- I read their letters every night, and I meet many of them in my travels around the country. I also know that many times their contributions go unrecognized. The 2011 Citizens Medal is a chance to recognize the everyday heroes in your community.

Here are a few examples of Citizens Medal recipients from last year.

Betty Kwan Chinn was homeless as a child in China and became mute. When she came to America, Betty found her voice and her calling. Today, she provides meals to the homeless in her community twice a day as expressions of gratitude to a welcoming nation.

Susan Retik Ger is a widow who lost her husband on 9/11 who found cause in educating and training Afghan widows and their children.

George Weiss, Jr. is veteran of World War II who founded the Fort Snelling Memorial Rifle Squad, a group of over 125 volunteers who have performed final military honors at over 55,000 veterans' funerals.

Their stories are powerful reminders of the impact an individual can have on his or her community and on the world. You can watch them tell their stories in a video gallery on WhiteHouse.gov:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/citizensmedal/2010

If you know someone like Betty, Susan or George, please take a moment to nominate them for the 2011 Citizens Medal before May 30.

Sincerely,

President Barack Obama

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Seth's Blog : The future of the library

The future of the library

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I want paper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

• Email to a friend •

duminică, 15 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs

Posted: 15 May 2011 06:07 AM PDT

Posted by Tom Anthony

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.

Faced with a new client, and having established a list of keywords they need to target, you want to evaluate the competition to find out what sites are dominating the SERPs for these keywords. However... being an SEO you're a busy guy (or gal), and you need it done right now. I've built a Google Docs tool to automagically do exactly that and this post will walk you through it.

The basis for this tool comes from a report in this linkbuilding post on YOUmoz which contained a neat little 'SERP Saturation' report. I don't know how Stephen made his snazzy looking report (he's now shared a few details in this comment), but in response to a few people asking about his I thought I'd put together a tool. Here is Stephen's report:

SERP Saturation Report

Cool, eh? We are going to produce something very similar, albeit not as pretty. We will automatically pull ranking data and tie into the Linkscape API to pull in some helpful metrics.

1. What does the report show?

So, what's the report all about? It is a pretty standard report, and most SEOs will have put together similar reports in their time. It shows which domains are dominating the results pages for the specified list of keywords. It is an excellent way to quickly see who the main players are, and see a few metrics for them.

Ours will be sorted by the cumulative number of times a subdomain has appeared in the top 10 of the search results over all the keywords we specify, and will display the mozRank, Domain Authority and Linking Root Domains for each. We'll show just the top 10 competitors in our report.

You can just duplicate the Google Docs spreadsheet I provide below, and change almost any of this to add, modify or take away as per your needs.

2. How do you configure it?

You must configure it the first time you use it:

1) If you've not yet done so, get a SEOmoz API key. Its free!

2) Open the Google Docs spreadsheet. In File menu select 'Make a copy' so you have a version you can edit (call it "Report Template" or such).

3) Go to the 'Config' sheet at the bottom, and enter your SEOmoz API details.

4) If you'd like to change the template for which Google URL to do (it defaults to UK for me), you can do that here too.

3. How do you use it?

Open your report template spreadsheet you just made.

1) On the config tab, paste up to 50 keywords, one per row, starting at cell B7 (its indicated).

2) Open the 'Report' sheet.

3) Now select 'Make a copy' and give it a name ("Client X Report" or whatever). This step is *essential* or the fields will not update properly (I'm working on making this not necessary - any clues?).

4. What should you see?

You should see a snazzy little report:

SERP Competitive Report

It shows everything I promised, and more even:

SERP Competitive Report Graph

A colourful and interactive, albeit it slightly wonky, graph! What more could you want?!

5. Under the hood

You don't need to read this section if you are neither interested in how it works or need to edit it at all. Besides which, I'm mostly just going to refer you elsewhere! A big shout out to Tom Critchlow, whose prior work contributed heavily to this little tool. Firstly, you need to read:

How To Build Agile SEO Tools Using Google Spreadsheets

Which introduces how to scrape the SERPs for ranking data. I modified what Tom did slightly as I wanted a list of subdomains, rather than pages, so there is a bit of string cropping (and fudging!).

Next you need to read Ian Lurie's post (which Tom also helped with):

Linkscape + Google Spreadsheets. Together, at last.

Again, this I also edited. I changed the code around quite a bit, which you can see in the script editor. You end up with a function you can enter into a cell:

=getLinkscapeData(A1, 1)

The A1 is a cell reference to a URL, and the 1 is a dummy parameter to prevent annoying caching issues.

For a look at the full code for the Linkscape API interface, and some pointers on how to modify it to suit your needs I've put up a separate post on Using the Linkscape API with Google Docs, which includes a simpler example spreadsheet to try the code out with.

The rest of the spreadsheet is a few simple bits to filter and cumulate the necessary bits and pieces, along with a few tricks to try to sidestep some bugs in Google Apps. Nothing in the sheet is protected (there are a fed hidden columns) so you can take a look at the workings. If you have specific questions, post them in the comments and I'll try my best to answer.

This was my first real foray into Google Docs, so it might not be particularly elegant. Also the document seems to have trouble updating sometimes - if anyone has a solution that would be great. In the meantime, if you just 'Make a copy' it seems to force an update.

6. Wrap up

Ok, it isn't in depth analysis, but if you have a keyword list, and want a very quick peek at what domains are players, and their general stats, this tool gives you a quick and dirty look. Most importantly - it is free and open, so you can tweak it to your hearts content.

Questions, comments or suggestions are very welcome - post below and I'll get back to you.

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Seth's Blog : An end of magic

An end of magic

Arthur C. Clarke told us, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Head back to the 1800s with a Taser or a Prius or an iPad and the townsfolk will no doubt either burn you at the stake or worship you.

So many doors have been opened by technology in the last twenty years that the word "sufficiently" is being stretched. If it happens on a screen (Google automatically guessing what I want next, a social network knowing who my friends are before I tell them) we just assume it's technology at work. Hard to even imagine magic here.

I remember eagerly opening my copy of Wired every month (fifteen years ago). On every page there was something new and sparkly and yes, magical.

No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we're missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It's not that there's no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It's that many of us can already imagine it.

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luni, 16 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Photostream: Behind the Scenes in April

Do you know someone like this?

Seth's Blog : The future of the library

The future of the library

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