Central Perk

vineri, 23 decembrie 2011

The difference

Good afternoon --

Earlier this week, it looked like Congress would go home for the holidays without preventing a tax increase that would mean millions of American families would have about $40 less in each paycheck.

But then something pretty incredible happened.

It began when we asked everyone to show us how that missing $40 would affect them and their families. In a matter of hours thousands of vivid, powerful stories from Americans of all ages, all backgrounds, from every corner across the country were pouring in. For some, $40 means dinner out with a child who's home for the holidays. For others it means a tank of gas or a charitable donation. In just two days, tens of thousands of Americans were making their voices heard.

You spoke up. Your voices made all the difference.

Thanks to you, Congress reached an agreement to extend the payroll tax cut. On top of that, vital unemployment insurance will continue for millions of Americans who are looking for work.

Yesterday I had the chance to meet a few of the folks who took to the web to make this happen.

Take a moment to hear what they had to say:

We aren't done fighting for the middle class. When Congress returns, they need to keep working to reach an agreement that will extend this tax cut and unemployment insurance for all of 2012 -- without drama or delay.

That's just the beginning of our work ahead in the new year to put more Americans back to work, restore middle-class security, and ensure that folks who work hard and play by the rules get a fair shot.

More than ever I'm confident that, together, those are goals we can achieve.

Thank you, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays,

President Barack Obama

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8 Things You Can Give Away to Earn Links + Mentions - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 22 Dec 2011 12:54 PM PST

Posted by Kenny Martin

Happy Holidays Everyone! It's that time of year again and Rand gets into the giving spirit with this year's special edition of Whitebeard Friday. Presented here are 8 generous tips that will encourage you to get into the holiday spirit of giving yourself. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below!

Video Transcription

Ho, ho, ho. Welcome to this year's special edition of Whitebeard Friday. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukah. Happy Holidays, whatever you celebrate. Festivus (the "Airing of Grievances"). Whatever you are celebrating this holiday season, I hope you're having a wonderful one. Welcome to the special edition of Whitebeard Friday. Every year I put on this ridiculous getup, and hopefully none of you who celebrate Christmas mind Jewish people like me wearing Santa Claus outfits. I apologize if I've offended anyone. But I have, you can see, drawn a Christmas tree with a Fesitvus pole in the middle and a Star of David. Huh, huh? A little cross-cultural segment there.

All right. This week on Whitebeard Friday I am talking about, I was originally talking about 12, to emulate the 12 days of Christmas, but it wouldn't fit on the whiteboard. So we're doing eight, eight things you can do, you can give away, to earn links and mentions to help your marketing efforts. Obviously, Christmas, the season of giving away. Even when I was a kid, my parents celebrated Christmas. My parents with my whitebeard. I was very, very young. This was like the 17th century. We want to talk today about some of those great methods of things you can give away as part of the holiday season, the giving season, and earn back great things for your marketing.

So, number one, your writing. This is a pretty obvious one, right? When you guest post for someone, when you guest comment, when you leave your written work or allow others to publish it, that earns you links back, links and references back. And I have a pro tip for each of these. So the pro tip here, make a search like this - you see this tiny writing here - "guest author," guest plus author or write or blogger or contributor, if you use that plus the word "blog" or the word "news" or your keywords, you will find posts that contain this stuff. Another pro tip, use Google blog search and Google discussion search. Both of those are great at providing this kind of stuff.

Number two, your videos. See, we're doing a video right now. Do you feel this wonderful video content? The pro tip here is use Wistia. I believe both Wistia and - people are walking by in the SEOmoz offices and think this looks hilarious - use Wistia or I believe Vimeo Pro also does this. When you put your videos up, if you'll notice the embed link for this video in particular, which I think maybe it's in the right-hand corner, that corner, that corner, one of the corners, the embed point will actually point back to your site, which is phenomenally great because it means when other people embed the video, you control the anchor text and the link of where it points back to.

Number three, your product. Whatever it is that you sell, whatever it is that you make, whatever it is that you do, you could have a service, giving that away often earns you links and references in return. Pro tip, be careful of those direct giveaways. If you say, "Hey, here's the product, I want a link back," that can get you into trouble. But if you instead use events, or charity, or sponsorship, or you give it away without a request and ask and people cover it, that's an organic and natural link, an editorial link. That can work for you.

Number four, very similar, your time. Donate and dedicate your time, like me, Father Christmas by helping people out, donating what it is that you do best. If you are a marketer, that could be helping other people with your marketing. If you are a consultant, it could be doing consulting work. If you are helping people in business or you are an expert in a particular realm or product, helping those people do those things, accomplish those things. Finding people who you know have needs in that area and giving it away can help you earn good will, and then that brings links back to your site and references back to your site. A wonderful way to give and receive.

Number five, this is something I hate when marketers don't do this. Give away your contact details. What I mean here is when you are participating out on the Web and you are hoping to earn links and references back, make your contact details public, make them easy to find, make sure that there's not a big challenge here. Make it clear you are open to contributing and helping and participating and that you hope that by doing these things you spread your brand. This will invite people to email you, to tweet at you, to link to you, to reference you when they are seeking contributors to these types of things. Contact details, by the way, also important to make sure that those are easily accessible and findable from your site and anywhere you do participate.

Number six, your photos, your images, or your graphics. The pro tip here, have an images or photos section on your site if you can, especially if you have a large media library, and then make sure it is open to licensing in exchange for a link. You can use the creative comments licensing, you can create your own licensing, you can create little things that make it easy to embed any of your images or any of your graphics and earn that link back. By the way, another pro tip on this, if someone is using your images, or you suspect that they are, use Google's similar images link inside. Here, I'll show you right here. Let's say I have just done a search for an image, and I have clicked on that image. Now you're going to see the image here, and there is a little X, and then Google has a sidebar over here with some links after I have clicked it, and one of those is "similar images." If you click on "similar images," that will show you other images like this one, oftentimes, people who have taken your image but haven't given you credit. You can then reach out to them and be like, "Hey, what's the deal?" Does it look weird having Santa kind of give a . . .

Number seven, your full feed, your full RSS feed. The pro tip here is, especially, this is important to not go partial feed but to go full feed when you're giving RSS because lots of people will republish that, lots of people will reference it, email it, subscribe, etc. Great for marketing. And pro tip, use absolute links. Don't use /blog whatever. Use www.mysite, the full link, because when it gets referenced on other sites, it will point back to you and that link will count and pass value.

Number eight, last but not least, your data. Undoubtedly, if you're doing interesting things in the world of product, of marketing, of customer research, of embedding yourself in a community, you are collecting valuable, super cool data. A great way to do this is to first build a list of likely writers, people who you think would be interested in the data you're providing. This could be white paper kinds of data. It could be research and survey data. It might be data you've generated from all the users of your product or from whatever it is that you're collecting. And then reach out. Before you have it, reach out and ask if they want access. By doing that, you create this wonderful confirmation, because you said, "Hey, Dear Writer, Do you want access to this cool data that we've got? Would you like to share? Would you be interested? Would your customers be interested? Would your readers be interested?" A lot of the time they'll say, "Yes, I would be interested. Please do share that with me." If you instead just reach out and say, "Hey we have this cool data," you get a lot of ignores. But if you first reach out and say, "Hey, Kenny, I know you write on the SEOmoz blog. Would you be potentially interested in some data about the social media marketing field?" Kenny will be like, "Hmm, yeah, that's sounds interesting. Send it over to me." Then you send it over and say, "Hey, we'd love if you could at least tweet or share it, and if you blog about it, that'd be even better." This is a great way of making sure they get your data and then link to you.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this silly edition of Whitebeard Friday. It's been a fantastic year. Hope you have a great holiday, and we will see you again next week. Yes, even between Christmas and New Year's we're going to be doing Whiteboard Friday. See you next week for another edition. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Historical Link Analysis is Here!

Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:38 AM PST

Posted by Samantha Britney

Season's Greetings, fellow Mozzers! As if this month hasn’t been exciting enough with the release of Custom Reports and Branded Keywords, today we have a special surprise for you. You asked for it, and we are happy to deliver. Introducing Historical Link Analysis for PRO!

(Photo credit: Dana Pleasant Photography)

Being able to see your link metric data over time helps demonstrate the effectiveness of your link building strategies. And hey, who doesn’t like to see progress? Read on to see how this new feature works.

Subdomain Link Metrics

This update to the Links section is full of lots of little goodies. Not only are we now storing your campaign link metrics over time, but we have also added Subdomain Link Analysis metrics for you and your competitors.

Historical Data Charts

What matters most in viewing historical metrics is how you are faring against your competition. For each metric, you can view historical data over time in comparison to your competitors. This way you can distinguish between the effects of your hard work to improve your link metrics and fluctuations that affect the entire index.

You can view historical data via the History tab or by using the menu link next to a given metric on the Summary tab. You can also export all historical data to a CSV file.

You may notice that we have made a few additional improvements to the Link Analysis section, including:

adding Total External Links to Root Domain Metrics (to align with what is reported in Open Site Explorer)
moving Link details to a separate tab for better readability
updating the Summary PDF report to include Subdomain metrics

Linkscape Index Updates

Your link analysis metrics will continue to be updated every time a new index is released. With the rollout of this feature we'll now be able to store your data from previous indices as well, starting with data from the October 28th index. However, this data only goes back as far as you campaign does. When you create a new campaign, we'll only begin storing link metrics for you and your competitors from that point forward.

In order to give you the best data, we’re continually improving our Linkscape crawlers and the data they return to the Index. As indices change, it’s possible that your metrics may change as a result of what is included in one index vs. another. This may occur even if a site’s link profile hasn’t changed at all. I encourage you to check out Rand’s Linkscape Index blog posts (released with each new index) to better understand additional factors that could affect your metrics. Best practices indicate that you should always compare your progress against your competitors, versus solely comparing to your past performance.

Let Us Know What You Think

We hope these product updates bring a little cheer to your holiday season. As always, we would love your feedback! Feel free to share your thoughts, or holiday stories, via a comment on this post. For feature ideas you can always share via the feature request forum.

Happy holidays!

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West Wing Week or "#40dollars"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, Dec. 23, 2011

West Wing Week or "#40dollars"

With the holidays in full swing and the countdown clock ticking away, President Obama continued to press Congress for the extension of the payroll tax cut for 160 million working Americans and unemployment insurance benefits for those looking for work. The President urged House Republicans to put aside their political games and pass a bill that garnered overwhelming, bipartisan support in the Senate.

Watch the Video:

SEOptimise

To blog comment or not to blog comment? 65% say YES to blog commenting!

Posted: 22 Dec 2011 06:01 AM PST

Blog comments: quick link building win or spam-tastic black hat method you wouldn't touch with a barge pole?

I wanted to find out what the general consensus was on this controversial topic within the SEO world, so I set out on something of a fact-finding mission to attempt to answer one question: does blog commenting work, and if so, can it be done in a white hat way? (Ok, I guess that's two questions then.)

Let's clarify what we mean by 'blog commenting'
We've probably all left comments on blog posts we've enjoyed or where we've felt we had something to contribute. What we're talking about here is the use of blog commenting purely for the purposes of gaining links – i.e. you wouldn't have left a comment if you hadn't been trying to build a link. That might mean an anonymous blog comment with an anchor text link in true old-school black hat style, or it could mean the more socially acceptable form of an actual contribution to a post but including a link back in the author profile, with your name as the anchor text. Or it could mean a comment linking to a resource on your site because it's relevant to the post in question. Either way, the motivation behind the blog commenting I'm talking about is self-serving, making it ethically questionable in the eyes of many.

Are people still using blog comments in this day and age?
I ran a quick poll to gain a rough idea of what proportion of the SEO community actually use blog commenting as a link building tactic. Here are the results, based on 52 votes:

So, based on this sample size, that's 65% of SEOs saying yes to some form of blog commenting being used for link building. Encouragingly, it looks as though most are doing so using their real identity, but that's still 35% who don't 'do' blog commenting (or at least, won't own to it).

So does blog commenting actually help your rankings?
One could argue that if it didn't work, people wouldn't still be building links using this method. But then, plenty of people still use the obsolete meta keywords tag. Does blog commenting still work, or are the 65% who said they do it wasting their time?

The anecdotal evidence certainly supports the argument in favour of blog commenting for link building. One particularly enthusiastic commenter on the poll said:

"I, and many other people, have ranked pages using nothing but blog comment links.

There’s no opinion in if it works or not – the answer is yes. How *well* it works vs. other tactics, what types of terms it can work for, and if it’s worth the effort of doing manually are other questions entirely.

But, as a sweeping statement – anyone who claims it doesn’t work either… did it wrong, never tried for themselves, or didn’t do enough of it." – Ian Howells

I also asked SEOptimise's very own link building genius Marcus Taylor for his opinion, and he said:

“Blog commenting is something I’ve experimented with considerably over the years and have ranked sites competitively using just blog commenting as a strategy, so I can confidently say that it does work, although it’s certainly not the most effective link building strategy."

Overcoming the obstacles
What are the main obstacles to blog commenting? Do the obstacles mean that it's ultimately an ineffective link building method? Let's take a look:

Perhaps the main obstacle to blog commenting for link building is that many of the comments you make may be filtered out, either automatically by spam software such as Akismet, or manually by whoever approves the comments.
You have to spend time finding blogs to comment on. If you're putting any thought into blog commenting, you may be finding blogs which are relevant to your industry – thus providing links from relevant pages.
You have to take the time to make an actual contribution if you want your comment to be approved. That really means actually reading the post, which can be time consuming.

So is it still worth it? Some surmise that blog comment links, even followed ones, may carry less weight with Google than regular links. However, as Rand Fishkin points out in this useful post on blog commenting, if you leave a helpful enough comment, the author of the post might even edit the original post to include your link in the post itself – and that's a lot better than relying on comment-based links! The bottom line: a helpful response that suggests your link as an additional resource is likely to result in sufficient success to justify the extra time it takes to leave a worthwhile comment.

Blog commenting isn't just about rankings
Those who scream "black hat" at the practice of blog commenting are perhaps forgetting that there are benefits other than rankings. For example, it's certainly helpful in blogger outreach – if you've contributed useful points to someone's blog posts in the past and they recognise your name as someone who knows what they're talking about, you're much more likely to be able to guest post for them. It's also a reasonably effective way of engaging with relevant communities – i.e. your target market.

This is what my Twitter followers had to say about blog commenting…

"Not sure I use it for link building per se, but I do leave them for the engagement side. I encourage clients to engage in communities in that way – would I do it on their behalf? Not unless I really knew what I was saying inside out, as saying the wrong things is more damaging for the brand than any link gain may give." – Peter Handley

"Although I don’t use commenting for link building directly, I do sometimes use it as an early stage of building a relationship with a blogger or particular author as part of outreach projects." – Paul Rogers

Marcus Taylor added, “I think the greater benefit of commenting is to build relationships with the bloggers themselves. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with blog commenting, providing you don’t do the whole spammy anchor text name thing and you do add value to the post. Steer clear of overdoing it or doing it on spammy/irrelevant sites solely for the links and you’ll be fine.”

So from what I've seen, the consensus seems to be: there's still a place for blog commenting – but not the spammy black hat kind. Blog comments can build you valuable links both directly and indirectly, but maximum benefit comes from genuine engagement – communicate what you're interested in and knowledgeable about, and the time it takes will more than repay itself.

Image by Kristina B on Flickr.

Seth's Blog : Firemen, donuts and meetings

Firemen, donuts and meetings

When a building is burning down, fireman coordinate their actions, make decisions and save lives.

They do this without Aeron desk chairs or Dunkin Donuts. They do it without subcommittees, McKinsey studies or input from the boss in another city.

To quote Al Pittampalli, "why bother going to a meeting if you're not prepared to change your mind?" To which I'd add, "Don't bother having a meeting if you're not there to change or make a decision right now."

Somewhere along the way, meetings changed into events where we wait for someone to take responsibility (while everyone else dives for cover).

How would you do it differently if the building were burning down? Because it is.

• Email to a friend •

vineri, 23 decembrie 2011

The difference

8 Things You Can Give Away to Earn Links + Mentions - Whiteboard Friday

8 Things You Can Give Away to Earn Links + Mentions - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

Subdomain Link Metrics

Historical Data Charts

Linkscape Index Updates

Let Us Know What You Think

West Wing Week or "#40dollars"

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : Firemen, donuts and meetings

Firemen, donuts and meetings

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vineri, 23 decembrie 2011

Video Transcription

Subdomain Link Metrics

Historical Data Charts

Linkscape Index Updates

Let Us Know What You Think

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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