There are a variety of tools and techniques recommended for SEO keyword research, from the free to the expensive, from the well-known to those that are almost kept a secret. However, there’s one source of keyword ideas which is often overlooked: the customers (and potential customers) served on a daily basis.

Let’s get sidetracked for a moment: I’ve lost track of the number of people at agencies who have been asked the question "If you’re so good at SEO, why don’t you rank for ‘SEO in New York’?" (Or wherever the agency is based.)

The answers vary, but one important thing is almost always the same: when you look at the off-line inquiries, people rarely phone up an SEO agency and say "Hello, I’d like you to perform some SEO for me, to cover a variety of tasks including keyphrase research, on site recommendations and link building" – the phone call is more likely to begin with "Hi there, er, I have a website where I sell my widgets, but I want to sell more, and I think I need to promote the site better online. Someone said there might be stuff you could do to help me?".

To mine this rich source of keywords, you want to teach your front-line staff to spot the ‘keyphrases’ that are embedded within the first three or four statements the enquirer makes, such as ‘sell more online‘ or ‘promote my website‘.

Your new, killer Keyword Research Tool

Get Your Hands Dirty

Of course, you don’t need to be a fashionable new industry like search marketing to make this work for you.

Let’s say you work for an auto garage. One of the most popular services you offer is tire balancing – it noticeably helps improve a vehicle’s driving experience, but it’s not too expensive (though it has good margins). The page on your website is well targeted towards ‘tire balancing’ and ranks fairly well in your area, but doesn’t receive many visits or have a great conversion rate.

You head down to the garage and ask the mechanic how many tire balancings he’s done recently.

"We’ve had three in just this morning", replies the helpful greasemonkey.

"And they all came here because they know we do tire balancing?" you ask, naively.

"Aw, no – all three just said their steering wheel was vibrating when they were on the freeway, so it had to be the balance was off," he replies.

You’ve heard what you needed to, and without another word you race back to the office, and update the page. The new title reads "Steering wheel vibrating? We’ll fix it in 1 hour with tire balancing" and the rest of the page is updated too. You not only start to receive more traffic, but it converts better as well.

Showing staff – whether they are receptionists, shop assistants, hard working mechanics or professionals – the value of spotting these keywords will help you gather a rich source of new targetable ideas, and it’s one that your competitors won’t be able to get to.

Keyphrase research? Oooh, that’s gonna cost ya….

Next stop: New Keyphrases

You can also go one-step-removed to get keyword ideas.

National Express are a UK-wide coach service (a little like the Greyhounds in the US) that get you from A to B more slowly and much more cheaply than taking the train. Their site targets terms such as ‘coach trip from Bath to Newcastle’ etc.

However, if I were them, I’d be calling the travel agents who have made bookings on behalf of customers, to find out what people asked for, when the booking ended up with a coach trip being the right answer. It’s possible that phrases such as ‘overnight journey to Newcastle’ or ‘cheap way to get up North’ will have actually come up in conversation, and the agents have then recommended a coach trip.

These phrases should then definitely be considered for targeting on the site.

Loitering with Intent to Research

One final example, from a conversation overheard in a garden center, between a customer (played by a middle aged female, looking lost) and the sales assistant (an underpaid college kid, looking increasingly confused):

• Customer: Hi, where could I find a mopsy?
• Assistant: I .. I’m sorry ma’am?
• Customer: You know, the thing I can screw to a wall to grow plants up?
• Assistant: Do you mean a trellis?
• Customer: Ah yes! I knew it was the name of one of my daughter’s rabbits.

If I worked for an online garden supplies website, I’d have immediately made a note to write a blog post about ‘How to Grow Plants up a Wall.’ I also think I’d have spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around to listen to what else people were asking for by description or by describing their problem, rather than searching for an item by name.

Whatever your niche, see if there’s a place you can hang out to get the opportunity for this kind of real world keyword research.

It’s Search Marketing

It’s been said many times that a significant part of sales and/or marketing is to solve each customer’s problem. This is just another way of getting you close to that goal, and bring you new business at the same time.

CC Photo Attribution:

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Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics – all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing.

The post includes real screen shots from Google Analytics (click any of them to enlarge) but the sites and data have been anonymized.

Target Your Target Terms

Remember that post about building a page with perfect keyword targeting? SEOmoz wasn’t kidding around.

A website that sells homewares had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains such as

• http://kitchenequipment.sitename.com

or

• http://livingrooms.sitename.com

whilst each sub-category was back on the main subdomain at:

• www.sitename.com/find_product2.asp?url1=living+room&url2=rugs+and+carpets

Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting.

Getting appropriate H1 tags onto each page was a quick job, improving title tag structure took a bit longer, clean & friendly URLs and internal links with appropriate anchor text were also added.

The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms. Can you guess when the changes were made?

Getting sorted in Google Local

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ranking factors for Local Search, dead simple tactics, etc, it’s important to get the basics right. A large chain of restaurants created a ‘bulk upload’ file with the correct data for each one of their locations. After uploading the file, they applied for it to be reviewed and ‘whitelisted’. Local data that’s been uploaded by the business owner and whitelisted is treated as authoritatively as locations that have been manually verified by postcard.

Despite various issues (Google’s best practice guidelines still aren’t quite the best solution in some cases) the traffic generated by visibility in Local Search has been significant and valuable. (The uploads were verified in late November when the traffic begins its steady rise.)

Architecture of Change

A current affairs magazine wanted to get more from their website. Because of falling advertising revenue, the publication was at risk of being closed down. They’d seen some growth from SEO already, but wanted to prove that the website had greater value.

Although the site had a good brand and some great content, it suffered from similar problems to many news-type websites, including badly archived content, duplicate issues and a CMS that hampered keyword targeting or promoting individual articles. Recommendations were made to improve the site’s architecture and migrate to the new structure.

The effect of the changes was immediate growth which took the organic traffic to 257% in three months. A month later, the magazine’s owner explained that the falling revenue from print advertising meant that they couldn’t continue to lose money publishing the mag, and closed it down.

Hook, Line, Sinker

An office cleaning company wanted to improve the profile of their site through SEO. Amongst other tactics, a member of staff spent a day writing a ‘linkbait’ post to publish on their blog. This generated huge amounts of traffic from social media sites (dwarfing their regular daily visitors) and was subsequently linked to from dozens of sites. This post, along with other content published on the site to attract links, helped the site grow in strength and authority, and it now ranks position 3 for ‘office cleaning’ in their country.

Paid In Full

This is SEOmoz, but I’d like to share a graph from a PPC colleague working on a site that sells scooters. They were initially bidding on very broad terms (scooter, scooters, buy a scooter, etc) but the campaign was adjusted to target more long tail terms, including descriptions, specifications, etc.

Over a period of around six weeks, the cost per click was reduced by 30% and the more targeted traffic converted increasingly well – this allowed the site owners to increase their ad budget and generated more sales than their paid search campaign ever had before.

If you’re new to SEOmoz and this post has inspired you to get involved in search marketing for your site, do browse the site for the PRO & free SEO guides and the SEO blog. If you’re a regular, do share any stories you’re particularly proud of in the comments.

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This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site – they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I’ll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic.

For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Competitors and Benchmarking

There are a couple of different metrics you can use track, which will demonstrate the more direct outputs of your SEO work, and expose your performance amongst competitors.

This chart tracks the Site Authority of the target domain (and some competitors) through time.

To date, trying to chart Linkscape metrics has been a bit misleading: the rapid increase in the reach of Linkscape and modifications of the tool’s algorithms have meant that month-by-month reporting of a site’s Authority wasn’t always a fair comparison. However, Nick tells me that the team are currently putting effort into tackling the challenge of tracking this data. Though you’ll have more confidence in drawing a trend chart such as this one soon, I’d still recommend collecting numbers right now to get a snapshot of where your site is amongst the competition.

Obviously, this assessment of site strength is query independent; differences in site architecture, on-page term targeting and the anchor text of external links will have a significant effect on each site’s performance and number of keywords.

In many ways, the next graph address this. The line for the target site is an ‘average ranking position’ – I’d recommend creating this by taking around twenty non-branded, representative keyphrases (eg: ten which you’re specifically targeting and ten which send a significant amount of traffic) and finding the mean of the site’s ranking for each phrase.

The competitor lines should be calculated by finding the mean ranking position of that site, for each of these keywords where the site ranks in the top 20. (We do this so that the mean isn’t artificially dragged down by keyphrases which the site isn’t trying to compete for, and where it ranks very poorly.)

Even a single month’s data points on these two graphs will provide a snapshot of your site’s position amongst the industry’s other players. Tracking the data each month will demonstrate how your standing has changed, and can directly show the impact of your SEO work – both on-site and off-site.

Industry Assessment

If you have been collecting ranking data in the past, then it can be useful to identify a term for which you’ve had a relatively static ranking over the last year or so. If your traffic from this term has declined over the same period then this provides a useful example of how market behaviour outside of your control is having an effect on the business.

If you don’t have historic ranking data, but suspect that your industry is in decline, you should compare search volume trends to organic traffic sent by some specific terms. In the example below, the site sees a decline in traffic for the single keyphrase ‘football tickets‘ but comparing this to the search volume for the term shows that the site’s performance has actually improved – they are increasing their share of that traffic.

If the industry really is declining and search volumes for all the typically valuable phrases are unlikely to return, then there can be a serious consideration about even continuing to operate in the market. If your core business was VHS rental, consider offering Blu-Ray; if you rank well for house and holiday insurance but are suffering from the decline in these markets then consider adding pet insurance  – a steady / growing market. (Check out this Google Insights data for UK insurance markets.)

Of course, these are extreme examples – and if you’re in these particular industries then you shouldn’t need a blog post to make these suggestions – but they remind us that there are some markets where a time comes to look for business from elsewhere.

Actions

As we did in the graph above, you must begin by looking at the organic traffic trend for keyphrases individually. A lot of information is lost when data is aggregated (such as in total organic traffic.) Go back and look at your highest volume keyphrases from a year or two ago, and compare these to your current highest volume keyphrases, by charting the monthly volume of traffic they sent over that period. It may quickly become clear that whilst your keyword portfolio has been dragged down by some dogs, there are some stars (or problem children) that are contributing a great deal to the overall traffic.

If you last did keyword research 12 or 18 months ago, user behaviour may have changed significantly – even for people looking for exactly the same product. Whilst the metrics mentioned above may bring you to the gloomy conclusion that search volume in your industry is substantially down, it’s possible to overlook the fact that there’s simply been a change in searcher behaviour.

Examples of such changes that have happened in different geographic regions:

• searchers are using more direct queries (‘cinema‘ & ‘film tickets‘ are steady or down, ‘film times‘ is way up)
• searchers are moving from long tail to head terms (‘internet marketing‘ & ‘website promotion‘ are declining but ‘SEO‘ and ‘SEM‘ are up)
• searchers are moving from head to long tail terms (‘currency exchange‘ is down but specific terms such as ‘dollars to pounds‘ are up)

The message here: don’t miss out on opportunities to compete on the emerging keyword groups.

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

1. If your organic traffic is down, either for particular keywords or as a whole, be clear whether this is because your site is under-performing, or because the search volume for a keyword / in an industry is descending.
2. Benchmark yourself against competitors by regularly recording the Authority and/or rankings position for relevant keyphrases of your site and theirs
3. Revisit your keyword research – a year is a long time on the internet, particularly given the current state of flux that so many industries are experiencing.

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There are very few tactics which can guarantee success in linkbuilding. Executed correctly, giving something away is one that gets close to fulfilling that promise.

This post covers competitions and giveaways; I’ll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we’ve run for clients.

Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains. They can also be great for data collection – it’s fine to ask the entrants for their email address and whether they’d be happy for you to send them emails again in the future.

Furthermore, there’s a potential for increasing brand awareness amongst people who’ve not heard of you before.

Running a Giveaway

In the simplest competition users visit the website to fill out their details, possibly answer a simple question, and then a winner is picked out of the hat.

Competition Prizes

If you have high margin products, these can make attractive prizes without harming your bottom line too much (e.g.: giving away tickets for your theatre doesn’t cost anything if the show isn’t sold out.) You should also consider ‘money can’t buy’ prizes: a trip to watch a rugby match is cool, but spending the day working for a national team and getting a signed jersey is priceless.

Look out for partnerships: when Distilled recently ran a whisky giveaway (to create buzz around the brand prior to the launch of our US office) we were sent messages by Jura whisky and Master of Malt (neither of whom we knew beforehand) offering some quite exceptional additional prizes.

There’s potential to improve any competition by approaching suitable partners first, to offer some co-publicity and links. (I once emailed some contacts to ask for contributions to a competition, and ended up with £300 worth of books, £120 of CDs and DVDs, £50 of gift vouchers, two magazine subscriptions, a £120 digital camera, a wild animal adoption, a bottle of port and a towel that folded up into a beachbag.)

Of course, the flip side of this is that you could simply look out for people in industries related to you that are running competitions, and offer an additional prize for their promotion, in return for links, etc. You can use Google to find such opportunities: search for terms like ‘win’ and ‘competition’ alongside phrases used in relevant niches (eg: ‘win album’ for music prizes) and then filter down to results from the last week / month. For example: this Google search.

Get Listed

The ‘comping‘ community is a great place to seed your competitions to begin. Certainly in the UK, a listing on a few active sites will often send the first 2 – 5,000 entrants – and I’m sure it’s not just us limeys that love a freebie. Search around for sites to submit your competition to, but regional sites you could consider include:

• Loquax.co.uk (UK)
• ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
• Compaholics (UK)
• CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)

Each site may have specific restrictions, and can have a delay between a few days and few weeks before submissions are published, so submit your competition as early as possible.

Seeding

Send competition details directly to twitter users & bloggers who you either know well, or think would be interested in covering it. Remember that people can be less inclined to share a competition if it’s good enough (to give themselves better chances of winning.) There are various creative solutions to this issue, but you can just keep it simple and appeal to the blogger’s love of sharing cool stuff with their readers.

Furthermore, look for opportunities to find partners who have email lists. Let’s take two companies with email marketing lists: BigHotel (a large, fictional hotel chain) whoc is running a competition, and GreenTour (a successful, fictional eco-tourism site) which is launching a new feature. They have similar audiences, but there’s no overlap between their products; BigHotel can mention the feature launch in their next newsletter and EcoTour can promote the competition to their subscribers. This just required finding a partner and making a gentleman’s agreement; as Bonytoad is fond of saying: "Win-Win, For Teh Win."

Use Your Affiliates

Make sure that your affiliates can add their tracking codes to the entry URL, and they’ll help to spread awareness of the competition pretty quickly and to places you might not be able to reach to otherwise.

Create a video primer

The Irish rugby competition mentioned above was launched with a 60 second video promoting the prize.

Videos are particularly shareable: embed codes can be copied from the Youtube page, and lots of social sites (including Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit) allow for easy importing of videos. Given that people might be watching the video anywhere, make sure to prominently display the URL for the entry page in the video, either on-screen or using video annotations.

Get Press

Lots of magazines and newspapers are happy to mention competitions and link to them from their websites. Find publications that target the geographic area or niche targetted by the competition. Pick up the phone and give them a call – ask to speak to someone who deals with promotions, or in the editorial department. A few minutes later you might have a decent link and some coverage that will be read by a very targeted group of people.

Maintain Momentum

When people have entered, it’s a waste to just show them a ‘thanks for entering’ message. Use this opportunity to give a call to action – typically to share the competition with other people. Consider having a secondary prize that encourages people to share the competition. For example:

Upsell the Competition

Have a successful competition, and want to take advantage of this get more entries? Take the email addresses of everyone who entered so far, and send them a message during the week before the competition finishes.

I’ve not done this, but I think it could work really well to add an extra 10% to your number of entries. To be honest, I’m considering not mentioning it here, and saving it for myself for a while, but I want to see what CTR & results anyone who tries it gets. Let me know if you have a chance.

Other Competition Structures

Outside of the basic ‘name-out-of-a-hat’ competitions, there’s potential for all sorts of interesting competition structures.

Competitions to Encourage Engagement

Ooh.com run a competition with two $100 prizes each week. The winners are picked from the new ‘OOHs’ which have been uploaded, and encourages people to not only add their content, but to make sure it is as ‘rich’ as possible.

Sites with user generated content (such as a forum, social networking or social media site) could use similar techniques to reward particular contributions.

Twitter Competitions

A competition where the only entry requirement is to tweet a message including a link to a site / account / hashtag has very low barriers to entry for Twitter users. Once up and running, such competitions excel at keeping momentum – the more people hear about the competition, the more people enter – and help to improve brand awareness for companies and products.

The tactic’s been used by a variety of organisations; the most famous execution was probably the competitions run by Moonfruit. This did well, but the concept already feels a little bit passé – plus you have to have an awesome product and spring for $10,000 of prizes to have the same impact that Moonfruit enjoyed.

Consider modifying this viral ’self-fullfilling prophecy’ competition for other formats or networks; Umbro had people upload photos on Facebook – the Facebook ‘News Feed’ then showed entrants’ friends that they’d submitted an entry. If you’re looking to find similar success for your sites, Google Buzz is still new & cool… I’m just saying…

Procedural Points

A couple of miscellaneous points about operating a competition:

Conversion Rate Optimisation

If you’ve attracted people to the competition entry page, you should hope to see a very good conversion rate to completed entries. Try using some CRO techniques on the entry page, to maximise the number of entries received and the amount of useful data collected.

Avoid Cheats

Log the IP address along with each entry – you can then investigate any IP addresses which submit a lot of entries to identify people who are trying to cheat the system.

OK; I hope that this has been useful, or at least inspired you to go through the back of the cupboards, and see if you have anything interesting to give away. Using tactics like this can be an iterative process – it doesn’t need to go exactly right first time, and people will never get bored if you run a few competitions to improve your process. Good luck!

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Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website.

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This week, I’d like to make suggestions for a ‘reading list‘ to help SEOs, and others who work online, particularly with website strategies.

But this list isn’t going to be blogs, post and online articles, oh no. These suggestions are entirely offline. We’re going into dead tree mode with eleven books and two magazines. Some of these suggestions you may want to flick through, some you may want to read cover to cover. Others will be suitable for suggesting to other people within your organisation.

There’s no intention that everybody should read all these books (they’re spread over many topics) and my list is far from exhaustive. I’ll welcome your feedback and further recommendations in the comments.

(NB: This post links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk to help you find more about the books mentioned. I’ve used affiliate links, and any revenue generated will be donated to good causes through a general disaster/emergency fund.)

Analytics and Data

Web Analytics in an Hour a Day – Avinash Kaushik

This book is regarded as required reading for anyone who needs to understand the concepts behind web analytics and how to properly assess and understand them. Beyond the very basics about collecting analytics data, the book focuses on how to truly understand how it applies to your website’s goals, and using analytics to collect actionable insights that will improve your website.

(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Information Dashboard Design – Stephen Few

This book isn’t directly related to SEO or web strategy, but since reading it, I’ve already had two opportunities to use its advice on effectively presenting data. Even if you’re comfortable creating tables, graphs and charts, the hugely practical and highly actionable advice about combining data into ‘dashboards’ is worth your time to acquire.

Whether you work with sites that need to present data in a way that’s appealing to users, or if you need to produce a dashboard of analytics and search data for use internally (perhaps gleaned from Avinash’s book) then you’ll be able to communicate the information more effectively after taking advice from here. (You’ll also start spotting the terrible data presentation mistakes that others make, but I can’t help you there unfortunately.)
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Usability & Testing

Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy – Steve Krug

Krug’s famous book about design and usability is one of those classic texts that offers the whole premise within the four words of the title, and then goes on to spend the book showing you how to build that premise into your design philosophy. Get a flavour of the author’s style and keen understanding in the sample chapter, How we really use the web.

Krug describes the first book as being about how to think about usability, whereas Rocket Surgery Made Easy is about how to do it – covering the process of improving web site usability though user testing. It’s highly recommended that before you start designing test and recruiting users, you give this book a read; if you’re not planning any user testing just yet, then read it anyway to remind you why you should.

(Buy ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)
(Buy ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy’ online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer – Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-von Tivadar

Complementing Krug’s books, this text focuses on using Google Website Optimizer to set up tests for Conversion Rate Optimisation. Beyond the simple technical aspects of how to run a test with the tool, it teaches how to use an understanding of the buying process and creating strong offering to make websites more powerful.

One reviewer on Amazon was given a copy of the book at SES, and mentioned: "In one recent test, we used the principles learned from the book such as persuasion architecture to setup a test in only an hour that increased lead generation on a high volume ecommerce site by 51%"
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Search Marketing

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web – Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville

How does a book originally written over a decade ago make it into this list? Because when O’Reilly publishes a book by these authors, on a topic so important to the way information is published online and understood / consumed by visitors, the text is going to stand the test of time.

Like many of these suggestions, the book doesn’t just float at a high level, but gets down to ‘brass tacks’ with detailed discussion about designing and implementing IA on websites, and dedicating a significant chapter to choosing whether and how to implement on-site search on a site. (Recommendation by Dr Pete.)
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

The Art of SEO – Eric Enge, Jessie Stricchiola, Rand Fishkin and Stephan Spencer

Despite the incredible ongoing changes in the field of SEO, an ‘all-star cast’ (including SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin) has managed to put together this excellent reference book for search marketers. Before page 50, the authors have covered the basics of how search engines crawl & index the web and search ranking factors; it goes onto cover the technical aspects of SEO, keyword research, competitor analysis & benchmarking, linkbuilding, vertical search and monitoring results.

Most appealing about this book is the understanding that the authors bring from their experience managing SEO campaigns in the real world – such as in the chapter dedicated to building SEO teams, and knowing when or how to appoint a search agency.

The main reason I sound like I’m raving about the book is the same reason you should read it: flattery. Rand dedicated this book to you, the members of the SEO community.
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Search Marketing Standard

Recommended by RobBothan, Search Marketing Standard published a quarterly magazine for the search industry. They promise: "Stop stressing out over the avalanche of marketing advice from online sources and let us filter the noise for you."

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B. Cialdini

This is a classic book, which chooses to pitch persuasion as a science, rather than an art. The author is a professor of psychology, so this is perhaps expected, but the rigour of explanation in the examples (many from Caldini’s own observations) will help you develop new, more persuasive ways of influencing the visitors to your sites.
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Management & Implementation

Good to Great – Jim Collins

I’ve never before come across a book that is essentially a write up of a research project; it’s particularly special as the research conclusions are highly valuable, and can be actioned. The premise of the work was to: identify concepts which great companies had in common, but that were not implemented by any (or many) companies that were simply ‘good.’

You can read more about what these concepts turned out to be, and see how Rand tested their application within SEOmoz in his 2007 post, Asking the Tough Questions or a similar post by Will, from Distilled’s perspective.
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Getting Things Done – David Allen

An outstanding book that proposes a workflow management system which would seem highly radical to many people with an established system, and terribly common sense to others. The book then leads you into a method for implementing the GTD setup.

From my perspective, the most important message (but one that plays second fiddle to much of the book’s other content) is that your mind is excellent at a certain type of work (creative thinking, problem solving, etc) and shouldn’t be fettered with other tasks (remember to call that client tomorrow, try to come up with some blog post ideas etc) which can be devolved to a trusted system.

You know when you put things by the door, so that you remember to take them with you when you next leave the house? This book provides a way of making sure that your whole life runs that way.
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Agile Project Management with Scrum – Ken Schwaber

Ken Schwaber is one of the authors of the ‘Agile Manifesto’ which outlined the principles behind the methodology known as ‘agile software development’. His ‘Scrum’ process – described in detail in this book – uses a series of relatively fast iterations, typically month-long ’sprints’ between releasing product improvements.

For people who don’t like structures and systems that may introduce additional bureaucracy as a barrier to work, the system may sound terrifying (particularly the formal daily meetings) but trust me: once implemented, Scrum reduces almost every barrier between finding out what needs to be done and actually doing it.

Though designed for software development, the principles can be applied to any product or service that can benefit from incremental improvements (and with a bit of creativity, I think this could easily apply to the output of a great deal of organisations.)
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

Day to Day

Wired

Wired (at Wired.com and Wired.co.uk) is a monthly magazine, covering many facets of ‘technology’, from gadgets to online-strategy. Its blend of creativity and informity will help you keep on top of technological trends and can also spark ideas, inspire design themes and help as a seed for linkbait concepts.

That their staff have coined terms such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘the long tail’ gives an idea of the impact the magazine has had on the internet marketing industry; reading it every month is the only way to make sure that you’re using their next bit of lingo, before it hits the big time.

Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home – by David Shipley & Will Schwalbe

Various people have written about how to manage email as part of your daily work life, but this book talks about the specifics of style and writing in the medium. It should help you create better understood, more expressive emails. Sam suggested this book; he said "It was recommended by an e-mail marketer friend and it changed the way I write (and read) e-mails. (…) Really useful."
(Buy online from: Amazon US or Amazon UK.)

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To make a valuable impact, SEO has to be understood by more than just an organisation’s search marketers. This post suggests how to explain the concepts, and get buy-in, from different people within an organisation.

I’ve chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed:

• Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities.
• Persuade them: once you’ve described SEO, this gives something extra to get them excited about the possibilities of SEO for them / their department, to help get them on side.
• Ask them: I’ve tried to list one particular request you can make to people in each role to benefit the SEO process within your organisation.

In addition, you should remember to give back to each of these stakeholders. There’ll be some metric, data or graphs that will demonstrate to them the ongoing effect they are having on the project, how it has benefited the organisation as a whole, and (for bonus points) how their role has benefited from SEO success. Inspiring people in this way leads to their ongoing commitment, and a successful organisation full of motivated, happy people.

CEO

• Their role: Responsible for the whole company; interested in the ‘big picture’ and needs to be able to justify decisions and costs to the board and shareholders.
• Persuade them: SEO gives a competitive advantage in attracting visitors and customers. Though it requires an initial push of effort, and ongoing resource, the work will show a demonstrable ROI, they’ll be provided with regular figures for the board about the profit generated by SEO efforts.
• Ask them: if there are any questions or objections they have, so that you can answer / resolve them. It can be important to get senior management to understand and appreciate online marketing, both so that they can approve investment in it and so that they will enthuse about & promote the project internally.

CTO

• Their role: Responsible for developing technology within the organisation and we’ll assume in this case responsible for the organisation’s website and online development.
• Persuade them: There is a large technical aspect to optimising a website for search engines – lots of information is available (both officially from the search engines, and recommendations from third parties) but there is work to be done in adapting this best-practice advice to the organisation’s unique needs. However, it’s not an entirely technical process, and much of the ongoing work will be done ‘off-site’, by those in the advertising / promotions teams.
• Ask them: to assign a proportion of their team’s time to SEO – ideally including members from both web development and R&D departments.

Web Designer

• Their role: Designing the look and branding of the organisation’s website
• Persuade them: Designing websites that will adhere to SEO principles need not be a significant constraint. There’s a significant overlap between designing human-usable and SEO-friendly sites, and many of the most well designed & stylish sites follow the appropriate guidelines.
• Ask them: to spend time talking to developers and SEOs about design practices that may harm or hamper SEO, and use this knowledge in their online design work.

Web Developer

• Their role: To turn designs for web pages into code which can be published online.
• Persuade them: By following some relatively straight forward (and typically common-sense) practices when writing code, developers have a vital role in creating pages that can be easily read and understood by search engines. They’ll see the impact of their work very visibly, as pages from the site get indexed and returned in appropriate search results.
• Ask them: to read lots! They can start with SEOmoz’s guides and blog posts (espec. pages from the technical issues category) and should print out the web developer’s SEO cheat sheet. Also, remind them that as easy at this basic best-practice stuff is, lots of people do get it wrong, so they should be prepared to get mad-props from their SEO colleagues for not fouling up this stuff as much as some of the competitors.

Sales Manager

• Their role: In commercial organisations, they’re responsible for the journey through the funnel from enquiry to sale.
• Persuade them: We can use data from the website and experience from the SEO community to target phrases which will generate visits & enquiries from the people most likely to convert into a sale. Their feedback about new enquiries and leads, combined with analytics data, will help tailor the products/services and marketing messages to minimise poor lead for the team and maximise sales profit.
• Ask them: to help with keyword research by giving you the words and phrases that potential customers use to describe their problems or to ask for product types.

Marketing Manager

• Their role: Responsibilities can include product development, advertising, press and promotion.
• Persuade them: Highly ethical SEO can be undertaken by following all the marketing best practices they’re familiar with. Giving a positive experience before and after purchase, creating and fostering conversations around the brand, getting coverage on trusted websites, etc can all contribute to improved rankings. In addition, search engine marketing produces very clear returns in terms of number of visitors, their activity on the site and purchases made / revenue generated – so they’ll be able to demonstrate value and justify ongoing investment in this activity.
• Ask them: to get up to speed on the importance of inbound links, and discover ways that their teams’ activities can help to generate links.

Content Editor

• Their role: Responsibilities may include any of creating, commissioning, editing and publishing content on the site.
• Persuade them: As well as being able to attract more visitors to your content, we can use SEO insights to help generate ideas for new site content that could be particularly successful. We can produce guidelines for your writers to help their content be more successful in search engines, and we can provide statistics that show how successful different pieces of content or different writers have been, to help inspire them to create more great content.
• Ask them: to review analytics and link data with you, to look at what has been particularly successful (in terms of total traffic, links and search traffic) and to try creating copy and content that is more SEO targeted. In addition, talk to them about writing great headlines and about linkbait’ show how their team can create content that goes wild on social networks and gets loads of links.

Community / Outreach Manager

• Their role: Responsible for the organisation’s relationships with individuals on and/or off the site, often with a view to generating conversation about the brand.
• Persuade them: By reaching out to people elsewhere online and encouraging them to mention us & link to the site, you / your team will increase the strength and trust of the site – this increases its ability to receive traffic for relevant search terms. Using tools such as Linkscape, we can show the value of every link you create and help you find new opportunities for outreach and linkbuilding.
• Ask them: to try requesting links from a few people they have close relationships with. Demonstrate how to find new places and people to reach out to and reasons to contact them (such as sharing content, offering resources, writing guest content, offering prizes etc.)

More

Every organisation has different roles, and the roles may have different responsibilities, but this gives some idea of the ways you might persuade different people that they can contribute to and benefit from SEO.

Feel free to use the comments to share any particular advice you have for explaining & promoting SEO internally. If you have any particular objections that come up, do mention them and we’ll see if we can come up with suitable responses.

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Amongst the add-ons I add to any new install of Firefox is the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick. (Find the install links at the bottom of this post.)

Obviously, this add-on is chock-full of features that are useful for web developers, but it really does make diagnosing various SEO issues much easier. This list gives the top seven tasks that I find easier when the toolbar is installed.

Click on any of the small images in this post to see them in full size.

1. Browse Like a Robot

By turning off JavaScript and Cookies, you can browse the web as it’s seen by ‘bots (which in most cases can’t accept cookies or execute JavaScript.) This basic change can help you recognise site architecture issues pretty quickly, such as when a main navigation bar is displayed using JavaScript or when visitors who can’t accept cookies always get redirected to the front page. (Yes, I’ve seen both of these in the wild.)

2. See What the Spiders See

For a more hardcore spider-emulation experience, use the Toolbar to turn off styles and images. The sudden appearance of previously cloaked text or seeing that the ‘main heading’ is actually an H4 item and sat 75% of the way through the content might suggest why a particular page is having issues.

This is how the site looked before Timmy joined

Although different spiders treat meta redirects in different ways, it can often be easier to diagnose some on-site issues if you disable them altogether via ‘Disable → Meta Redirects‘. To see what the site serves up to different user agents (such as mobile devices, GoogleBot, etc) you’ll want to get the author’s other successful add-on, the user-agent switcher.

3. See the Structure

Talking of page structure, you can press ‘Information → View Document Outline‘ to see the structure of a page, or simply ‘Outline → Outline Headings‘ to see the hierarchy of headings within the page.

4. Validation and Best Practices

The toolbar gives quick access to code validation tools (such as the HTML, CSS and RSS validation from WC3.) There are also options to highlight links without title attributes, or images with missing (or blank) alt attributes.

5. A Tip for Search Marketers Who do CRO as Well

Those of us with our massive screens (by the way, did you see this guy?) might not always appreciate how people view our pages. However, a quick click on the ‘resize’ button lets you see the site through the viewport of an older monitor or a net book.

I should probably let LoveFilm know that 20% of people can’t see their big green ‘Start a free trial’ button.

6. Making Web Page Screen Captures Easier

A change we’ve tried to make at Distilled recently is to include more illustrative images in our client reports. A fiddly task that comes up from time to time is creating a screen shot of a web page, but without it being obvious which links you’re already clicked on. A quick click on ‘Miscellaneous → Visited Links → Mark All Links Unvisited‘ removes the ‘visited’ styles from any links on the page.

7. Reputation Management Tip: Anonymity Made Easy

A year ago, I posted about how to hide your referrer string when browsing, as a handy way to prevent people seeing that you’re probing their site. It’s much easier to do with the Web Developer Toolbar, by simply clicking ‘Disable → Disable Referrers‘

You can read more about the Web Developer Tool Add-On, or if you’re running Firefox, simply install it now.

If you’re already a convert to this add-on, do let us know in the comments of any other features you use regularly.

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