Howdy mozzers. Since a lot of people in the search space are geeks, it naturally follows that there are plenty of single SEO guys and gals. Therefore this post is for you! Actually, it’s more of a collection of random SEO tips and tricks I’ve picked up recently that I decided to hang together by applying the tips to online dating at the same time!

Disclaimer: I’m going to reference OKCupid throughout this post. They are not a client, I have no alliegnece with them but they’re like the Google of online dating. Their blog is an A+ example of how to write engaging content which gets links. I reference it all the time when talking to clients.

5 Ways Being an SEO Makes You Better At Online Dating

1) Add Trust

This is something I learned from doing Conversion Rate Optimisation. Getting users to convert almost always isn’t about changing the colour of buttons or the position of images. It’s about getting the right message across to your users. You want to find out what makes them tick and then give them what they want. This can sometimes be as simple as changing the text of a header on a page.

Top Dating Tip: Mention things like "good at cooking", "sporty" – people respond well to these kinds of hints that you’re an awesome person.

Top SEO Tip: Make sure the language and message used on your site fits your users. I wrote a post on using natural language for CRO which contains a nice little case study you might want to check out.

2) Be Efficient

Effective SEOs are efficient people (and efficient people are also effective SEOs I imagine?). Rand wrote a fantastic post on using outsourcing to get things done which highlights the different tasks that you might be able to outsource and Will wrote a fantastic post on automating tasks (with a followup cheatsheet full of APIs). Anytime you find yourself doing the same task over and over again you should really stop and think about how you can do it more effectively. Can you outsource? Can you automate?

Top Dating Tip: Write an "opening message" – full of humour and intelligence and wit (outsource this if you find it hard) which you can use to woo potential suitors. Online dating is a long slow process (at least for guys) and you’ll need to message lots and lots of people in order to get dates (at least if you’re as ugly as I am) so take the pain out of this process by automating the opening email. Of course, with all good email marketing you need to make it look like it’s not automated. Include references to specifics from their profile and get their name right!

Top SEO Tip: Automate automate automate. Did you see recently that you can now run scripts from within Google Products? Kind of like Google Apps only stupidly easy to use. It lets you send emails, access calendars and even create Google sites. The programming language is kind of like Visual Basic but includes powerful tools like sending emails and fetching web pages. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine the possibilities here!

3) Research

Research is integral to strong SEO. You need to research rankings, links, site owners, potential link opportunities and a whole host of other things. The internet lends itself to researching and gathering data and sometimes you need to employ some of the SEO tricks you’ve learned to use Google effectively or to track down an errant webmaster. There was a scary email conversation between distilled and SEOmoz staff following a Q&A where we discussed how to find the individual behind a social media profile. The amount of data you can gather from a simple digg profile is terrifying. Within a few minutes we had his real name, family members, wife’s name, address and phone number. So next time you think you’re posting something "anonomously" think again!

Top Dating Tip: Users will often use the same photo to sign up to loads of different sites. So use a service like TinEye to do a reverse image search on potential suitor’s profile photos. What people write on social media profiles and what they write on their personal blog are two very different things!

Top SEO Tip: Following the image theme, I recently picked up a really neat trick you can use to find people who are hotlinking your images. Simply use the imagesearch: command in Google Images like this: imagesite:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org (make sure you’re searching google image search!)

I’d like to think that you’d use this list of sites as a list of places to get links from rather than a list of sites to goatse but each to their own… (hat tip for this imagesite search query goes to Andre who I met at A4uexpo in Munich).

4) Stay Fresh

The idea that having "fresh content" would help you rank was one of the myths Rand recently addressed and I certainly don’t think it carries much weight. That said, for fresh queries, fresh data is essential. Rand recently talked about how twitters of a URL may help them rank for QDF-style queries. Certainly QDF is one area of SEO that a lot of people overlook.

Top Dating Tip: Having a fresh profile helps get dates. If your join date is 2 years ago or your last login date was over a month ago then chances are you’re not interested. So make sure that you keep things up to date. I also think that some of the ranking algorithms at sites like OKCupid favour fresh profiles over stale ones.

Top SEO Tip: Think about which queries are triggering QDF algorithms in your industry. Are they worth chasing? Is your site set up to publish content fast? Is your content team set up to publish content fast?! Some SEOs I’ve talked to recently still didn’t even know there was such a thing as QDF so if you’re in this space make the most of it and think about twitters of your URL like Rand says. Here’s a good beginners QDF video (oldie but goodie)

5) Test Test Test

Testing is crucial to online success. Whether it’s testing process changes, or multivariate testing using Google Website Optimizer it’s important to keep testing things. Karl from Conversion Rate Experts gave a fantastic presentation in Munich at A4uexpo where he really demonstrated why testing radical changes is much better than changing little changes. Unfortunately I can’t link to his slides but I’m assured he has a post in the works so keep your eyes peeled for that soon.

Top Dating Tip: Test which profile picture will get you most dates by using the My Best Face feature. It lets you see which profile image works better for you and gives you lovely graphical breakdowns of the data to show you which demographic your image works best for. It’s like CRO for online dating!

Top SEO Tip: Try segmenting your website optimiser tests. Will wrote a post on how to segment your tests which you should check out.

I hope you enjoyed this – look out for my next installment entitled "5 ways being an SEO doesn’t  help you get dates online" which will mainly feature images of SEOs looking geeky and having poor social skills.

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User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn’t including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content.

Remember folks that even if you don’t have "classical" user generated content these tips are applicable if you put out a large amount of content, regardless of whether it’s UGC or in-house. If you have a team of writers you can pretty much think of them like a small bunch of users creating UGC for your site so these tips apply for many different types of sites. If these tips don’t apply then you’re probably running a boring website anyway.

1) Nudge Users Into Doing SEO For You

This is one of the most powerful tools in your UGC armory and applies equally well to UGC uploads and also in-house content generation (how many in-house SEOs have come up against CMS limitations in teh past!). The idea is simple – firstly you need to figure out what a perfectly optimised UGC upload looks like. For example, say I was doing SEO for youtube (I’m not btw) I might consider a video like this pretty much spot on:

This video has all of the key elements

1. A descriptive title with the relevant keyphrases in there ("omg cat" and "dramatic chipmunk")
2. Submitted to the correct category ("comedy")
3. Lots of good relevant tags added (like "slack" and "jawed")
4. A good (though not actually perfect) description with the main keywords repeated on the page.

Compare that to a video like this which has virtually zero SEO value:

The video title is "640×360.mp4", there’s no description and no tags.

So when you’re building your UGC upload process (or internal CMS for uploading content) you need to build in as many nudges as possible to turn videos like the second into videos like the first. What these nudges might be will vary wildly and depends on your definition of a perfectly optimised page and what sort of content users are uploading. That said, here’s a few nudges that you might want to consider:

• Enforce a minimum and maximum title length. This will force people to put at least a few relevant phrases in there but also avoid spamming the title with too many phrases.
• Enforce a description.
• Let users choose their own related content on the site and embed links to those pieces of content automatically. This can be a good way of increasing internal linking to strong content.
• Provide users with some popular tags they might want to use instead of letting them think for themselves.

It’s important to note here that some of these changes might seem to be a trade off between usability and SEO, enforcing a description for example might lose you a few video uploads. You should carefully watch this to ensure that you don’t kill conversion rates in the process and you should strongly emphasise WHY a description is important to ensure users are motivated to add one. Be sure to put the WHY in their own terms (i.e. "your video will get more views and comments if you include a description"). Linkedin does this very well with their "your profile is only 60% complete" calls to action.

2) Mash Up Your Own Content for Agile Rankings

Sometimes we get quite hung up in SEO as to what exactly we mean by "unique content". We might check for example, that an article written for a website is unique. But once we determine that the content is unique how many times can we put that article on our site? Can we re-use the headline on multiple pages? Full answers to these questions is beyond the scope of this post, suffice to say that you can often get away with re-using sections of unique content on more than one page on your site. And unique content is an asset. So consider these two situations:

Ranking For Head Terms – If your site is full of user generated content then you will naturally have plenty of long-tail phrases nailed. But what about the big terms? These terms are harder to nail down. Instead of relying on your community to optmise for this phrase, instead you can aggregate content from your community and sit it on a page that otherwise is perfectly optimised by hand. For example, let’s continue looking at youtube and consider the keyphrase "poker videos". Now in the UK there are no youtube results for this on the first page. In fact the highest ranking youtube page is this video:

Now, ranking with an individual video is fine – but it’s not perfect because it’s not the best page for a user to land on and also it’s not ranking 1st page! So what can we do about it? Well how about we create a page which sits on this URL: www.youtube.com/videos/sports/poker-videos and is perfectly optimised for the term "poker videos" with a good title, header and intro text. Then most of the content on the page can be pulled from existing uploaded videos. So aggregating content in this way can provide you with powerful canonical pages which you can internally link to strongly and can rank for specific head terms without you having to rely on individual videos.

Being Agile & QDF Terms – The above technique can be done en masse as part of a site overhaul and I suggest that building these kinds of pages into your site as part of the category structure is a GOOD THING. But sometimes, search phrases come out of nowhere – these are the phrases that weren’t anywhere yesterday, let alone 6 months ago when you did your research! Still with the youtube example, looking at the hot trends for today I see that "draft picks 2010" is a hot phrase right now:

Keeping with the youtube example I see that there are plenty of videos for the term but that’s just the problem – there isn’t a good single page for Google to find that is specifically about the term. So, if YouTube were being agile they could quickly deploy a page (www.youtube.com/nfl-draft-picks-2010/) targeting the term, link to it from a high-crawl page (like the homepage) and BAM they’d be ranking in no time. The beauty of this is that all they need to do is do a little picking and choosing of existing content to create the page. They don’t need to write anything much in the way of original content to rank for the term. This is great for videos but applies equally to other forms of UGC and can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. QDF FTW!

3) Link Building is Hard – Get Someone Else To Do It!

This is one of the aspects that is talked about most elsewhere – widgets and embeddable goodness is talked about a lot so I’m not going to labour the point. One thing I do want to point out here is that you can apply conversion rate optimisation methodologies to your link building efforts here by improving conversion rate of sharing content. For example, YOUmoz is a linkbuilding tool for SEOmoz – so when a new YOUmoz post goes live we could set up an email that is sent to the user who submitted it which has a strong call to action to both blog and tweet about their latest YOUmoz post. This simple action might improve the link conversion rate of YouMoz posts by 20%. Boom, extra links!

4) Use Your Community To Do Research

Another way that you can use your community to help your link building efforts is by using feedback forms and surveys. For example, a site I worked on recently which let’s say promotes widget expertise sent out a survey to their users and one of the questions they asked was "where else do you talk about widgets online". Some people said Facebook, some said blogs but a surprising number said they not only talk about widgets on this site but they also discuss widgets on forums. So this is a really valuable insight and should motivate you to ensure that when you offer widgets and embeddable content you also offer forum code as well as HTML to ensure that you’re getting as much exposuring as possible. I can’t really predict exactly what insight you’ll gain from surveying your users but I can guarantee that if you do it you’ll learn something about other sites in your industry, keyphrases you were missing or usability issues which can lead to conversion rate improvements.

By the way – did I mention that you should go take the SEOmoz industry survey?!

5) Educate Your Users on SEO

Not everyone in the real world hates SEOs. Shock horror! In fact, plenty of regular users are really keen to understand more about how SEO works. So running training sessions for your users highlighting in particular the benefits good SEO can bring them can really help motivate your community and helps users optimise their own content, do their own link building, keyphrase research etc.

Towards the end of last year the SEOmoz team did some work with Etsy and actually put together some training courses/videos/PDFs for the community to help users learn about SEO. Here’s the Etsy Guide to SEO.

Etsy Guide to SEO Workshop from Etsy on Vimeo.

So, in summary – user generated content is a phenomenal asset, use it wisely and you will profit! As usual, I’d love to hear about other creative uses for UGC in the comments…

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I’m no business guru. I’ve never run or owned a business. But from what I’ve overheard from smart people who do run businesses, developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is crucial to succeeding. It’s the essence of being remarkable which is what Seth Godin talks about a lot. It’s one of the first questions that I ask clients when they come on board – "What’s your USP? Tell me why you’re better than your competitors".

Listening to clients tell you why they’re better than the competition is a little like getting a client to sell their product to you for CRO (as the Conversion Rate Experts talk about in their SEOmoz case study). The answer to this question will often surprise you and start you thinking of all kinds of juicy ways that you can go about gaining links.

So this is one way of getting link building techniques. But once you have this information about a businesses USP there are other ways to leverage it. And that’s what I want to talk about in this post.

Negotiating Partnerships For Links

Ok, so the stage is set – you’ve figured out what it is that makes your company (or website) better or different from your competitors. You’ve figured out your USP. Now, you need to package that USP up and exchange it for links. Let’s take a really basic example; a successful blogger like Glenn Allsopp. He figured out that one of his USPs was writing kick-ass pieces of content. So he decided to do some guest posting (please read his awesome guide to guest posting). When you boil it down, all a guest post is at the end of the day is a little mini-partnership between two bloggers.

Let’s look at a slightly bigger picture example. Let’s say you’re running a website with data on local pubs and bars. Let’s call this website BeerMoz.com. Now they look hard at the competition and figure out that more or less everyone has the same data, but their USP is in packaging up the data in nice Web 2.0 ways while their competitors are stuck in Web 1.0 swamps. One of the consequences is that BeerMoz has some kick-ass widgets. These widgets let you see the top rated pubs and bars in your area. Awesome linkbuilding-sauce. However, they don’t just stop there, here’s the clever part – Beermoz take their widgets and create partnerships with other local data providers.

What does this partnership look like? Well it looks a little like regular users embedding a widget only it’s done on a much larger scale. Take a camping website (say TentMoz.com) who has local data on campsites, they’re interested in jazzing up their campsite pages by displaying the best pubs to drink in nearby. This data is provided by BeerMoz and there’s a link back to BeerMoz via their widget.

This one partnership nets BeerMoz hundreds if not thousands of links. Admittedly it’s only from one domain so the value of those links tails off but they’re still great links to have – ideally to inner pages too (if the widget is set up correctly to point at individual pubs).

While it’s not going to bring any classical SEO benefit, consider Twitter’s partnerships with Google and Bing. These are exactly the kinds of deals that (done with anyone not a search engine) nets you some really strong links.

How To Find The Partnerships

Once you’ve come up with the concept, finding a website to partner with can often take just a little extra creative thinking. Often a good place to explore are those people who compete with you in the rankings but are not direct business competitors. For example, look at the people who rank for "SEO Tools" – you’ve got a mixture of sites actually offering their own SEO Tools but also blogs writing about SEO tools.

The hard part, however, is often getting to talk to the right people at the company once you’ve identified them. This is where having some business development experience comes in very handy. This stage of getting to talk to the right people, saying the right things and bargaining like a pro is something that business development people are very good at and I strongly recommend that you consider giving a little bit of SEO training to one of these people rather than trying to teach these skills to an SEO.

If you’re struggling however, consider reading a sales book to get some ideas of how best to speak to the right people and say the things they want to hear. Also – consider using LinkedIn as a resource to find contacts or get introductions at a company that you’re aiming for. Leveraging your personal network for an introduction can be the most effective way of getting a warm lead in these situations – twitter has saved my bacon more than once. Mmmm bacon.

Closing The Deal

Once you’re into the detail of negotiating the partnership there’s a few tips and things to bear in mind. Firstly, remember that you likely have more assets than the one you’re offering. For example, consider throwing into the negotiations some free exposure in your email newsletter or some twitter love for some of their content. Try and figure out what it is that drives their online presence and offer them something that helps it.

Here’s a story that my Dad loves to tell – many years ago (likely pre-internet!) he had a small dingy (like a small boat if dingy doesn’t translate to the US folks) and was trying to sell it. He advertised in the local paper for a few months at a really reasonable price but got zero responses. It appeared people just weren’t interested. Frustrated he decided to advertise again, but this time with a price tag several times what he was advertising it at before. Instantly he had several enquiries and sold it almost over night.

What we can learn about this story is that often attaching a price tag to something makes it’s perceived value go up. If you think about it, there’s no real reason for this to be true but nevertheless it’s how us simple predictable humans work. So why not open these negotiations by trying to SELL them your USP? If your USP is genuinely valuable then there’s no reason that you can’t sell it to them. Couch it in terms of licensing, or syndication of data. As discussions progress you can gradually start to talk about removing the price tag if they’ll only link to you in return for giving them this data. Boom! They see what you’re offering as valuable, they think they’re getting a steal and you get your links. (BTW – I wonder if this is technically buying links? I’m sure Google would never penalise you for it but it’s an interesting hypothetical example…)

Reciprocal Linking Isn’t Dead

If you’re struggling to really stand out from the crowd or don’t have a USP to talk of then firstly you have bigger problems than not enough links!! But secondly, consider reciprocal linking. Yes, yes I know I’ll probably get shouted at in the comments but reciprocal linking done between trusted sites on a manual level from pages without large numbers of external links is a GOOD THING. There, I said it. So consider negotiating some reciprocal links from strong sites. A few things to bear in mind:

• You want to carefully consider what you’re offering and to who you offer it. There’s only so many of these that you want to put in place so make sure they’re high quality.
• Don’t link to their pages which link to yours. Try and spread it around a little.
• Try not to create site-wide links. These are generally a bad idea. A smaller number of strong links will trump sitewide links every time.

 What experiences have you had using partnerships for link building? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ – it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge – all you need is:

• A verified Google webmaster central account
• Google Analytics
• Excel

If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Lurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).

Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.

Step 1 – Download the internal links

Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:

Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":

This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note – for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).

Step 2 – Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics

This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics – go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.

Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).

Step 3 – Put both sets of data in excel

Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel – I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:

Step 4 – Vlookup ftw

Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:

Note – that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.

Step 5 – Categorise your urls

Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:

If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.

Step 6 – Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness

Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:

It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:

And:

Step 7 – Combine the two pivots

Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:

Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.

Conclusions

25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic

So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight – afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.

Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic – Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.

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I was at a recent client meeting for a new project and we were brainstorming ideas. After considering all kinds of wacky schemes, plots, techniques and tactics we came up with what is, in essence, a very simple linkbuilding technique. In the interests of openess I wanted to share it with you, I’m just nice like that.

This idea works best when you are working in an industry where the value of the items that you are selling is high, and the object is somewhat unusual, distinctive or customised. Examples of businesses which might fit this category:

• Antiques dealers
• Bespoke interior decorators
• Painters
• Bespoke aquarium builders
• Photographers
• Landscape gardners

If your site is within one of these niches then the basic premise is as follows:

"When your clients have purchased something from you which is unusual or distinctive they are often happy to link back to you. This is especially true for high-value items."

A Real Life Example

Disclaimer: Distilled built and designed the Aquarium Architecture website but we are not involved in their SEO. The below is an illustrative example. Also, I love aquariums so it’s a win-win

Those of you who are paying attention will notice that I carefully slipped "bespoke aquarium builders" into the list above. The reason being that Aquarium Architecture are just such a company – they design and build bespoke high-value, custom-install aquariums. To give you a flavour of what I’m talking about:

Pretty aren’t they?

Anyway – while you’re all drooling over the nice pretty fish I’m going to talk about how they can get links out of the work they do. The website doesn’t have prices on but you can imagine the kind of money you need to get one of these aquariums. So the buying process is often a long and involved affair where clients will want to ensure every little detail is correct. Because of the intimate relationship which Aquarium Architecture have with their clients it should simple to build into their process at some point, asking for a link to their site. Obviously, this isn’t going to be applicable for all clients (the above image was taken from an installation in a professional footballer’s house, and he doesn’t even have his own website) but they do a reasonable amount of business with Pubs, Hotels and the like. These businesses DO have websites and would provide valuable links.

Remember To Add Value

When building a link building campaign however you should always remember that you’ll get more links if you can add value to the linker. Therefore I don’t suggest that Aquarium Architecture simply ask for a link. Instead, I’d recommend that as part of the process a case study is built on the site for each new client which shows off photos of the aquarium along with making-of shots and/or design sketches. They’ve already done this to a limited extent as you can see here:

So now, not only do Aquarium Architecture have a direct and intimate relationship with their clients but they also have now built some content on their site which the client has a motivation to link back to. If you were building this process for an antiques website instead of an aquariums website you might want to include the history of the particular antique item on the case study page. These kinds of case study pages can be really high value and are a natural place for the client to link to. Not to mention the fact that you’re building out website content all the time to help long-tail rankings and you’re constantly adding testimonials which will help conversion rates. Win-win-win!

Or, Alternatively, Why Not Make Some News?

Of course, manually building links is hard work, even when you have a process like above. Therefore you might also want to consider taking some of the more unusual/remarkable/impressive contracts and craft a news story out of it. Again, the Aquarium Architecture guys did this well (again, nothing that Distilled was involved with):

The above story appeared in the Daily Express in the UK and is a fine example of the kind of linkbait that you can create when you have products of such a unique and high-value nature. Unfortunately in the above example Aquarium Architecture didn’t get a link out of the story but there are plenty of ways you can go about getting links from this kind of thing.

Key Takeaways

So I completely understand that not all clients or websites will be able to do this kind of thing but hopefully even if you can’t follow this exact process you can gain some insights into how you might build a process into your existing business practices to help your company build links.

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This post was inspired by Rand. If I’m honest, I’m not sure how many of my posts aren’t inspired by Rand… Specifically however it was this tweet which set the wheels in motion (if ever so slowly):

The link that Rand twittered was this one to the Financial Times. It’s a story about checklists. Yeah, *yawn* right? Well not quite – you see these checklists, used by all kinds of people from pilots to doctors, have

The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes – freakonomics

been shown to increase safety, save lives and make millions. Atul Gawande is a surgeon and has worked hard to get checklists implemented in the medical profession to help save lives. He’s written a book about these checklists called The Checklist Manifesto (Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). If you want to read more about these fascinating checklists and their incredible power I suggest you check out the FT link above or click here to read this New Yorker article written by Atul Gawande himself. Also, be sure to check out a sample from one of the medical checklists.

That said, this is the internet age – why should we be forced to read anything at all when we can instead get all the knowledge we need through a short and catch video clip? Well, here’s the short and catchy video clip of John Stewart’s interview with Atul Gawande on The Daily Show (sorry, only available to US viewers I’m afraid – c’mon guys get your act together. I can watch the show in the UK, why can’t I watch clips online from the UK?):

As you have probably guessed by now, I was inspired by all of this to apply some of this checklist theory to our SEO projects. The main idea being that while we all know what to do – sometimes we forget to do some of the basics and by having a simple checklist at hand we can make sure we don’t miss anything out. There are obviously lots of different areas of SEO that this would apply to (and other areas – I think it’d work great for PPC) but I’ve chosen to focus on new projects. Below is a checklist that I am in the process of implementing at Distilled for any new SEO project which comes on board. I anticipate that it’s still useful for in-house folks too when launching a new site or project. I welcome your feedback and thoughts on this work in progress!

SEO Project Kickoff Checklist

Is billing set up? – This is useful to ensure that not only is the client in the system and set up for billing but that the project has actually transitioned from sales to operations. It’s also essential to check here that the SEO team knows how much the client is paying.

Is the project in the project management system? – This is a no-brainer (like all the things on the list!) but useful to ensure that you can keep track of the project. In addition it’s important to ensure client contact details are stored there.

Introduce all team members – Ensure anyone within the company who’s working with this client has sat down and knows what everyone else is doing. This is especially important if the client is paying for multiple services such as PPC, Web Development, SEO etc.

Do you know which URL you’re working on? – Often you’ll start work for a company but that business may own many different sections and URLs. Which one are you working on?

What is a conversion? – Whether goal tracking is set up or not in analytics it’s crucial to understand what a conversion is and how much that conversion is worth to the business.

Do you have access to analytics & webmaster central? – SEO without data is like the winter olympics without snow. Ensure you have access to the data from the very start.

Check for irregularities – validating analytics data can be a complete piece of work sometimes, that’s not what I mean here. What I mean here is just a quick sense-check that the site ranks for it’s own name, that analytics data vaguely ties up with rankings, PPC traffic isn’t appearing in analytics as organic etc.

Benchmark current data – The three data points I think it’s useful to benchmark (that you can’t go back and check later) are: 1) Link metrics (my favourite are DA and PA) – it’s useful to store a copy of linkscape somewhere too, 2) A count of indexed pages (yes, I know this is sometimes wildly inaccurate but it’s still worth noting down), 3) A snapshot of rankings for the top 20 keyphrases (full rank tracking/analysis can be set up later in the project).

Has a kickoff meeting with the client been scheduled? – And does the client know who their contact is within the SEO team.

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So it’s a new year (doesn’t 2010 feel like the future?!) and it’s a new you. As Pete blogged last week plenty of new year’s resolutions are being set. For many this may involve getting a better or job or getting paid more money. This post is for you. Hopefully by the time you’ve read this post you’ll have some ideas to turbocharge your career.

First, I present you with a brief personal history. There was some interest in reading this on twitter so hopefully it’s useful to you.

How I Became Head of Search at Distilled

I started out a few years ago stuck in a pretty mundane job working as a project manager. Actually, I wasn’t even a project manager I was a project assistant. My alternative job title may as well have been project manager’s tea-boy. It was reasonably well paid but mentally about as stimulating as being punched in the eye.

About this time Will & Duncan were just setting up the company that would eventually become Distilled and obviously Will was raving to me about this thing called the internet. Believing this to be the future, I decided to get a job working for the internet.

Account Executive is a good entry level job for those wanting to get into SEO.

At this time, I didn’t really have any internet skills except hanging out in forums and playing poker online. Thankfully that seemed to be enough for me to get a job as a Digital Account Executive at a digital agency. This role involved doing account management for both web build projects but also SEO and PPC projects. Although I wasn’t actually doing any SEO, speaking to clients every day about their SEO and PPC campaigns quickly got me interested in what SEO was and how one did it. As I’m sure a lot of you can relate to, once bitten by the SEO bug there was no turning back. I started reading SEOmoz and other blogs and, if I’m honest, got a little bit obsessed.

This was a good thing for the company I was working for however as I started actively becoming involved in running the SEO projects for some quite big name clients. This was fun but ultimately I was still doing a fair amount of account management and my aim was to concentrate on doing SEO so I started looking around. By this time Distilled had taken shape, Will and Duncan had hired their first employee and had even got themselves some nice offices so it was (with hindsight) quite a natural time for them to start think about offering SEO. I jumped ship from my old agency and came to work for Distilled. Tally ho!

Now, technically, at this point I became Head of Search for Distilled, but with only 4 employees and a handful of small clients this wasn’t really too much to brag about. Still, I was able to immerse myself in SEO which was what I wanted and I was enjoying myself.

There was still much to learn at this stage – and although my job title hasn’t changed over the years my job role has changed quite dramatically and I feel like I’ve actually had several different jobs at Distilled as my role has evolved.

As Distilled grew up we hired Rob and Lucy to be SEOs alongside myself. Along with a little bit of hands-on work from Will and Duncan we functioned well as a close-knit team and we all managed our own SEO projects within Distilled, working together but as a pretty flat team. At this point, my

Although my job title hasn’t changed my role has changed several times since I’ve been working at Distilled.

role as "Head of SEO" didn’t involve doing anything much different from Rob and Lucy. That said, the whole company was growing and we started to get on board bigger clients and do more consulting rather than just hands-on SEO for small businesses. This naturally involved more formal reporting, delivering client-side training sessions and putting together high-level reports that our clients could take to their board to influence decisions regarding their online strategy. Good times. Around this time I started to attend a few industry conferences and shortly after I started speaking at industry conferences.

So already my role has changed from managing small-time SEO projects to doing consulting for large companies. Recently, my role has changed again within Distilled – we’ve hired some more staff for our SEO team and I’ve started spending more time on managing a team as well as doing hands-on SEO and consulting.

Anyway, that’s my (far too long) personal story. Hopefully it’s helpful to get a glimpse at how to make the progression within this industry. Although I’ve been lucky that Distilled has provided a new role for me at every step of my career I could easily have taken those 3 separate roles within different companies.

10 Tips To Boost Your SEO Career

And now, without further ado, I present my 10 tips for professional development within the SEO industry. Note that I’m assuming you’re already working in SEO at some level. If you’re not, then I suggest you read Danny’s posts on learning SEO.

While you’re reading through this list you might want to motivate yourself by reminding yourself what you can earn at different job levels within the SEO indsutry.

1) Get Qualified

Although I’m not a huge fan of qualifications generally and certainly in the SEO industry they’re few and far between, but nevertheless – getting either GAIQ or Adwords qualified will look good on a CV and give you some valuable skills. Not to mention they’re pretty easy and cheap so totally learnable in your spare time!

2) Learn Some Secondary Skills

SEO, or more broadly internet marketing, covers such a wide range of topics, skills and industries that it never hurts to have more strings to your bow than just linkbuilding. Try teaching yourself some PHP or CSS. I recently learned a few CSS bits and pieces and they come in handy for styling blog posts (Rob gives a good intro to learning CSS for styling blog posts here).

A side project is a great way of polishing up all your secondary skills, in fact a side project looks great on a CV too as Judith demonstrates here: if your SEO is not moonlighting, fire them.

3) Craft a Kick-Ass CV

When thinking about applying for a job it’s crucial to create an astounding CV, but SEO doesn’t offer too many transferable skills does it? Think again. Instead of putting things like "linkbuilding" on your CV, take a look at Rand’s post on skills that have served him well. All those skills would stand out on a CV. Also worth taking a look at is Rand’s whiteboard friday on how to get an SEO job.

4) Do Some Agency Time

If you’re working in-house then that’s great and I’m in no way trying to suggest that SEOs who work at agencies are better at SEO. But, it has to be said that working agency side you get to work on many more industries than you would otherwise. You can work on news websites, ecommerce websites, lead gen websites and a whole lot more! Getting experience working on a broad range of sites can really help make sure you’re up to speed on all the different niches of SEO – whether it’s local, image search, video search or product search.

On the flip-side, if you’re working agency side then consider working in-house for a bit. You’ll get experience in reporting to a board as well as having to experience first-hand the challenges of getting buy-in from other departments. All useful experience.

5) Immerse Yourself in Excel

I’ve raved about Excel a lot in the past so I won’t do so again here. That said, there are two crucial skills that will help you get a better job and Excel can help both of them. They are reporting and data analysis. Reporting is essential whether you’re working at an agency and need to report to clients or are working in-house and need to report to a board or your boss. Data analysis is essential to ensure that your report is always positive (I’m only half joking here…!).

In summary, if you don’t know how to put graphs and charts into your reports then you won’t get very far, as this chart shows:

6) Present At A Conference

Presenting at conferences is good for so many different reasons. Networking, making friends, having fun, experience in public speaking etc etc. I really love speaking at conferences and you should too. Having it on your CV can really make you look like an expert. And actually speaking is easy – just watch out for the speaker submission forms at SES, SMX, Adtech and all the rest of the conferences and come up with an appealing pitch.

If that’s too daunting, then consider speaking at a smaller conference. I spoke at the first ThinkVisibility in the UK last year and it was only small but lots of fun. This year I’m speaking again and it’s going to be a fair size bigger! How did I get to speak? Simple, I saw Dom twitter about wanting speakers for his conference and sent him a DM. If you apply yourself it’s that simple.

Once you’ve been accepted to speak you’ll want to take a look at these presentation skills for SEO.

7) Make Friends (aka Networking)

Networking used to be something I hated doing. The idea of making small talk with others in your industry filled me with dread. Then I realised what an awesome bunch of people the SEO industry is and decided that actually it was fun to hang around them, swap emails, twitter etc etc and before I knew it I was networking. So get involved in the local SEO scene wherever you are. In London, that means getting yourself down to LondonSEO. By networking you’ll get to know who’s hiring, and more importantly whether they’re worth working for!

If you want to network slightly more officially then check out LinkedIn – you’ll be able to see upcoming job opportunities as well as raising your personal profile. Which brings me neatly to:

Build A Personal Brand

Building a personal brand is essential to getting a decent job, especially in the SEO industry. This xkcd sums it perfectly. There’s some great blog posts on this topic:

• WBF – building a personal brand
• The Layman’s Personal Branding Platform
• SEO Tips for Building Your Personal Brand
• The Ever-Snarky Rebecca Kelly’s Personal Branding + Networking = Job

In summary, get twittering and blogging with a username that’s recognisable and consistent.

9) Get Some Management Experience

Here’s where you might want to take your career to the next level. If you’re looking at trying to transition from an SEO consultant to someone who manages a team you’ll need to get some management experience. If there’s no opportunity for managing a team where you are right now then a great way to get a bit of experience is to get an intern. It’s an easy sell to your boss since you don’t need to pay them and it can look great on your CV.

For anyone who’s looking to try and up their game as an SEO manager then these two posts from Rich Baxter are essential reading:

• SEO Management 101
• Building A Great SEO Team

10) Add More ROI To Every Project You Work On

As the internet grows and as the industry evolves we’re all moving towards becoming "online marketers" rather than just "SEO"s. Many of the skills that we know and love from SEO are applicable to other areas that can bring a client ROI. Two classic examples are email marketing and conversion rate optimisation. Get proficient at both of these and you’ll make yourself an all-round expert and hard to turn down for any kind of online marketing position. Here’s a few primers:

• Learning a little about email marketing
• WBF email marketing and SEO
• Google Website Optimizer 101 (the best page on CRO I know)

Conclusion

In conclusion I just thought I’d mention two things. Firstly, I’m not looking for a job so please hold the recruitment calls – I love working at Distilled and am extremely grateful to Will and Duncan for giving me the opportunity to make it through several iterations of "head of search", here’s to the next iteration! Secondly, everyone’s different but I strongly believe that it’s not all about the money. If you’re applying for a new job then please please try and work for a fun company and make sure that you’ll enjoy it. Your own enjoyment is far more important than just the $$/££ you’ll get paid. Seriously.

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This past week saw the launch of Google’s real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it’s not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this.

Questions I’d love to see the answer to are things like:

• What triggers real-time one-boxes?
• How long do they last?
• Are they tied to a geographic location?
• Are they tied to a language?

Unfortuantely I think it’s a bit early to have answers to questions like this, so rather than tackle these questions I’m just going to talk a little bit about how you can go about tracking the impacts of real-time search results on your industry.

Does real-time search affect my industry?

The answer is probably yes. For search terms that have hardly any tweet-volume I’ve already seen examples where literally one or two tweets can generate a real-time one-box. Sometimes even for the brand name term. That means that more or less any breaking news in your industry will generate some level of real-time results.

But what about other industries? After all many of us will be working on sites that target keyphrases that people DO tweet about. For us, the focus is on trending search terms. The key thing is to identify the types of keyphrase that might feature real-time search results. The most useful way of doing this that I’ve found is to monitor twitter volume and in particular monitor peaks and troughs in volume. Trendistic will do this nicely for you. The first neat thing from Trendistic is that you can see a long list of hot topics by day in the archive:

Browsing through the archives we see that there are certain topics which come up again and again such as TV, film, sports, celebrity etc. These search terms are alwasy going to be affected most by real-time search and SEOs working in this field are likely to already be used to working with QDF search results and various other one-boxes like News.

How Do I Track Real-Time Traffic?

The second nice thing from Trendistic is the ability to query individual terms and see when peaks and troughs occured over time, for example here’s a snapshot of the [eagles] term (nice win Eagles!):

By using a service like this you can query the historic search volume and take an educated guess at when real-time search might have been triggered. By doing this for your main search terms you can start to understand things like strange traffic drops or spikes that might have been caused by real-time one boxes hanging out in your SERPs.

What about if you’re actively engaging in twitter though? If you feel like you might have gained a portion of your search traffic from tweets that were appearing in real-time search results then you should think about tracking those clicks.

Tracking real-time search volume and one-box traffic is a difficult problem however and one that isn’t completely solved. That said, here’s a few things that might be of use. Firstly, for anyone seeing #-based Google URLs you can actually track clicks from different parts of the page. Looking at the following real-time search for [nexus one]:

I clicked on two different results, the first one was a ‘real’ result that appeared in the real-time box, that is a page that’s been crawled recently and shows up via Google rather than showing up because Google found the result on Facebook or Twitter etc. With the # URLs at Google in action I saw the following full referral path:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=blog_result&ct=result&cd=11&ved=0CBcQmAEwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccortez.com%2Fhtc-nexus-one-blessed-by-the-fcc-updated%2F&rct=j&q=nexus+one&ei=gComS7LCDZehjAeDwdTOBw&usg=AFQjCNF2939x_yuKVTzL9UlN6m23cw0Kog

Note the "&oi=blog_result" in the referring URL (bolded added, obviously). This let’s you see any real-time traffic that has come via a crawled blog post. After that I clicked on a twittered URL and got the following:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?url=http://bit.ly/7315xj&rct=j&ei=2yomS4y7NYvNjAfQ3qXfBw&sa=X&oi=microblog_result&resnum=9&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CD8QoAQoADAI&q=nexus+one&usg=AFQjCNGWb9DkQaPZd2NGuOg6Th7lWd9hsg

Note both the url=http://bit.ly/7315xj and &oi=microblog_result (again, bolded). This allows you to see both where the click came from (a real-time microblog result, i.e. from a site like twitter or facebook) but also the URL that was twittered (in this case the bit.ly link).

These referring URLs will show up in your server logs but unfortunately won’t show up in Google Analytics (since Google treats these all as search queries and so will just dump them in the same place and only let you see the keyword searched for). To get them to show up in Google Analytics you need to set up a profile to show the full referring URL, such as the filter detailed in part 2 of this post.

Not all users see these # Google URLs however, most are still seeing the old style search?q= Google URLs. From looking at the traffic for sites where we have the appropriate filter set up I’d say somewhere between 5 and 10% of users are seeing these URLs. This means that if you can get this kind of data for a small proportion of your traffic and extrapolate for the other 90% of users. (Btw, does anyone have any more accurate stats on the % of users seeing which search result type? I’ve not seen anything concrete anywhere…)

Of course, looking at the example above we see that a fair amount of traffic from micro blogging servicies actually goes through URL shorteners such as bit.ly. In that case there’s another method you can use to track your traffic. Take a look at the following referral list for this bit.ly URL:

This allows you to see which of your bit.ly links have appeared on Google search results pages – we can see from this example that 2 have come from new # style Google search results pages and one has come from the old-school format.

I’m sure over the coming weeks more and more will get said about real-time search but hopefully this has been food for thought!

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