Posted by randfishAs some of you likely noticed, Linkscape’s index updated today with fresh data crawled over the past 30 days. Rather than simply provide the usual index update statistics, we thought it would be fun to do some whiteboard diagrams of how we make a Linkscape update happen here at the mozplex. We also felt guilty because our camera ate tonight’s WB Friday (but Scott’s working hard to get it up for tomorrow morning).

Linkscape, like most of the major web indices, starts with a seed set of trusted sites from which we crawl outwards to build our index. Over time, we’ve developed more sophisticated methods around crawl selection, but we’re quite similar to Google, in that we crawl the web primarily in decending order of (in our case) mozRank importance.

For those keeping track, this index’s raw data includes:

• 41,404,250,804 unique URLs/pages
• 86,691,236 unique root domains

After crawling, we need build indices on which we can process data, metrics and sort orders for our API to access.

When we started building Linkscape in late 2007, early 2008, we quickly realized that the quantity of data would overwhelm nearly every commercial database on the market. Something massive like Oracle may be able to handle the volume, but at an exorbitant price that a startup like SEOmoz couldn’t bear. Thus, we created some unique, internal systems around flat file storage that enable us to hold data, process it and serve it without the financial and engineering burdens of a full database application.
Our next step, once the index is in place, is to calculate our key metrics as well as tabulate the standard sort orders for the API

Algorithms like PageRank (and mozRank) are iterative and require a tremendous amount of processing power to compute. We’re able to do this in the cloud, scaling up our need for number-crunching, mozRank-calculating goodness for about a week out of every month, but we’re pretty convinced that in Google’s early days, this was likely a big barrier (and may even have been a big part of the reason the "GoogleDance" only happened once every 30 days).
After processing, we’re ready to push our data out into the SEOmoz API, where it can power our tools and those of our many partners, friends and community members.

The API currently serves more than 2 million requests for data each day (and an average request pulls ~10 metrics/pieces of data about a web page or site). That’s a lot, but our goal is to more than triple that quantity by 2011, at which point we’ll be closer to the request numbers going into a service like Yahoo! Site Explorer.
The SEOmoz API currently powers some very cool stuff:

• Open Site Explorer – my personal favorite way to get link information
• The mozBar – the SERPs overlay, analyze page feature and the link metrics displayed directly in the bar all come from the API
• Classic Linkscape – we’re on our way to transitioning all of the features and functionality in Linkscape over to OSE, but in the meantime, PRO members can get access to many more granular metrics through these reports
• Dozens of External Applications – things like Carter Cole’s Google Chrome toolbar, several tools from Virante’s suite, Website Grader and lots more (we have an application gallery coming soon)

Each month, we repeat this process, learning big and small lessons along the way. We’ve gotten tremendously more consistent, redundant and error/problem free in 2010 so far, and our next big goal is to dramatically increase the depth of our crawl into those dark crevices of the web as well as ramping up the value and accuracy of our metrics.
We look forward to your feedback around this latest index update and any of the tools powered by Linkscape. Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishIn 1997, Google’s founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:

• Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
• All votes are, initially, considered equal
• Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
• More important pages cast more important votes
• The votes a page can cast are a function of that page’s importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts

That algorithm, of course, was PageRank, and it changed the course of web search, providing tremendous value to Google’s early efforts around quality and relevancy in results. As knowledge of PageRank spread, those with a vested interest in influencing the search rankings (SEOs) found ways to leverage this information for their websites and pages.
But, Google didn’t stand still or rest on their laurels in the field of link analysis. They innovated, leveraging signals like anchor text, trust, hubs & authorities, topic modeling and even human activity to influence the weight a link might carry. Yet, unfortunately, many in the SEO field are still unaware of these changes and how they impact external marketing and link acquisition best practices.
In this post, I’m going to walk through ten principles of link valuation that can be observed, tested and, in some cases, have been patented. I’d like to extend special thanks to Bill Slawski from SEO By the Sea, whose recent posts on Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model and What Makes a Good Seed Site for Search Engine Web Crawls? were catalysts (and sources) for this post.
As you read through the following 10 issues, please note that these are not hard and fast rules. They are, from our perspective, accurate based on our experiences, testing and observation, but as with all things in SEO, this is opinion. We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves. Nothing is better for learning SEO than going out and experimenting in the wild.
#1 – Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes

Whenever we (or many other SEOs we’ve talked to) conduct tests of page or link features in (hopefully) controlled environments on the web, we/they find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down. This certainly fits with the recently granted Google patent application – Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data, which suggested a number of items that may considered in the way that link metrics are passed.

Those who’ve leveraged testing environments also often struggle against the power of the "higher link wins" phenomenon, and it can take a surprising amount of on-page optimization to overcome the power the higher link carries.
#2 – External Links are More Influential than Internal Links

There’s little surprise here, but if you recall, the original PageRank concept makes no mention of external vs. internal links counting differently. It’s quite likely that other, more recently created metrics (post-1997) do reward external links over internal links. You can see this in the correlation data from our post a few weeks back noting that external mozRank (the "PageRank" sent from external pages) had a much higher correlation with rankings than standard mozRank (PageRank):

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine Google separately calculating/parsing out external PageRank vs. Internal PageRank and potentially using them in different ways for page valuation in the rankings.
#3 – Links from Unique Domains Matters More than Links from Previously Linking Sites

Speaking of correlation data, no single, simple metric is better correlated with rankings in Google’s results than the number of unique domains containing an external link to a given page. This strongly suggests that a diversity component is at play in the ranking systems and that it’s better to have 50 links from 50 different domains than to have 500 more links from a site that already links to you. Curiously again, the original PageRank algorithm makes no provision for this, which could be one reason sitewide links from domains with many high-PageRank pages worked so well in those early years after Google’s launch.
#4 – Links from Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value

We’ve talked previously about TrustRank on SEOmoz and have generally reference the Yahoo! research paper – Combating Webspam with TrustRank. However, Google’s certainly done plenty on this front as well (as Bill covers here) and this patent application on selecting trusted seed sites certainly speaks to the ongoing need and value of this methodology. Linkscape’s own mozTrust score functions in precisely this way, using a PageRank-like algorithm that’s biased to only flow link juice from trusted seed sites rather than equally from across the web.
#5 – Links from "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value than Those from Footers/Sidebar/Navigation

Papers like Microsoft’s VIPS (Vision Based Page Segmentation), Google’s Document Ranking Based on Semantic Distance, and the recent Reasonable Surfer stuff all suggest that valuing links from content more highly than those in sidebars or footers can have net positive impacts on avoiding spam and manipulation. As webmasters and SEOs, we can certainly attest to the fact that a lot of paid links exist in these sections of sites and that getting non-natural links from inside content is much more difficult.
#6 – Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value than those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images

This one isn’t covered in any papers or patents (to my knowledge), but our testing has shown (and testing from others supports) that anchor text carried through HTML is somehow more potent or valued than that from alt attributes in image links. That’s not to say we should run out and ditch image links, badges or the alt attributes they carry. It’s just good to be aware that Google seems to have this bias (perhaps it will be temporary).
#7 – Links from More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value (even from less important pages)

We’ve likely all experienced the sinking feeling of seeing a competitor with fewer and what appear to be links from less powerful pages outranking us. This may be somewhat explained by the value of a domain to pass along value via a link that may not be fully reflected in page-level metrics. It can also help search engines to combat spam and provide more trusted results in general. If links from sites that rarely link to junk pass significantly more than those whose link practices and impact on the web overall may be questionable, they can much better control quality.
NOTE: Having trouble digging up the papers/patents on this one; I’ll try to revisit and find them tomorrow.
#8 – Links Contained Within NoScript Tags Pass Lower (and Possibly No) Value

Over the years, this phenomenon has been reported and contradicted numerous times. Our testing certainly suggested that noscript links don’t pass value, but that may not be true in every case. It is why we included the ability to filter noscript in Linkscape, but the quantity of links overall on the web inside this tag is quite small.
#9 – A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Overcome "Stronger" Competition Temporarily (or in Perpetuity)

Apart from even Google’s QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) algorithm, which may value more recently created and linked-to content in certain "trending" searches, it appears that the engine also uses temporal signals around linking to both evaluate spam/manipulation and reward pages that earn a large number of references in a short period of time. Google’s patent on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data first suggested the use of temporal data, but the model has likely seen revision and refinement since that time.
#10 – Pages that Link to WebSpam May Devalue the Other Links they Host

I was fascinated to see Richard Baxter’s own experiments on this in his post – Google Page Level Penalty for Comment Spam. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on some popular, valuable blog posts that have received similarly overwhelming spam and, low and behold, the pattern seems verifiable. Webmasters would be wise to keep up to date on their spam removal to avoid arousing potential ranking penalties from Google (and the possible loss of link value).

But what about classic "PageRank" - the score of which we get a tiny inkling from the Google toolbar’s green pixels? I’d actually surmise that while many (possibly all) of the features about links discussed above make their way into the ranking process, PR has stayed relatively unchanged from its classic concept. My reasoning? SEOmoz’s own mozRank, which correlates remarkably well  with toolbar PR (off on avg. by 0.42 w/ 0.25 being "perfect" due to the 2 extra significant digits we display) and is calculated with very similar intuition to that of the original PageRank paper. If I had to guess (and I really am guessing), I’d say that Google’s maintained classic PR because they find the simple heuristic useful for some tasks (likely including crawling/indexation priority), and have adopted many more metrics to fit into the algorithmic pie.
As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback and hope that some of you will take up the challenge to test these on your own sites or inside test environments and report back with your findings.
p.s. I finished this post at nearly 3am (and have a board meeting tomorrow), so please excuse the odd typo or missed link. Hopefully Jen will take a red pen to this in the morning!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by jennitaDisclaimer: You will not learn any SEO, CRO, SMO or Analytics in this post. You may however feel the urge to watch the Wizard of Oz and eat crepes.
As you may have heard, SEOmoz has moved offices (woo hoo!). So we thought it would be nice to take you on a tour of our new digs. We’re quite proud that we outgrew the old space and needed a bigger place. Please follow along as I take you on a tour of the new office.

We are just a block from Pike Place Market, and within walking distance of Bell Harbor which is where SMX Advanced is held. We have the entire top floor! But let’s look at the good stuff… the inside.

First, as you first step out of the elevator you may think, "Wow, this really is a cool space." But then…

You look down at your feet and exclaim, "Wow! I feel the need to breakdance!"

Next, as you make your way through the Operations department (who used to sit in a back, very dark corner) you too will be in complete shock at the sunny, openness of the space. Just like this guy:

Holy big, bright awesome room batman! Yes we even have a meeting room called the Batcave . (Ok, the bat cave is a bright, sunny, room that does not resemble a bat cave in any way. But that’s ok, cuz we have a bat cave. damnit.)

Oh wait. What’s this?! Crepes, yes my friends. On "opening day" at the new moz office we had a crepe guy! "I’ll have one with nutella, strawberries and bananas please."

But seriously, we really have a lot of work to do. See, we’re working! Well at least Ben Huff is (the dude on the left).

Nevermind. Oh look we also had fruit (and mimosas ehem), we’re not complete pigs you know. Remember Phil ? Last time you saw him he was wearing his PJs. #justsayin

Have I mentioned that Rand has an office… with a door… that he can close! This probably isn’t overly exciting for most people but for the developers who used to sit right outside his office (aka his desk) and listened to every phone call, webinar and Whiteboard Friday… let me tell ya, they’re cheering today.

Plus we have 5 meeting rooms now. We used to have one. Again… now there are F I V E. I was late to a meeting earlier because I couldn’t find Thunderdome. I thought it was in Spider Skull Island, but apparently those are different. heh. Boys named our meeting rooms if you hadn’t guessed that already.
 

Rand in sheer shock:

Plus really, who could resist having this right outside the window:

The only downside to getting a new office is that now we all have this silly dress code.

Wonder Twins… Activate!
If you’re going to be in town for SMX Advanced, we’ll have a few office tours set up. The dates/times will be announced soon, and we’d love to show you around in person!
Thanks to my husband, Rudy Lopez who provided the amazing photos (all except the obvious snapshots).
 Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Danny Dover As recently as a month ago I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder. This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers. When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics was important but avoided the extra effort necessary to learn how to get the most out of the software. This post explains what I needed to learn to get over this.

After learning the basics of Google Analytics, you can learn interesting facts like what search terms people use to find your website. In this case, web searchers are more interested in fat people falling than they are in me.

Here is the problem with Google Analytics:
It is obviously potentially useful but who has the time to study how to use a product. I don’t even read the text-less IKEA manuals so why would I read documentation for software. Sounds boring.
This all changed when SEOmoz offered to pay for me to go to WebShare’s Google Analytics Seminar (Wait, you are paying me to leave the office? Mission Accomplished). This 16 hour class walked me through Google Analytics and pushed me through the massive learning curve.
This post distills what I learned in those 16 hours of employer-paid-learning into something you can understand and act on in 20 minutes. Nerd High Five! (*Pushes up glasses*)
Overcome the Google Analytics Learning Curve in 20 Minutes:

An actionable guide to learning what you need to know about Google Analytics.
First Things First:
What are Accounts and Profiles and how are they different?
When you first log in to Google Analytics you need to navigate to your desired data set. This is much more confusing than it ought to be.
Accounts are like folders on a computer. They can contain a lot of different files (profiles) and serve mostly just for organization. An example of an account might be Work Websites or Personal Websites. (Be forewarned, this is not intuitive on setup. Don’t make the mistake I did and name an account after a website. That naming convention is more appropriate for a profile).

Profiles, on the other hand, are like files on a computer. They can’t contain additional profiles or accounts. They represent one view of a website (although not necessarily the only view). An example of a profile might be api.seomoz.org or SEOmoz minus Office IP addresses. You can limit a profile to whatever view of a website you want by using filters.

What are Filters and Segments and how are they different?
This is also more complicated than it ought to be. (grrr)
Filters are attached to website profiles (i.e. "SEOmoz minus office IP addresses") and are permanent. If a profile includes traffic data from all IP addresses except SEOmoz’s office computers, there is absolutely no way to reinclude this excluded data in the given profile at a later time. Filters are irreversible and kinda mean (thus the anal in Google Analytics). You can set them up on the profiles page. (See Below)

Segments are similar to filters except they are profile agnostic and their effects are temporary. In addition, they can be compared against each other. The example segments below shows all visitors (blue line), new visitors (orange line), and returning visitors (green line) and their distribution on the top content of the given website.

What are "raw" profiles and why use them? (Ctrl+Z won’t save you here) 
Google Analytics is different from other Google products in that it doesn’t provide a way to undo certain types of data processing (i.e. filters). In order to give you freedom to explore (and potentially ruin) your profiles, it is important that you create an unfiltered (raw) profile of your website that you can use in case something goes wrong with one of your other profiles. In SEOmoz’s case, this profile is literally called "Do Not Touch! Backup Profile". This is the backup profile we will use to get historical data when Joanna Lord screws up our other profiles. (Danny!)
What if I don’t trust a specific metric?
Tough beans! The key to getting the most out of Google Analytics is to trust it. This is very similar to how we measure time. We all know that our bedroom clock is probably not exactly synced with our office clock but we trust each time-peice as close enough. You need to make the same leap of faith for Google Analytics. The metrics might not be 100% accurate all of the time, but like a clock, at least they are consistent. This makes Google Analytics metrics good enough. (And quite frankly it is as accurate as all of its competitors)
 
Navigating Google Analytics:

Google Analytics Navigation
Dashboard (Mostly Useless High-level Metrics)
As you would expect, the dashboard shows you the high-level status of your website. The problem is that these metrics tend not to drastically change very often so if you keep looking at your dashboard, you won’t like see any big changes. ZzzzzzzzZZZzzzzz.
Real analytics pros don’t let friends rely on the default dashboard stats.
Intelligence (Automated e-mail alerts) – Check Monthly
Intelligence is Google’s confusing name for automatic alerts. Did traffic to your homepage jump 1000% over last week? Are visits from New Zealand down 80% from yesterday? Intelligence alerts will, with your permission, e-mail you if anything unexpected happens on your website.
Visitors (The type of people that come to your site) – Check Monthly
As the name implies, this section reveals information about your visitors. Want to know what percentage of your users have Flash enabled or how many people viewed your website on an iPad? This section will tell you. (Long live Steve Jobs!)
Traffic Sources (Where people are coming from to reach your site) – Check Weekly
This section shows you different reports on the sources that drove you traffic.
Content (Metrics on your pages) – Check Weekly
Whereas, Traffic Sources shows you information about other people’s pages as they relate to yours, the Content section only shows you information about what happens on your pages.
Goals (Metrics on whether or not people are doing what you want them to do) – Check Daily
Goals are predefined actions on your website that you want others to perform. It is important to note that you must configure these manually. Google can’t auto detect these. This section shows metrics on how people completed these goals or where they dropped off if they didn’t complete them.
 
Report Interface:

The bread and butter of Google Analytics are the reports. These are the frameworks for learning about how people interact with your website.
Graph:
The graphs/reports in Google Analytics have 6 important options. The first three are detailed below:

• Export. This is pretty self explanatory. You can export to PDF, XML, CSV, CSV for Excel or if you are too good for commas you can export to TSV.
• E-mail. This is one of Google Analytics more useful features. This tab allows you to schedule reoccurring e-mails or one time reports for your co-workers. As an added bonus, if you set up these auto-reports, the recipeients don’t even need to log into Google Analytics to access this data.
• Units (in this case Pageviews). This is a report dependent unit that you can change based on the context.

• Advanced Segments. This is an extremely powerful feature that allows you to slice and dice your data to your likings.
• Date Range (in this case, Apr 24 2010 – May 24 2010).
• Graph By. This feature allows you to choose the scope of the graph in relation to time intervals. For some reports you can even break down data to the hour.

 
Data:
Data is your tool to see specifics and and make quantifiable decisions.

• Views. This feature actually affects the graphs and the data. It dictates the type of graph or the format or the data.
• ?. This is your source for help on any given metric.
• Secondary Dimension (in this case, None). This allows you to splice the data table by specific data dimensions (cities, sources, etc…)

 
Which Reports To Track and When:

I recommend using this as a starting point and tailoring it to your needs as you learn more about the unique needs for your website.
Daily
Goals -> Total Conversions
Content -> Top Content (at the page level)
Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources
Traffic Sources -> Campaigns – (Optional)
Weekly (or bi-weekly if you have a content intensive website)
Goals -> Funnel Visualization
Goals -> Goal Abandoned Funnels
Content -> Site Search
Traffic Sources -> Direct Traffic
Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites
Traffic Sources -> Keywords
Monthly
Visitors -> Overview
Intelligence -> Overview
Content -> Content Drilldown (at the folder level)
Content -> Top Landing Pages
Content -> Top Exit Pages
Traffic Sources -> Adwords – (Optional)
 
Which Reports to Ignore:

Visitors -> Benchmarking
From installation validation tools, it’s estimated that as many as 70% of Google Analytics installs are either incomplete or incorrect. This means that the data that these benchmarks rely on, is very likely inaccurate.
Visitors -> Map Overlay
While this feature is one of the most popular features of Google Analytics, it is also one of the least useful. The data these maps present is not normalized so areas with high populations tend to always dominate the screen. They are not completely useless as they show trends but they are not something that can be relied on heavily either. Use your best judgement when viewing this report.
Content -> Site Overlay
This feature seems like a good idea but is not able to be implemented in a way that makes it accurate. Put simply, in order for this tool to work, Google Analytics would need to have more information about the location of a link on a page and a mechanism for tracking which instance of a link gets clicked. Clicktale and Crazy Egg are nice alternatives.
 
Conclusion:

Tracking the metrics above is only the first step. Imagine Google Analytics as a magical yard stick (For you sissies on the metric system, a yard stick is like a meter stick but better). It is essential for measuring the success or failure of a given online strategy but it is not an online strategy alone. It is best used as a supplement to the your current activities and should be treated as such.
I am surely going to get some flak from some Analytics gurus who know more than me. (You want to go Kaushik?) Remember, this guide is intended to help people get over the GA learning curve, not to be a comprehensive guide. If you are looking for the latter, check out the hundreds of blog posts at the Google Analytics Blog.
One last thing, if you’re interested in taking the Seminars for Success classes, here’s the upcoming schedule.

Phoenix, AZ
June 9-11, 2010

Chicago, IL
June 23-25, 2010

Berkeley, CA
July 28-30, 2010

Los Angeles, CA
Aug 18-20, 2010

San Diego, CA
Sep 1-3, 2010

Salt Lake City, UT
Sep 15-17, 2010

Vancouver, BC
Oct 6-8, 2010

Atlanta, GA
Oct 27-29, 2010

Orlando, FL
Nov 3-5, 2010

Washington, DC
Dec 8-10, 2010

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by lauraThis post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.Let me start by asking you this.  What makes your site:

In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself.  Now that we’ve gone through defining target audiences, doing categorized keyword research, finding Gaps & Opportunities and defining who the competition is, we’re going to take one more important step before dumping this all into a big juicy pile of strategy. We’re going to sniff out the competition and see what makes them different and remarkable, and we’re going to use those creative noggins to work on topping them. Are you feeling confident?
We’re going beyond comparing title tags here; We’re looking at product features that would make people want to visit your site instead of your competitors, and not just visit once, but visit repeatedly, sign up, link to, email their friends, share on Facebook and Twitter, etc.  We’re looking at what makes your competitors sticky, what makes them linkbait, what makes them lovable.  Because SEO today isn’t just great meta tags, it’s a great product.
We’re going to slice and dice the competitors in a couple of different ways, and like most of what we’ve covered so far, you should feel free to do any kind of research or use any tools that work for you – you don’t need to do exactly what is shown here. I highly encourage getting creative and breaking out your own competitor template and/or build on top of these examples,
TEMPLATIZING COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
If you’ve read the previous steps in this SEO Strategy series you know I’m an Excel junkie and you probably know what I’m about to say next, don’t you?  That’s right! We’re going to open up Excel and make tabs!
This time we’re making a competitive research template that you can use for any of your SEO competitive research projects.   The tabs we’ll create for this example will be:

• Features
• Sentiment
• On-Page
• Inlinks
• Traffic

 
I know I don’t need to say it again (but I will) – this is just an example. You can do whatever you feel is right here.  The idea is to get a good big-picture look at what our competitors are doing, not just in their title tags and inlinks, but what features, tools and social visibility do they have? What is it that’s making them rank so well, and what is it that’s making people like them, want to share their content, want to link to them, etc.   We’re not just counting inlinks and looking at the anchor text.  We’re comparing product offerings. We’re looking for what makes a site naturally popular.
It’s important to realize that SEO is so much more than inlinks and tag optimization. There have been plenty of sites that have gained top rankings and high visibility before they ever accomplished SEO basics.  If you’ve got a hot product, links and traffic will come more naturally. And if that’s what our competitors are doing, then we want to peek into their properties and see how we can do even better, or at least do great at the parts they’re slacking on (finding or refining our niche).
We’ll create one of these Competitive Template worksheets for each category we’re comparing (from the categories you defined in Step 2 and/or the Gaps and Opportunities you want to target from Step 3).  This way we’re looking at our competitors in each niche, rather than just for the site as a whole, since they oftentimes are very different.
GET IN THE MINDSET
Here’s here we ask ourselves, “Self? Based on what I’m learning by looking at my competitors’ offerings, what specific things should be built into this product in order for it to have a good chance at outranking them?”  Remember in high school when you wanted to be cool like the popular girl so you studied how she acted, what she said, who she hung out with, what she wore, etc?  It’s sort of like that except you don’t want to be like her, you want to be even AWESOMER.  You want to be the one who has the coolest clothes, the most interesting friends, and the best parties in town that everybody wants to go to and cant stop talking about. 
So I encourage you to be as specific and thorough as possible in your research, but also be realistic.   If you just can’t afford to be that cool for example, then can you be the coolest kid in town for a specific group of people (aka can you be the best and most relevant site for a specific niche or subgroup/subtopic)?  Think creatively and always keep in mind who you’re targeting and what you can bring to the table. 
Now that my cliché high school movie clique speech is out of the way, I’ll  share some examples of research you can do, but feel free to compare whatever features you feel are important.
REMEMBER YOUR TARGET MARKET AND THEIR GOALS
If you’ve done some persona research or defined target markets in Step 1, keep that in your mind for this Step.  Remember that you’re looking at these site features and content from your target market’s perspective, and you’ll want to check that whatever goals they are trying to reach are available on your site and the competitors’ sites, and how easy those goals are to find and to achieve. 
For example, let’s say I have a music site, and I defined a persona in Step 1 that I named Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy is a Rolling Stone reader and music aficionado who likes to impress his friends with his endless wealth of music industry knowledge.  Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy likes to stay on top of the latest Rock ‘n’ Roll news, so he’s looking for the best site online to get breaking rock ‘n’ roll news and fresh perspectives in his RSS feed and maybe could be swayed into a newsletter.
I would have created a music news keyword category just for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy in Step 2.  I found out who my competitors are for music news keywords in Step 4.  Now, when I dig into these competitor’s sites, I can poke around and look at everything they’ve got going on, but I also want to pay special attention to the task(s) at hand for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy.  Does my site and/or my competitors’ sites offer what he’s looking for? Is it easy to find? Are steps to conversion simple and user-friendly? How does my conversion process compare to my competitors? What product is Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy more likely to subscribe to, come back to, share with his Rock ‘n’ Roll friends, etc?
Putting this lens on allows you to catch things you might not have noticed by just comparing inlinks and tags. If you’re intrigued by this process, check out my favorite industry book to hit the shelves recently – Vanessa Fox’s Marketing in the Age of Google. It goes into this kind of stuff in more detail – you’ll love it.
Now let’s get into some spywork, shall we?
TAB 1: FEATURE & CONTENT COMPARISON
I’ll usually compare at least these three types of things in my feature & content comparisons:

• Content & Landing Pages
• Resources, Widgets, Tools
• Social Presence & promotion

I’ll create a matrix with my site and 1-5 of my top competitor sites (that we defined in Step 4) in the rows, and the aspects I’m comparing in the columns.   So it might look something like this:

The stuff I compare is different every time I do one of these.  Think about what you want to compare that would be important to visitors and/or your targets, and put that in there.  I’ll usually end up adding things as I go along.  For example if I find out that one of my competitors provides a calculator tool and I hadn’t thought about that, I’ll add it to the feature comparisons.
Once you’ve done this, step back and take a good look at what sets these sites apart.  Ask yourself some of these questions:

• What features/content do my competitors have that I don’t?
• Does this content serve a need my target markets are looking to fulfill?
• Could/should I provide those features/this content? Could I make them even (more comprehensive, easier to use, more valuable to my visitors, provide it faster, easier, cheaper, etc)?
• How active are they in social networks where my target markets might be?
• How are they promoting their content through social sharing functions on their sites?
• Do they have proper targeted landing pages for the terms I care about?
• Are there calls-to-action on the landing pages? How apparent are they?
• Are there features of the site (tools, calendars, calculators, communities, etc) that might encourage repeat visits to the site?

I could go on, but the idea is to get a good feel for what’s going on in this competitive space, and start to form some recommendations based on this comparison that you’ll put in your Recommendations section of your Strategy document.  Take notes on this and start to form your recommendations now.  You can iron them out and make them sound good later, but you don’t want to forget, so make sure to get these thoughts while their still fresh in your head.
TAB 2: SENTIMENT (LIKES/ DISLIKES):
This one can be a crap shoot, but if you can get any insights out of it – excellent.
First, if you happen to have any good social monitoring tools that are half decent at determining sentiment (I’m a huge fan of NetBase for larger shops) use these to determine what people like about your competitors products and features, and what they don’t like about yours (if applicable).  Also check out what they wish someone provided, or what they want or need or are looking for that they haven’t been able to find online. 
If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search!  Search for any variation of things like:

• “like” +
• “love” +
• “I wish” +
• “sucks” +
• “hate” +

What you find may or may not be useful, and remember, we’re not just looking for SEO-related stuff here – we’re not looking for whether people love or hate our SEO – we’re looking for what people love or hate or how they feel about your product and your competitor products.  We want to know why they like the popular girl more than the other girls.  Or more specifically, we want to know why they visit, revisit, link to, share, email, bookmark, or talk about that product.
If whatever you find is relevant and insightful, make a note of it.  The insights you gain from here will go into your Recommendations in the next step.
TAB 3: SEO ON-PAGE COMPARISON
On-page comparisons can be automated, and there are a few good tools that provide usable data.  But of course the best on-page comparisons come with a touch of SEO know-how to not only show where there might be a flag, but of course determine 1) if the flag is actually a concern, 2) the level of concern/priority for each flag, and 3) the actions to take to fix it.
Here are a couple of on-Page SEO Comparison Tools that you can use any combination of to compare yourself against competitors:

• SEOmoz Crawl Test
• SearchCLU
• Website Grader
• Covario

Of course there are lots more out there – feel free to share your favorite with us in the comments. But remember, automated tools are not SEO consultants.  They can only do so much. Use this as a base to compare some of the on-page features, and add your own analysis to what’s working or not working for you vs. your competitors for these on-page factors.
Make notes of the things you consider flags – not all of it has to be noted or used in your recommendations.  In fact, I usually only note a few things here that stand out.  For everything else, I point to regular canned SEO best practices from the Recommendations section of the Strategy document.  This isn’t a best practices document; this is a custom analysis with specific insights and recommendations (which is why you’re worth so much).   
TAB 4: INLINK COMPARISON
I’ll keep this one light and simple – you guys know how to do link research by now. You can use some of the inlink tools to compare the number of external links to the site and even the anchor text used in those links in this tab.  If you do, be sure to graph the results. 
 
What I’ll often do with inlinks too, is create a grid to see if I can determine who’s possibly link-shacking with who.  Take your top x sites, including your own, and put each site in a cell across a couple of columns of your Excel tab.  Put the same sites in rows in the cell tab that you’ll cross-check with the columns. 

Then do this search in Yahoo Search:
Site:site1.com linkdomain:site2.com
This will return any pages from site 1 that are linking to site 2 (and indexed in Yahoo). For example, here are the pages on Wikipedia.org that link to seomoz.org: 
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awikipedia.org+linkdomain%3Aseomoz.org 
Do this for each site (both directions).  Keep in mind some of these links might have nofollows on them (use the SEOmoz toolbar to easily see nofollows).  Sometimes you’ll see some sites with heavy cross-linking.  This might mean a partnership, network, or paid links.  Whether or not any of this cross-linking info is useful is questionable, but I like to see it if I have time to do the work. 
Use this tab for any link comparisons you feel are important to explore.  Because I’m skimping on this section a little, I expect you guys to share your competitive inlink practices in the comments.  If you gain any good insights from what you find in your competitive inlink research in this tab, make a note of it for your Recommendations that we’ll build out in the next step in this series.
TAB 5: TRAFFIC COMPARISON
We know who our competitors are in search results.  I also like to look at overall traffic to get an idea of who’s killing it beyond just Search.  If your competitors are getting a lot of traffic in general, they’re doing something right.  Also what are their traffic trends?
Here are some tools you can use to look at traffic and traffic trends:

• Compete
• Alexa
• AttentionMeter
• comScore
• Nielsen
• HitWise

This is another one of those things that I like to look at, but usually isn’t extremely actionable for SEO.  I like to know the trends and the overall popularity of my competitors.  I might gain some insight from looking at these, like if any competitors are losing ground or gaining fast (many times this could be due to search traffic since search often drives a large percentage of traffic to many sites).
TAB 6+: YOURS
What else do you want to compare?  Add as many tabs as you like.  This isn’t necessarily something you have to give to your client (although you could add it on as an appendix), this is a space for you to use to explore the competitive landscape.  Add what you feel you want to dig into, and take notes on what you find that is useful for your recommendations along the way.  We’ll be creating that part of the Strategy document next.
WHAT YOU NEED IN THE END
You need specifics. You need competitive insights that go beyond title tag comparisons.  You need to know everything about the popular girls.  The most important tab for me in this whole process is usually the features & content comparison.  This is the stuff that speaks to why a site is popular (as long as I’m comparing the right things) and it’s the stuff that can affect some of the other tabs like inlinks and traffic.  I use the insights I gain on this tab almost every time.  I may not find any really good insights in the rest of the research, but I almost always find some juicy nuggets in the feature & content comparisons.
You should now have a really good idea of what you’re up against, where your site stands competitively, and what you might need to consider in terms of providing a unique, remarkable offering to your target markets.  Combine that with Gaps & Opportunities we found in Step 3, and categories and keywords of interest you found in Step 2, and you should have a nice set of notes that you can use to form some solid, specific recommendations in the next step.
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Posted by Tom_CHowdy 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.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfishLast week, I gave a 45-minute presentation at eMetrics London on a variety of analytics for SEO topics. The presentation slide deck is embedded below:
Metrics for SEO by Rand Fishkin (eMetrics London 2010)
The presentation went into more depth in person, but topics included:
Some basics:

• Measuring traffic against macro query growth
• Measuring against search market share
• Measuring against temporal trends
• Keyword selection based on traffic quantity, quality and difficulty of ranking
• Choosing keyword messaging to optimize conversion rate
• Tracking CTRs on search results
• Identifying crawl errors using a variety of tools
• Tracking rankings – when, where and why it’s useful 

A handful of intermediate level tactics:

• Getting beyond "last-click" attribution
• Evaluating indexation for SEO
• Tracking vertical search results using filters

And some more advanced items:

• Evaluating metrics for predicting search results ordering and valuing links/content
• Applying metrics to improve your SEO
• Valuing social media together with search
• Discussing the relative impacts (both primary and second-order effects) that social has on rankings

Happy weekend everyone!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by great scott!Link building sucks.  You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. It can be slow, tedious, and exhausting. It’s also one of the most crucial aspects of complete search engine optimization.  So what do you do when faced with the intimidating challenge of building links? Once upon a time, you could’ve just submitted your site to a few hundred cheap directories (or a few thousand like so many of the $99 "SEO" shops offer), arrange for a few dozen reciprocal links from sites with decent PageRank, and maybe even negotiate a nice, keyword-targeted footer link from a reasonably popular blog. Bing-bang-boom, you’ve got several hundred good links with super-optimized anchor text…hellooooo rankings!

Those of you who’ve been playing this game for a while are probably thinking, "ahh, 2004, those were the days!" Everyone else is either looking at the screen incredulously or laughing hysterically, "this stuff doesn’t work at all anymore!" Oh really? Doesn’t it?  Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory links often have a bad rap because in the last several years they’ve largely become synonymous with cheap, spammy, dishonest, and largely useless scam SEO offers. But here’s the catch: if you’re careful, reasonable, and practical, these oft-maligned practices can still be effective.  Don’t go screaming black hat on me, watch this week’s video to learn the how, when, and why of what can make these black sheep of the link building world viable tactics.
 

 
As discussed in the video there are times when these strategies can be legitimate.  Rand covered these in a lot of detail in our recent PRO Webinar on Advanced Competitive Link Building, so if you’re a PRO Member, be sure to watch the recording. For now, let’s look at some situations where these strategies can still work.
Sitewide Links  The early oughties (aka 2000’s) were the like Studio 54 for sitewide links: shady links were snorting coke off of hookers in the dark recesses of footer navigation across the web. Then Google raided the joint looking for manipulative link patterns like the IRS looking for cooked books–the jig was up for footer and sidebar sitewide nav links.  To this day you can occasioanlly stumble across a rogue footer containing a few links out to ridiculously unrelated content (one local theater here in Seattle has links out to branded baby care products), but by-and-large this practice is no longer used…except for when it is.  Does Disney link to other sites in its content network? Does Lulu link to their SEOmoz and PC magazine awards? Does SEOmoz link to service partners like Distilled and Exact Target? Yes, they/we do and we do so in sitewide footers. These are legitimate and natural relationships. There’s nothing strange or fishy here. In fact, if any of these links were paid, they’d be better off on one or two strong pages rather than on a sitewide navigational element. Basically, you should consider these bad if/when they seem unnatural and/or they’re done alongside other shady stuff.
Reciprocal Links  First things first: within niche industries, natural reciprocal links are compeletely natural. In fact they’re often difficult to avoid. Think about the SEO space; SEOmoz, SEOBook, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and all the others…we’re constantly linking to each other, but do we ever call up Aaron or Loren or Matt and say, "hey, I’ll link to your page if you link back to mine with this exact anchor text"? No, that’d be ridiculous. ‘Reciprocal’ becomes a four-letter word when it becomes clear that your site has an unusually high proportion of 1-to-1 links (you and other sites link to each other only once), often with suspiciously consistent anchor text. Those are the phenomena that start to look shady and draw attention.
Directory Links Here’s the litmus test for a directory: Do they care who you are? Good directories endeavour to actually create a high-value resource by excercising editorial control and restricting listings to sites and businesses that will be of value to their users. Bad directories endeavour to maximize the number of people willing to pay them money to be listed next to Der International Haus of Spamcakes because, hey, it’s a PR3 link! It’s really that simple. Directory links of the good variety can be really solid link sources (they’re often niche or local), but the bad kind (of which you can probably find 20,000 for $99) ain’t gonna do a damn bit of good for you.
When it comes down to it, you simply need to use good judgement with your link efforts. Is this a link someone would not be surprised to find on this site and in this location? Is the link from a site you could or would legitimately link to in a blog post? Would your site or page be a good resource for someone visiting a particularly directory? What about the rest of the content and links, do they seem legitimate?  A little honest evaluation and some common sense is really all you need to avoid engaging in bad linking practices.Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by LindsayThe preparation of an SEO Site Audit is something that every SEO, whether in-house, agency-side, or independent consultant, has done. They range from a brief assessment of an hour or two followed by a quick email  to a mammoth document of more than 50 pages that can take a month or more to complete. A junior SEO might charge a few hundred dollars for a quick assessment and a well known consultancy can charge in the neighborhood of $40K for a report on the more complete end of the scale. For a process that gets that much time and money allocated it’s way, I’m amazed at the lack of chatter on industry blogs. I suppose what elements we review and how we go about the process are among the things that SEOs hold close to their chest.
In true SEOmoz spirit, I’m cracking open the black box and sharing what I’ve learned along the way. This is the first post of many that you will see from me over the coming months on the topic of optimizing your SEO reviews. Today, I’ll cover a few of the most significant elements that I’ve come up with over the years to include in all large SEO reviews.
1. SEO Scorecard
I’m starting with the single most important element of the SEO Audits I create. The idea was hammered out with the guidance of an executive at my old in-house gig. Woody wanted something to bring to the VCs that would summarize our SEO health across multiple web properties in a clean and concise summary. I told him SEO was too complicated for that, but he pushed me and together we came up with the SEO Scorecard.
The scorecard works on a five point rating scale and assesses the website’s key pages in columns against a hearty list of categorized SEO factors in rows. Don’t go overboard when selecting your key pages. I’ve never had to go over five even on the largest of websites. Once you dig in to a website you will usually find that 90% of the content is represented by a handful of templates. The SEO Scorecard is built and populated in Excel, then pulled into your audit document in screen shots.
I always feature the SEO Scorecard near the beginning of the document. It is an excellent way to anchor the rest of the report and gives you something to reference as you describe enhancements. I’m including a screen shot of the first bit of my current SEO Scorecard so you can visualize what I’m talking about.

2. Internal Linking
I’m not talking about the SEO factor here; I’m referring to how link within your SEO Audit Word document. If your reports are anything like the ones I’ve worked on, they end up huge in terms of length and file size. This is especially true if you are good at including screen shots and other graphic elements. Help your readers navigate the document with a click-able table of contents and plenty of embedded links between related sections and topics. Your readers will get more out of the document and will be able to navigate it in a way that makes the most sense to their learning style. This internal linking process might add an hour to the final editing process, but your clients will thank you. Believe me.
Here is a screen shot from the Most Pressing & Valuable Changes section of an audit.

3. Action Items
One of these days, I’ll share the outline that I use in creating an SEO Review document. For now, you can imagine a series of headings and subheadings along with a whole lot of text and a sprinkling of screen shots. For the average Joe, an SEO Review is a brute of a document to read. The concepts are foreign and as they read they’re mind is spinning with ideas of how they will implement the grand ideas you’ve presented. Don’t burden your readers with the additional task of creating a to-do list as they read. After you’ve elaborated on the details of an issue and how it should be resolved, include a list of action items. These are meant as a brief summary, so keep them short and concise!
Here is a sample of action items that followed the Local Search section of a recent report I created.

4. Repetition
As much as you like to think that your clients will read your entire review document over and over with bated breath, they won’t. More likely, your clients will skim the document looking for the most important issues and action items.
At SEOmoz, we not only covered key issues in the SEO Scorecard and in written detail within a dedicated section. We covered the most important components in one form or another a total of SIX times; Overview, Table of Contents, Scorecard, Most Pressing & Valuable Changes section, the topic section (most complete), the Action Items, and the document’s Closing Summary. I’m not suggesting that you copy and paste your entire assessment six times, but what I am suggesting is that you mention key enhancements often and place internal links to the complete assessment within the document’s dedicated section.

• Tell ‘em what your gunna tell ‘em (Overview).
• Tell ‘em some details about the most important things your gunna tell ‘em (Most Pressing & Valuable Changes). 
• Tell ‘em where to find the info (Table of Contents, Internal Links).
• Tell ‘em just how bad it is on a scale of 1-5 (SEO Scorecard).
• Tell ‘em (the topic section).
• Tell ‘em what you told ‘em (Closing Summary).

I’ve been writing audits for a long time and will say that it has become one of my favorite tasks as an SEO. It wasn’t always that way. In the beginning it takes countless hours to get your groove and find your efficiencies. I hope that I’ve shared a few ideas here today that will improve your experience writing SEO Audits moving forward.
Keep your eyes out for more posts on the topic of SEO audits over the coming months. I plan to publish something every two weeks until I run out of interesting things to say. Topic suggestions are welcome.
Action Items

Happy Auditing!Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by chenryAnalytics is one of those things that hasn’t always been at the top of my priority list until recently. Google Analytics has many features I’ve never used before because I haven’t had the time to sit down and really investigate what they can do for me and my clients. A few months ago, in one of my late night GA adventures, I found a section on event tracking, a small love soon formed.
Like most of you out there I often find myself creating different CTA’s (Calls to Action) and wonder how effective they really are. Google Analytics allows you to setup goals but that really doesn’t track the effectiveness of your specific CTA’s. Through the combination of event tracking and CTA’s, you can easily find those CTA’s that are not making the cut and replace them with something more effective.
 
The Setup
First you will obviously need to have Google Analytics installed on your website. If you already GA installed on your website you need to make sure you have the most current, up to date, script. If your script in not current you can follow the instructions HERE depending on if you are using asynchronous snippet, traditional snippet, or the urchin.js tracking. Once your GA script is setup correct to allow tracking you are ready to setup the links you will be tracking. 
 
Before we start to use event tracking we should take a quick look at the syntax and the way you can use it. The syntax for the _trackEvent() method is:
 
_trackEvent(category, action, label)

• category (required)
  The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
•  action (required)
  A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional)
  An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.

Example: seomoz.org 
Lets first look at how you can use event tracking and use SEOmoz as an example. In the image below are two unique CTA’s that both end up at the same page. How would you tell if a user clicked on the top CTA or the bigger CTA in the middle of the screen? Using event tracking it would be quite clear what CTA was the most effective at getting clients to that page. 

Implementing event tracking is quite simple, you just need to add a simple onClick javascript action fill that with the _trackEvent syntax and you’re done. Below is how I would setup link tracking for the two CTA’s we discussed above in the example section. It may look a little different for you depending on if you are using asynchronous snippet, traditional snippet, or the urchin.js tracking. The example below is for asynchronous tracking.

 
 
In the example you will see that the category for the tracking is set as “GoPro”, because the CTA is about becoming a PRO member. The action is “FrontPage” because both of these CTA’s are located on the front page, you could also place the URL or page in this area. The label is set as a unique identifier, either “TopMenu” or “MiddleImage”, which refers to the specific CTA that you are tracking. If you have similar CTA on different pages you could change the label to reflect the page of your CTA.
 
Once your links are setup and you can view the data in the Content -> Event Tracking section on GA. When you find CTA that are under producing, think about replacing them with something that might work better in that location.  I often compare the number of clicks on my CTA’s with the number of goals that were completed.  If I find that I have a high number of clicks but lack the conversions, there may be a problem with the landing page.   If I’m not getting the clicks on my CTA’s then it may be a problem where my clients are not seeing my CTA’s or they are not appealing, either way it helps me narrow down any issues I may have.
 
If you are having problems getting data to show up in your reports, please check the Common Pitfalls section or leave a comment below for some additional help.
 
Other Uses for Event Tracking 
I’ve also been using event tracking for monitoring clicks on my external links. It provides a great way to find out what links your clients are using. Event tracking can also be used monitor load times on videos, though I have yet to experiment with that feature.  Another way to use event tracking would be what Sam Niccolls post a few months back in step number 10 in 11 Conversion Rate Optimization Lessons Learned in 2009.  In step 10, Sam talked about using Virtual Pageviews to track form abandonment.  Unlike the old virtual page views method, using this method does not inflate page views and will not affect your overall data.  In what way are you using event tracking that could help out everyone else in the community?
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