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Seven Things That Reality Could Borrow From The Internet

Posted by Jane Copland on Aug 27, 2008

Posted by Jane Copland

The Internet, as fragile, infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly does some things that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in real life. I am not a programmer, so this is piecemealed together from things I do know... but in my ideal world, I'd be able to solve most of my problems with a couple of simple instructions and a hard refresh.

1.  Redirecting phone numbers. When I moved to Seattle (two years ago last Saturday), I acquired a local number. In the days before Facebook became microchipped into everyone's forehead, I had little means of getting in touch with everyone I knew and letting them know that my number had changed.

I would like to take the hassle out of changing my phone number. I should be able to text my service provider with this:

Redirect 301 3456 1-206-555-2387

This would be far more convenient than trying to email everyone in my phone book.

Additionally, upon receiving a new number, it came to my attention that the number was only one digit different to that of a large parking garage in Seattle. No, I cannot help you get your car out of the Union Square garage at seven a.m. on Sunday morning.

2.  To deal with the people who'd abandoned their cars in the garage whilst out drinking in Seattle, I'd like to text in:

if ($question=="parking garage")
echo "Your car has been impounded.";
else
echo "Hello.";

3.  Another thing I found infuriating upon moving to the U.S. was your addresses. In New Zealand, we have addresses like:

23 Smith Street
Wadestown
Wellington
New Zealand

I shall not entertain the idea that New Zealand may have, in the time I have been away, instigated postal codes. Here, and in various other countries too cool for simple addresses, you've made things far too complicated. In the United States, they number street addresses like it's a contest to count to one-million. I've not lived at a street address below 1000 since I came here. And Britain: what is with those postal codes? EC1M 5UJ? W2 1JU?

I would like to be able to rewrite a complicated address, sending this on a postcard to the post office:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^30 Brown Street Seattle $ComplicatedAddressLongPostalCode

4.  Real life should also be programmed such that I don't waste my time trying to get into bars and clubs that I'm not going to be allowed into. It's just a risk you take when you're underage: you can guarantee that some bars in some towns either aren't going to ask to see identification, or they'll let you're in because you're a female and you're wearing lots of make-up. But most won't.

A simple system of cue cards would save us all a lot of time. A bar that will definitely ask you for ID posts a 401 on their doors. Those that will also not fall for fake IDs should make it clear with a 403. A simple 502 indicates that the bar is at capacity.

5.  Unplugging and re-plugging-in anything that doesn't work properly should immediately result in it working again.

6.  I would like to be able to establish a secure connection to my pizza delivery place. Encrypting the information that I send to the person on the phone at Palermo's would make me feel a bit better when they repeat both my name and my credit card number aloud in the store whilst taking my order. Fantastic work, telephone guy. Now everyone knows all my basic financial details, including my card's expiration date and my middle initials and my address.

7.  Given how many friends I have living in different time zones, it would be useful to employ IP delivery on my mobile phone. If someone calls my phone from Australia or New Zealand, they're delivered the me who knows how to pronounce words like "g'day" and who says "eh" instead of "huh." When my grandmother calls, I can serve up the version that passes all the Safe Search requirements. Americans are served a Jane who says "soccer" instead of "football." Without such a feature, speaking the correct version of English at the correct time is far too difficult.

If someone would get onto that, I'd appreciate it. Especially the bit about cleaning up my language around my grandmother.

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The Vast, Pacific Horizon

Posted by randfish on Aug 26, 2008

Posted by randfish

Sunday night. Rays of sunshine are pouring in heat through the skies above Los Angeles, penetrating the plane's interior despite the drawn windowshades. Mystery Guest is next to me, reading a book we picked up on the Santa Monica pier today, and a Macromedia Flash document is calling to me from the desktop tray, but I'm in the writing mood, so it'll have to wait a little longer.

SEOmoz has been a strange place to work over the last 9 months - not because we've moved offices or doubled our staff or shifted around the management, though those milestones have certainly had an impact. No, what's really odd is that we've been in a state of constant anticipation - working towards the biggest launch we've ever had and salivating in anticipation of the release. If you've ever smoked a brisket or braised lamb on the stove, you know the sensation. Every minute spent waiting feels like an hour. The olfactory assault teases you; the glances at the clock are too frequent, and your stomach voices its opinion that the time-space continuum is moving at a less-than-optimal rate. Stretch that over the course of a year and you've got a good idea how we all feel.

Rewind to the Fall of 2007. Seattle's having a rare sunbreak in late October and I'm at lunch with Michelle (our board member from Ignition). "What's my big idea?" she wants to know. The one I'm dreaming about - the one I'd build if resources were no constraint and time was, for once, on my side. "Well," I say, "there is this one thing." Yeah - but that one thing is going to take a lot more time and resources than we've got, even without outside investment. It's so ambitious that even my usually optimistic friends in the industry don't see it as a real possibility in the next half decade. The thing is - they don't know about my secret weapons (and until January rolled around, actually, neither did I).

It turns out that with the right connections, the right partnerships, a half-crazy CEO, a pair of equally over-optimistic, never-say-die engineers (Nick & Ben), and the dedicated SEOmoz team, my pipe dream might actually have a chance in hell of bearing fruit.

February of 2008 and some early testing gives us a roadmap, but it's an expensive one and it's going to mean tying up nearly all of our dev resources for 6 months (and adding a handful of pricey, new talent to the team). That means virtually no new tools, no new projects, no time to patch up the parts of the SEOmoz site that aren't scaling so well. Big risk could spell big rewards, but only if everyone in the SEO world thinks this product is as amazing as I do. Otherwise, the burn rate is going to catch up too fast, and that means... Well, it won't be pretty.

Looking up from my laptop, the sunlight's gone and the dark rainclouds of Northern Oregon obscure the last wisps on sunset. That Flash document - a slideshow of wireframes for our new product, still hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. The visualization of all our new stuff is proving to be a massive challenge, so I'm attempting to re-skin the graphs and charts to help clear this hurdle. Some of the concepts are so new and unfamiliar that they require a great deal of education before they can start to provide value and insight. SEOs are smart, and they learn fast, but we don't have the luxury of time on our side, and in a down economy, marketers need actionable data, not inaccessible brain teasers.

In May, I remember getting my first glance at an early Alpha version of the product - by then it was affectionately called "Carhole" internally. If you don't watch the Simpsons regularly, the name's a nod to this brilliant bit of dialogue. Every SEO project I worked on that month and every question I answered found some use for "Carhole." And every time I didn't use it, I thought of how, when the final product launched, I'd be able to solve all the missing pieces of the puzzle. But the doubts were still there - what if no one else realizes how amazing this will be? What if the data is too complex to be accessible to a large audience? What if we run out of money before we can launch?

This, I think, is a startup CEO's life - half driving, mind-numbing, teeth-chattering fear. And, half wild-eyed, frenetic, obsessive passion. Nothing's good enough, yet everything is amazing. Nothing can be launched fast enough, but rushing out the door is fraught with peril. Today the world will rejoice at the mere thought of your product; tomorrow, it's too complex to get traction. How do we survive this institutional chaos without going mad? I don't know - I know that some of us don't. I just wish I knew whether it was luck or wisdom that kept the successful ones afloat in the maelstrom - and whether I have enough of either to make it.

Tonight I'm back in Seattle. Mystery Guest's still next to me, but she's given up on her book and has fallen asleep on the floor next to the computer in our spare apartment bedroom. In 18 days, we'll be married - another event nothing can prepare me for, and one that takes up every spare second of an already overburdened year. Has ambition outweighed common sense? Has Rand finally succumbed to his own driving neuroses? Only time will tell. I do know that the next 60 days are going to be some of the defining moments of my life, both personally and professionally. I just thank the stars that even if things don't turn out perfect on the professional side, they've never looked brighter personally. And deep down, I know that's the one that really matters.

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Headsmacking Tip #6 - Test with Paid Search Before You Target with SEO

Posted by randfish on Aug 25, 2008

Posted by randfish

This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV's it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."

The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-focus on higher ROI targets.

There's just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you're pursuing this process:

• Paid search traffic can behave differently than organic traffic, so don't take the figures at 100% accuracy. Build in some room for error, and you'll create far better expectations.
• When crafting your PPC campaign for test purposes, make sure to narrow to exact match so you don't accidentally measure traffic that's coming in for longer tail or modified versions of the search query. It's great to do this and measure response in a PPC campaign, but with SEO, you won't be able to naturally rank for those same variants unless you identify and target them individually.
• Make sure to narrow to a geographic area, especially if your keywords contain any potential local intent or local modifiers. Otherwise, you can seriously over/under-estimate.
• Keep seasonal variation/flux in mind. Use Microsoft's Keyword Forecast or Google Insights for Search to help out. Volume fluctuations usually indicate shifting intent as well, so purchasing keywords in a down period can hamper the accuracy of your forecasts.

That's it for this week's headsmacker. I've got a very personal post I worked on during my plane flight back from LA this weekend coming soon (hopefully tomorrow), and we're also launching our new blog etiquette guidelines and some explanations this week, so stay tuned!

BTW - If you somehow missed it, go back and check out Danny's brilliant post from last week on analyzing the Top 100 Blogs. It flew under the radar a bit, but is worth a thorough examination.

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Beware Pay-Per-Performance Agreements: SEM Sues Pop Phenomena ‘The Secret’ for Unpaid Share of Web Revenue

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire on Aug 25, 2008

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,








Best Regards,
Sarah

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Using Your Whole Business to Build Links

Posted by willcritchlow on Aug 22, 2008

Posted by willcritchlow

In my opinion anyone working in marketing should be reading Seth Godin's blog. Seth is a new marketing expert and his brainstorms and thoughts regularly give me new ideas. I am in the middle of reading one of his books - Meatball Sundae - its contents won't surprise anyone who reads Seth's blog; it's premise is that mass market products are "meatballs" and the new marketing (in which he includes SEO) are "sundae toppings". Trying to add sundae toppings to meatballs results in a mess, and organisations need to be built from the ground up with new marketing built in.

We'll get on in a second to situations where this isn't exactly true, but the basic premise is certainly tempting:

• Paypal wasn't done by an established payment provider - it was a start-up
• ebay's marketing looks nothing like Sotheby's
• Amazon apparently gets ~30x the traffic that Walmart's website gets

There are a few situations where I would disagree with the conclusion that you always get a mess when you add new marketing to old businesses - particularly in SEO - understanding the basics of SEO (not even linkbait etc. but just keyword research and basic technical on-page SEO) can be enough to form a valuable sales channel for old-school businesses.

There are "meatball" businesses like Tesco (our largest supermarket in the UK) who have broadly understood SEO (although they have a long way to go in some areas, they are miles ahead of the competition) and who are now popping up as competitors across many many verticals.

I therefore think it can be possible to translate old-school success into SEO success with some creativity, and it is still possible to start up in traditional ways in many sectors and at least gather local search traffic through basic SEO techniques. Even when the website is effectively an afterthought to the core business.

However...

It is an analogy that has great use for those of us who have to sell SEO and even more so for those of us who have to explain to over-enthusiastic prospects that SEO is not a magic switch we have under our desks marked "Google rankings".

Link building

What do you mean by link building? How do you do link building?

We know from Rand's question and the enthusiasm for various linkbuilding tips that acquiring links is something many SEOs struggle with.

There are a variety of ways of 'building' links - some to be recommended and some definitely not:

• Directory links and those that you get automatically just by asking / submitting
• Asking for each link and "selling" to the individual webmasters
• Link worthy content (and asking for links off the back of this)
• Linkbait through social media / viral ideas
• Spam
• Buying links (through a network)
• Buying links individually

These are all the ways normally discussed of getting links (OK, OK, I'm sure I've missed some that are technically different but almost anything will actually fit into one of these categories).

But meatball sundae teaches us that there is another way:

• Build your business in such a way that it acquires links

For most of us working on the agency / consulting side of SEO, it is hard to make business model changes (certainly fundamental ones) to our clients' businesses, but if I was starting a new business, you can be sure this would be a priority of mine. Even in established businesses, it can pay to think like an entrepreneur when looking for ways of shaping the business for links.

Lessons we can apply

I am a big advocate of looking for ways that clients' businesses can support link acquisition. For those of you at the expert seminar this week, this fits closely with Rand's presentation on enterprise link building strategies. It became clear at the seminar that there are a lot of in-house SEOs who read SEOmoz and for you guys (or agencies working with larger clients) I think a critical success factor will be exactly this.

In no particular order, here are a few ideas I have had on this subject (I'd love to see more in the comments):

Partnerships and content syndication and all other ideas from Rand's presentation

Rand's presentation at the expert seminar this week talked about this and a variety of other enterprise link-building tactics. I have tried to avoid re-using his ideas (apart from the unicorn link, below). All of his ideas belong in this list as well. If you weren't there, they'll all be out on video soon...

Releasing financial information in link friendly ways

Obviously this is closely regulated, but within the confines of what you are allowed to do, consider carefully how financial information is released as there are many places that are guaranteed to cover it, so some basic linkworthiness and keyphrase research goes a long way.

Allies and internal partnerships

You will have a PR and marketing team. Making friends with them and getting them on your side means that your budget just effectively grew. Both advertising and publicity can attract links if done in the right way. The best advice I can give here is not to preach but rather to help them look good to their boss. Just like any networking interaction - think what you can do for them. Internal networking is no different.

Use your homepage

If you create linkworthy content, and you have a big brand, then you don't need social media to begin the process of spreading it. If your homepage gets tens of thousands of visitors a day, then hitting your own homepage can be as good as hitting the digg homepage (remembering that your content is going to be a lot more relevant to your average visitor than the average digg visitor). Integrate your linkbait into your business.

Use your email list

We've been talking about this one quite a lot at Distilled HQ and maybe it'll be the subject of its own post sometime soon, but the power of building (what Seth calls) a permission-based relationship with people whereby they not only subscribe to your special offer newsletter but also want to hear when you launch new pieces of linkbait is hard to overstate. Think this is crazy and no-one would ever do that? Consider viral ideas like 10 reasons it would rule to date a unicorn. I think a lot of the people that appealed to would love an email when the next one in the series is released.

This is not an exhaustive list (and hasn't even really covered the ways your business can be linkworthy in itself) so I'd love to see your ideas and thoughts in the comments...

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Quick note to say thanks to everyone whose hard work went into the expert seminar this week. I got a lot out of the sessions and the networking and it was especially good to put faces to avatars when meeting so many people I've spoken to online but never met before.

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Keeping People Away From Your Website: A Beginner’s Guide

Posted by Jane Copland on Aug 22, 2008

Posted by Jane Copland

Many of you have probably set your SEOmoz account settings such that when you comment on a blog post, we email you whenever someone adds a new comment. One thing we don't do is include the contents of the new comment in the notification email. Why not? Because then you would have less reason to click through to see the comment in its natural habitat and you'd be less likely to reply. The same goes for SEOmoz private messages and replies to Q&A questions.

Some people really don't like this. Having the message provided in the email is certainly the quickest solution, but it drastically reduces the chances of a person clicking through to a site. In a limited sense, this isn't too much of a problem, but over time, this surely could result in a noticeable drop in traffic.

I've noticed more and more sites steering away from this model lately. Most recently, I have seen photo comments in Facebook notification emails containing the text of what the person wrote. Facebook notification emails already show the text of wall posts and private messages, but up until now, photo comments could only be seen on-site. To reply to any of these messages, one needs to visit Facebook, but people often don't. Consider this recent conversation I had with a friend:

Jane: Ooh you have a message!
Stephen: Nah, from a mate I used to work with. Read it in Gmail already.
Jane: I always do that and forget to open it. Then I get all excited. "A message!" And I've already read it.
Stephen: You should write a book about your tragic life.

Ignoring how tragic it is that I get excited about Facebook messages, it's true that I read messages in Gmail and, unless they warrant immediate attention, usually resolve to reply later. Later, I'll go to Facebook and notice that I have a new message. However, upon going to the inbox, I'll remember that I've already read it. Unless I need to reply, I'll frequently delete it without opening it again. My not clicking through means that Facebook serves at least two less advertisements than it would have otherwise.

Adding the content of blog and photo comments to notification emails seems even more dangerous. If a person is simply interested in keeping up with a conversation and not adding to it themselves, they can easily read everything they need to in their email accounts.

We know what it's like with sites like Facebook, too. I'll think I'm just going over to reply to a message or look at a photo comment, and I get distracted. I go to the home page and look at the news feed. I click around. Not following a notification email kills a lot of potential ad views and actions for Facebook or for any site which gives out too much information over email. My eyeball-time is given to Gmail instead.

If this practice is popular enough that companies don't want to get rid of it, would it be better to include only a snippet of the content? Perhaps a set number of words or a percentage of the text. After all, people are more likely to be interested in reading the rest of the message if they're only presented with half of it:


Many other sites, including Twitter and LinkedIn, follow this model. I'm not sure about this tactic because it is so convenient to read things via email. This is especially true with Gmail or any email system that threads email messages. However, it just seems vaguely counter-intuitive.

Some have likened these emailed messages as being like the difference between ordering delivery and eating in the restaurant. I disagree, because you still pay for the meal if you have it delivered. In fact, in some places, you pay more. When I receive the message elsewhere, I don't see any advertising (aside from Gmail's!), so a website whose revenue comes from ads is essentially giving me my meal for free.

A far better analogy is that of RSS feeds: People who prefer to read articles and posts through feed readers could easily digest everything a site puts out without ever visiting the site for themselves. A similar argument regarding RSS is whether or not sites should provide the full text of their posts in RSS.

Is the mostly positive user-experience of "delivery" messages a good one? I quite like reading my messages in the environment from which they were sent and I don't view that extra clicks as a bother. What do you think is the correct balance between ease of use for site members and creating an environment where people are most likely to visit a site?

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Roundup Thursday for the Week of 8/17/08

Posted by rebecca on Aug 21, 2008

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

• Royal Pingdom shares the best interview questions from Google and Microsoft (and they throw in a cheeky IKEA interview question, too). Warning: the questions are uber-geeky and pretty quantitative/logic-heavy.
• Speaking of nerd alert, here's the linear algebra behind search engines. Geez, my head hurt just typing that.
• The O'Reilly Radar asks if linking to yourself is the future of the web. The post has two good recommendations for self-linkers, so be sure to check 'em out.
• Yahoo! Buzz has opened up, so now content from any publisher on the web can be "buzzed up."
• The Scientific American highlights the problems with e-voting. Good information to have, especially with an extremely important election looming in the US.
• What the frak?! 29% of Internet users have purchased from spam! I can't believe anyone's seriously stupid enough to--ooh, wait a second, a window just popped up on my screen telling me I've won a free iPod! Sweet! Hold on, I gotta input my credit card info to cover the shipping and handling...
• Psychology Today dissects the creative personality trait. I don't see "copious amounts of body odor" on the list. Hmm...
• Not only is stress bad for your mind, it can harm your body, too! Stress: the silent killer. Find out more tonight at 10!

Four star links:

• Sure, people poke fun at Rand's coinage of the term "linkerati," but this chart proves that frequent social readers are more likely to link to/share viral content.
  
• SEMI came up with 24 amusing ways for SEO detractors to prove their point. I like the "Use the same title tag for every page" tip. :)
• ReadWriteWeb has some good tips on how Technorati can become useful again.
  
• Chris Brogan has 50 ideas on how to use Twitter for business.

Five star links:

• Condomunity has a great article on the importance of crafting great headlines for your blog posts. Definitely check it out and start training your brain to come up with catchy titles and headlines that capture your readers' attention and suck them in.

YOUmoz entries:

• Even Kanye Can't Make Twitter Mainstream. Ciaran talks about how Twitter seems to be struggling with becoming widely popular.
• Why Google Hates Links. Moleskin contributes his first ever YOUmoz post and discusses how directories are a great addition to a website for link building purposes.
• Social Media is People. Feedthebot talks about the motivation behind social media and reminds us that it's more important and more valuable to have an interaction and a relationship with your audience than it is to build links.

Best of YOUmoz:

We had a lot of great YOUmoz entries this week! I'll share the top 3:

• Learning SEO: A List of SEO Audio. For his first YOUmoz post, Flying Monkeys shares a list of some great SEO interviews and tips that appeal to our aural learners. Way to think outside the box and offer up some nice audio resources!
• Small Business SEO: Content Strategies. Rishil is at it again--this time he shares some questions to ask your client in order to come up with some content strategies for small businesses. He's certainly building up an arsenal of valuable SEO posts--thanks, Rishil!
• Google Refuses to Penalize Me for Keyword Stuffing. Darren Slatten shares an interesting experiment he conducted. Basically, he tried to spam the crap out of his SEOmoz profile in an attempt to drop it down from the #1 spot on a search for "world's greatest seo." It didn't work, but the case study is both amusing and quite valuable. Thanks for spamming us, Darren!

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added this week.

Upcoming events:

• Webdagene September 18-19 in Norway
• Social Networking Conference at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington and Conference Center September 22-23 in London, UK
• PPC Summit September 25-26 in Los Angeles, CA

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• Ongoing SEO work for Modern Eco Homes in New York, NY
• Digital marketing expert for Green Mountain Energy Company in Austin, TX
• SEO manager for FXCM in New York, NY
• SEO team lead for Blue Moon Works in Denver, CO

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• DragonSearch Marketing in New York, NY
• EcommerceRecruiter.com in the US
• Blue Moon Works in Denver, CO
• Myers Media Group in San Diego, CA
• SalesonlineWorld in San Francisco, CA
• PG1 Search in Portland, OR

UK/Europe:

• Searchlight Digital in Newport, Gwent, UK
  

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Katherine Watier in Maryland is an integrated marketing and communications professional with experience in SEO/SEM optimization, web 2.0 campaigns, web analytics, direct mail, email, public relations, and online marketing and media training.

Happily employed:

• Paul Bradish (I'm not sure where he lives) is an Internet markter and SEO/SEM consultant who focuses on e-commerce. He currently works as president of IslandSupplements.com and MMAOverload.com.

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New Guide Release: The Professional’s Guide to Advanced Search Operators

Posted by rebecca on Aug 20, 2008

Posted by rebecca

Ladies and gentlemen, another guide has seen the light of day! Hooray! Our newest debut is The Professional's Guide to Advanced Search Operators. Available in web and document format, this guide covers advanced searching and identifies various search operators that can help with competitive analysis, keyword research, site auditing, link building, and more. The guide also shares some valuable SEO tools available on the web.

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Google Refuses to Penalize Me for Keyword Stuffing

Posted by Darren Slatten on Aug 20, 2008

Posted by Darren Slatten

What's up, YOUmoz! Ok, enough small talk. I'll get right to the point.

I have a 2-page website that I created for the sole purpose of having something to link to from my SEOmoz profile page. My site doesn't really do anything or provide any useful information, but I use it to experiment on sometimes. Over the past 3 months, I've written several YOUmoz posts that include links to my site with the anchor text World's Greatest SEO. I chose this phrase because it amuses me... plus it has virtually zero search traffic, and therefore, zero competition. In other words, simply using that phrase in my home page's title tag was enough to get into Google's top 10. After a couple of my YOUmoz posts linked to it, I easily grabbed the #1 spot in Google.

As you might have guessed, my incoming traffic immediately exploded off the charts and set a new record for bandwidth consumption.

Times were good. But then I got greedy. I added the phrase [worlds greatest seo] to my SEOmoz profile page in an attempt to also conquer the #2 spot in Google.

Unfortunately, my plan backfired as my SEOmoz profile took over the #1 spot and bumped my site to #2. I tried to undo the damage by removing the phrase from my profile page, but it didn't work. Google still ranked it as #1, claiming that some keywords only appeared in links pointing to the page. So basically, my profile page has enough PageRank to outrank my own site, despite the fact that it didn't even contain that phrase in the content anymore. In other words, this is what I was looking at:

My Site

• PR 0
• Exact phrase used in Title, Description, H1, and paragraph content.
• Exact match anchor text in links from several YOUmoz posts.
• Ranked #2

SEOmoz Profile

• PR 4
• Exact phrase not used anywhere on page. Only the words "SEO" and "greatest" appeared on page. "World's" didn't appear at all.
• Also had at least one exact match anchor text link from YOUmoz.
• Ranked #1

Now keep in mind that both these pages are mine and I love them both... but my SEOmoz profile is kinda like a stepchild to me, you know? I mean c'mon... I built my site from scratch, using nothing more than a text editor and Photoshop. And now my SEOmoz profile thinks it can just show up and take the #1 spot away from my baby? Ha... not on MY watch, you spoiled little brat!

Anyway... I did what any loving parent would do: I nurtured my own child's success...by secretly beating my stepchild. How? By keyword-stuffing the living crap out of my SEOmoz profile! Everyone knows that stuffing a page with keywords is bad...so I decided I would TRY to get my profile page penalized for keyword stuffing so that my baby could rise to the top, where it belongs!

Well... the results are in, and I think they're interesting. Basically, it didn't work. My SEOmoz profile is still ranked #1, despite the fact that it has a ridiculously-high keyword density.

 

I'm not going to make any claims or assumptions about whether or not Google penalizes pages with unnatural keyword densities. My only point of writing this post is to share an interesting find. I'll let everyone draw their own conclusions.

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Examining The Internet’s Top Blogs: What We Can Learn From Their Success

Posted by Danny Dover on Aug 19, 2008

Posted by Danny Dover

Everyday a fiercely competitive battle takes place online over capturing the attention of millions of readers. As a result the blogosphere constantly changes shape and different players thrust forward as content kings for the day. Lately, I have been trying to find out what forces control this volatile scene. I have been looking for recurring themes and hoping to find useful correlations.

Last Friday, (August 15th, 2008) I took a snapshot of the Internet’s top blogs. This freeze frame identifies the blogs that have developed the skills necessary to compete. Unlike traditional top blog lists, I did not seek to place blogs in order of perceived importance. Instead, I combined public lists of top blogs ordered by the amount of inlinks (Technorati), amount of community subscriptions (Bloglines), ability to start and follow trends (BlogPulse) and the ability to thrive in foreign markets (Wikio). I then weighed each individual blog against its all encompassing internet performance using SEOmoz’s Trifecta Tool. The result is a list of blogs that have proven to be powerful in all aspects of Internet success.

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My hope is that by analyzing what all of these blogs have in common, I can learn how to become a better internet citizen and participant. Simultaneously I want to share my findings and gain additional insight by learning from all of your unique perspectives and experiences. I have already identified some common traits and trends below and I look forward to learning more from all of you.

Big Corporations Don't Dominate, Yet...

Of the 100 proven blogs in my sample, 66% were self owned. This leads me to believe that blogging is still dictated by ability rather than budget.



Branding That Works



Think the Market is Over Saturated? Think Again




Its as Much About Who One Writes for as it is About Who is Doing the Writing




It is my hope that others will be able to learn from my research. If I have learned only one thing about this industry, it is that online there is always more opportunity than one person could ever possibly need. By pooling resources and cooperating, I think we can beat the battle that takes place in the blogosphere and receive the mutual benefits that come with the victory.

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 If you are an experienced blogger, feel free to share your opinions and expertise in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that's not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter and/or Linkedin. Thanks!

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