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The Inside Story: Facebook Marketing Strategies

Posted by Danny Dover on Oct 30, 2008

Posted by Danny Dover

Facebook Search

TIP: Note the opportunity to take advantage of the inherent flaws of returning results in alphabetical order. It is not a coincidence that so many companies named themselves with alphabetical order in mind in the days when yellow pages were popular. (Ex. AAA Plumbing) The same tactic can be used to drive users to a given Facebook Page.

The search function also has a lesser known feature that has the ability to drive traffic outside of the site. When a user types in a query that doesn’t match anything in their social graph the search bar provides the ability to search Microsoft’s Live search index.

Facebook's Search the Web uses Microsoft's Live Index

Performing a search of the web through Facebook returns search results and ads that are exactly the same as those returned by Microsoft’s Live.

Facebook Search Engine Result Page (SERP)


Live SERP

TIP: Consider double dipping. Although Live drives less traffic than Google, it might be worthwhile to target Live in SEO and PPC campaigns to automatically encompass Facebook.

Marketer’s can also take advantage of Facebook’s wealth of domain juice to raise references to their brand in the major search engines SERPs. Facebook’s Pages are publicly indexable and quickly rise to the top of many search queries.

SEOmoz's page on Facebook.com being returned high in the Google SERPs

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News Feed

News Feed is a feature on Facebook that highlights what is happening in a user’s social circle. It does this by analyzing relevant actions taken by a users friend on the site and presenting the most relevant actions on the given user’s homepage.

The News Feed processes nearly every action taken by every user on Facebook. According to the Feeds creator, Andrew Bosworth, this is over 1.1 Trillion actions daily.

Bosworth had this to say about the underlying algorithm:

“First, it gets a list of all my friends and acquaintances on Facebook and considers how often I interact with them. Then, with full respect for all privacy settings, it gets a list of all the things my friends have done on the site since it last checked. It also looks up all the stories it could have published the previous week in case one of them needs to be updated. After looking at all that information and considering my News Feed Preferences, it picks just the few stories that are good enough for publication and puts the rest in a safe place until it gets back to me again. It does all of this for me in 0.00023 seconds." Source

He also said “[News Feed] is keeping track of whom we seem to be keeping an eye on recently as well as remembering whom we have cared about in the past. It is very discreet and never talks about this secret information to other people or systems, it just needs the information to do a better job picking stories”:

His comments and my own research have led me to believe that the News Feed’s algorithm uses the following factors to return results:

Outward Facing Data:

• Users Friends
• Fan Pages
• Group Activity
• Photo Albums
• Photo Comments
• Photo Tags
• Wall Posts on other users Wall
• Wall Posts on given user’s Wall
• Event Activity
• Notes
• Relationship Status
• Friend Requests
• Friend Request Response
• Profile Text Changes
• Status Updates
• Posts
• Videos
• Application Activity
• Application installations
• Facebook tools IE “People you might know”
• Privacy Settings

Internal Data:

• Profiles that the user views
• Photos that the user views
• Friends of Friends
• Recent activity of the given user
• Last login of given user

“It doubled the amount of actions taken on the site within the first week, and that boost never went away.” said Bosworth.

This massive amount of user specific data combined with the incredible amount of traffic Facebook receives on a daily basis, clearly has incredible potential for internet marketers. Organic rankings can be gained in the News Feed by performing the actions listed in the factors above while being friends with given users. Alternatively, marketers can buy sponsored stories (called social ads) to appear in users’ News Feeds.

Facebook's Social Ads are displayed inside the News Feed

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Facebook Advertising Platform

It should come as no surprise that Facebook uses its wealth of user data to match advertisers with very specific user groups. The self service advertising platform is very similar to Google’s Adwords. (In fact, it is now run by Google’s former Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, Sheryl Sandberg.) The system allows advertisers to create small 150px by 155px ads which can contain a 110px by 80px image with 135 characters of body text and a 25 character title. Users can run both ‘Pay for Clicks’ and ‘Pay for Views’ campaigns targeted by any of the following attributes:

• Country
• State
• City
• Sex
• Age Range
• Keywords in profiles
• Schools
• Workplaces
• Relationship Status
• Interest (gender)

To fully understand the value of the advertising on Facebook I ran a mock advertising campaign. I created a company and website (and at the risk of derailing my post) gave it the need to hire models.

For new customers, each ad in hand reviewed to ensure quality.

TIP: The approval process is surprisingly strict. It took me 3 times to get my ads approved due to errors like irregular capitalization (Ex. “Submit A Candidate” instead of “Submit a Candidate”). It is also important to note that the ad reviewers take the time to follow the link associated with the pending ad and decide if the webpage it points to is legitimate. By examining server log files I saw that the person who reviewed my ad not only viewed the landing page but clicked through the navigation to other pages on my website as well.

I eventually got the following ads approved:

Chas Williams	Danny Dover	Mel Gray	Mike Thompson
Timmy Christensen

To make this campaign more fun, I found ugly pictures of my fellow developers and held a competition to see whose ad got clicked the most. The results were as follows:

Facebook Ad Manager (Two columns removed)

Facebook’s advertising platform is a great value. Currently it has relatively small competition (compared to the major search engines) so its prices are very reasonable. To run a CPM campaign targeting the 23,280 Facebook enabled 18 to 25 aged at the University of Washington, it cost me $20.33 USD for 53,368 impressions. The results were not phenomenal but did establish the Facebook advertising platform as a viable marketing option.

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Facebook can be a great resource for small businesses that rely on local customers. The marketing features are still relatively inexpensive and the platform is new enough that marketers still have a chance to shape it. If you have not already tried a test marketing campaign, I highly recommend you do while the prices are low.

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Living on Adsense Blog Earning Stats for Oct 26th 2008

Posted by chris.whiteley on Oct 30, 2008

It seems that I am a few days behind on my Adsense blog earnings for this week. I took a screen shot Sunday night, and did not have a chance to post about it until right now. Of course right now I am at work and trying to write this post as fast as possible. I got in like 5 minutes early to write this.

I have to give you the condensed version of what my earnings posts usually are:

• earnings are looking good
• still working on my new Saving Money Tips blog
• download Adsense Secrets 4, it’s now free to download. Don’t be a goof, go download it (that’s what I used to really increase my earnings)
• take a look at last weeks stats:

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 10/26/08

Posted by rebecca on Oct 30, 2008

Posted by rebecca

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

• On Thursday, November 6th, Exact Target and Marketing Sherpa are launching a free, 8-part webinar series. They'll be extracting actionable intelligence from Marketing Sherpa's new 2009 Email Benchmark Guide. If you attend any of the sessions you'll receive $100 off the guide and $400 off Marketing Sherpa's Email Summit being held in March.
• Loren Baker, Dave Snyder, and Jordan Kasteler recently launched IM Broadcast, an Internet marketing video uploading and sharing site. Check it out for all your Internet marketing video watching needs...I hope the comments are better than the poo you see on YouTube. :)
• Brent Csutoras says that social media is invading traditional media, and he links to his article on Search Engine Land as well as provides some recent examples of how social media has usurped traditional media.
• Web Hosting Mind tells us 4 things our web hosts don't want us to know. I'm assuming #5 is "You look fat in those jeans." That's harsh, web host. Too harsh.
• Apparently Google is recession-proof, seeing as how they recently bought a friggin' fighter jet. Geez, I guess the spam has gotten pretty out of control over at the big G...
• The biggest threat to America isn't terrorism or our plummeting economy, it's Twitter. Well, according to the US Army, anyway. They labeled Twitter as a possible terrorist tool. Hmm, there's a rising threat of foreigners using Twitter for potential terrorist means? Oh my God, Jane is a terrorist! I knew it! Jane, your pleasant accent and sunshiney hair doesn't fool me...
• Public health experts from the University of Glasgow found that the higher your IQ, the more likely you are to develop a drinking problem. Man, the search industry sure is smart--you can tell by how much we drink at conferences!
• Guy Kawasaki provides a test to help determine if your CEO is clueless. If your CEO is Alicia Silverstone, that's a pretty strong indicator.

• TechCrunch reports that the most watched TV shows aren't the most talked about online. The chart is interesting only becuase I'm baffled that people actually watch Two and a Half Men. Seriously though, this article is interesting because it sends the message that networks should consider strengthening their shows' social networks to create an Internet buzz that can hopefully carry over to more viewership. It presents a good opportunity to leverage social media marketing and social media to the shows' advantage.
• Vandelay Design shares 25 impressive blog footers. These footers are really creative and should inspire you to think about your own footers and whether they need a little face lift.
• Valleywag talks about possible Facebook layoffs. The social networking site's burn rate is likely pretty high, and it's gobbling up Microsoft's $240 million investment very quickly, so it'll be interesting to see what happens with the site and how successful its advertising model does.

• Brent Csutoras provides another great social media marketing article. He examines Yahoo! Buzz and wonders if it's a buzz-kill of a social news site because the stories are all hand-picked by editors and only a few non-Yahoo! properties are ever featured (and these properties are extremely high-level authority domains like the Consumerist and the Wall Street Journal). Pretty lame, Yahoo! Buzz.
• Stephan Schmidt shares 6 reasons why his VC-funded startup failed. His case study is a good learning experience for all new startups that are popping up.

YOUmoz entries:

• CSS Galleries: Great for Traffic and PageRank. DreamWebDesigns provides a list of some CSS galleries that can provide a good amount of traffic to your site once it's submitted to them.
• Becoming a Double Threat: Integrating Your SEO and Affiliate Marketing Campaigns. John McElborough gives some really good advice about affiliate marketing and how you can optimize your campaigns.
• Free Download: Link Building Report Template. Bookworm SEO recently created a link building report and shares the template with the SEOmoz community.
• Creating a Methodology for Potential SEO Clients. Hismove shares some questions he asks potential clients in order to evaluate them. With this checklist he is able to make customized decisions based on their unique needs.
• New to SEO Looking to Make Cash? SEOnoobsauce (best user name ever) tells us how he attends local Chamber of Commerce meetings to network and gain potential local business clients.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Google Results Not cAsE sEnSiTiVe? Are You Sure? Jac did a bit of poking around to see if Google's search results are case sensitive. She saw some differing results for identical searches that were capitalized differently. The debate of whether or not Google's results are case sensitive sparked some interesting comments and is certainly an experiment to consider.
  

• Online marketing team leader for Gordian Project Online Marketing in Riverside, CA
• In-house PPC manager for SEOverflow in Denver, CO
• Search manager within a Digital team in Birmingham, UK
• SEO for Webpaje.com in Bogota, Colombia

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• ComCorp in Delray Beach, Florida, as well as Canada and the UK
• Real Life Media in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, India, Japan, and South Korea
• Ditley Web Design in Chicago, IL
• ShopVisible in Atlanta, GA
• Atomic Media SEO in San Diego, CA
• inQbation in Washington, DC
• Plexus in Georgia
• Sixth Man Marketing in Spokane, WA
• SEO Inc. in Carlsbad, CA
• Chris Hornak's Pittsburgh SEO Consulting in Pittspurgh, PA
• Wagg.it in Bay Area, CA
• Yellow SEO in New York, NY
• SetNine in Newark, NJ

South America:

• Emarketing Peru in Peru
• Webpaje.com in Bogota, Colombia

UK / Europe:

• seomaxx GmbH in Berline, Germany
  

Asia:

• NetAdwise Solutions in India
• SEO Services in Pakistan

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Helen Z. is a skilled and qualified professional with a background in diverse aspects of online marketing. Her objective is to pursue a career as an Online Marketing Manager with an organization that offers opportunities for growth and advancement.
• Bryan Siegel in Mira Loma, CA, is an SEO who has provided top rankings for numerous clients. He's looking for a challenge and desires a fast-paced,c asual and upbeat work environment.
• Wayne Cowan has led the operations of a successful SEO company. He has strong business development skills and his goal is to develop technology and marketing solutions that make an emotional connection with employees, investors, and clients.
• Matt Arnzen has 13 years of progressive experience in all facets of marketing, web site development and management, SEO and SEM,  revenue generation, visitor analysis, and team development. He can also design and produce ecommerce websites and web-based business applications. 

Happily Employed:

• Azhar Iqbal is a market research analyst for A.I Training & Consultancy in Pakistan.

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What Quantum of Solace can tell us about information architecture

Posted by Duncan Morris on Oct 30, 2008

Posted by Duncan Morris

I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again, in my opinion the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I'm going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases 'site' or 'information architecture' interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)

The Illustrated Guide to building a search friendly website covers information architecture and its importance. I see far too many sites where very little or no thought has been put into the flow of information and, as the guide says this will have a huge impact on the potential search engine rankings.

The most common information architecture issue I see is when there isn't a way for the search engines to get to every page of a website. This most commonly occurs when there is regular new content, often user-generated. Usually there is, at best, a theoretical way for the spiders to get to every page, but this often includes going via a link deep in pagination.

A lot of clients I talk to struggle with the concept of information architecture. I'm going to talk through my thought process when I'm devising a website's architecture to try and help with this. I'll also touch on some of the common problems you come up against.

Most of the sites that I deal with have a large number of pages, which means the correct architecture is almost always a hierachy of some sorts. People tend to be quite comfortable thinking in terms of a hierarchy, but less comfortable coming up with one for their site.

The benefit of breadcrumbs

When I'm thinking in terms of a hierarchy I like to start with a page at the tip of what will become your tree. Unsurprisingly, this is often called a leaf. If you can't identify these pages there are bigger problems than information architecture to worry about. Often called the 'money pages' these pages are normally where a sale is made, or the user finds the information they are looking for.

Let's take a film site as our example. It's not really relevant that Quantum of Solace is out about two weeks earlier in the UK than the US, but it makes me feel pretty smug, and that's a good enough reason as any to use it as the example. For a site that lists films the page about the actual movie is the money page. Maybe it's the page selling the DVD or cinema tickets, or it could simply be the page with all the information about the movie (with a goal of advertising revenue).

Once you have identified your money pages think about the ideal breadcrumb for that page. Don't worry about being generic, or how it will work, just think about your ideal breadcrumb. For Quantum of Solace, you may have come up with something similar to this:

Home > Action Movies > Quantum of Solace

It is short, so not many clicks from the homepage, and few people will argue about Quantum of Solace being an Action Movie. We could pick any number of films and slot them into a breadcrumb structure like the above. I also happen to know that there is search volume for the category in our hierarchy (i.e. action movies).

Home > Comedy > Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Home > Romance > Casablanca

The problem arises when there are too many options at any given level. The homepage is probably okay; according to imdb.com there are 27 genres. That's a pretty decent number of links for a top level in a hierarchy. The issue comes when you look at the number of films that would be in each category, according to imdb there would be 26,469 action films. The maximum number of links you can get away with on a page will depend on your site, but a good rule of thumb is keep it close to 100. Certainly 26,469 links is way past the cut off point.

There are two options available if you find yourself with too many links in a category. The most obvious is to split the category by adding in sub-categories. In this case we could add in a sub-genre. I'm not aware of any universally known sub-genre system, so this looks unlikely to work. It's important that any sub category you add doesn't confuse your users. If they don't know which sub category a film is in, they have to start guessing, which means your hierarchy has failed.

The second option is to add a level above the problematic category. For example we could add the release date as a category above the genre. When adding categories high up in the chain, you need to think about keyword cannibalisation. Let's add the release date and see what happens:

Home > Movies > 2008 > Action > Quantum of Solace

With this hierarchy we end up with a page for 2008 action movies, one for 2007 action movies, and one for 2006 action movies etc. That's not a good situation for a whole heap of reasons. Firstly, rather than just one page targeting "action movies" we now have one page for each year that a movie has been released - that sounds like keyword cannibalisation to me. The second problem is writing a content for the action movie page for each year - that's going to be tough to write compelling content without introducing duplicate content. Finally, I strongly suspect there is low search volume for "2008 action movies".

Adding high level categories isn't always a bad thing. You'll notice I've sneaked Movies in as a category as I think that unlikely to lead to keyword cannibalisation in same way as the date hierarchy would.

My final tip when thinking about your site architecture is that you can sometimes move categories around to help with having a small number of links per category. For example, we can avoid duplicate content, and reduce the number of films per category, by moving the date hierarchy I added earlier to below the genre category. This leaves us with the following hierarchy, which looks like a much better place to start.

Home > Movies > Action > 2008 > Quantum of Solace

Disclaimer: The above hierarchy is an example only. I suspect it wouldn't end up being the right answer, and you would end up removing the year and adding alphabetised pagination or similar. Using the above hierarchy may cause severe pain, injury or death.

Ensuring your quality content is spidered

With your hierarchy in place you now have to work out what to put on each page. The best information architectures closely map to the way people search, and this gives you an opportunity to create useful pages that people may want to link to. The category pages you create shouldn't just be a list of links, that's the job of a sitemap.

n the Action Movies example above, we could list the most popular new releases, or show user generated comments about some of the films. It's alright to add links that miss out a category. For example, given the anticipation around Quantum of Solace, I'd add a link to it from the action (and probably movie) category pages. The key is to add links to your important pages. How you define important is up to you. It could be pages that make you the most money, pages that aren't currently ranking or any other metric you can think of.

Hurdles

The sheer volume of pages that most sites have, and the fact that most things in life don't fit into a nice category structure means that there are a huge number of hurdles to getting your information architecture correct.

Overlapping hierarchies.

More often than not there are multiple different suitable hierarchies that could be chosen. When this happens it is important to choose the closest fit as your default hierarchy. You can easily add the other hierarchy for your users, but you can only ever choose one set of breadcrumbs, so to avoid duplicate content you must choose your default hierarchy.

For example, you often get overlapping hierarchies when organising architecture around places. In London, people talk in terms of boroughs, districts and tube stations, which means our office could be said to be in Southwark, Bermondsey and London bridge.

When new releases get old

In an early draft of this post I had "New releases" as a possible category that could sit above action movies. At first glance this isn't a horrific choice - it will have search volume, it helps to reduce the number of films in each category, and it would be an easy page to write in a way that naturally gathered links. There are two issues with it. Firstly it would cause keyword cannbalisation in the same way that adding a year did. Suddenly there are at least 2 pages competing for the search "action movies". You have the new release action movie page, and you'd have the archived action movie page.

The other problem is that new releases, quickly turn into old releases. At this stage you have to update the film's place in the hierarchy. This will most likely include updating the breadcrumbs of the page the URL, and all the category pages that link to it. I mentioned earlier that you need to make it as easy for your users as possible. In three months time, if you were browsing around a site looking for a page about Quantum of Solace, would you choose the new release category or not? What about 4 months? 5? 6? My point is, try to avoid choosing a hierarchy that will lead to pages moving from one place to another within the structure.

P.S. Sorry for the somewhat mis-leading headline. I think people in the know call it creative license, I suspect a number of you will call it keyword stuffing :)

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Headsmacking Tip #9 - Vertical Content Can Earn You Links

Posted by randfish on Oct 29, 2008

Posted by randfish

For the next in our headsmacking series, I thought we'd look at the ever-challenging task of bringing links to your site. Though it may seem daunting, sprinkling some creativity on the link acquisition puzzle can definitely make the process easier (and sometimes, more fun, too). One of the strategies that seems to elude many site owners and marketers is that of leveraging their vertical content to help earn links. There are dozens of vertical directories and vertical UGC/Web 2.0 portals that cater specifically to providing references to those offering content in areas like whitepapers, web-based tools, downloadable software, geographic-specific content, audio, video, feeds and many more. Here's just a tiny sampling:

• A huge list of video listing sites - not all of them provide live links, but plenty do, and if you have video content, spreading it around never hurts.
• A list of podcasting focused sites - quite a few of these offer direct links, but as usual, the better ones have more stringent quality requirements.
• Free software listings - if you provide downloadable software, there's a great number of sites that would love to link to you.
• The Free software directory - one of the best software lists out there, and a great place to be referenced
• ZDNet's Whitepaper directory - one of the best sources, but there are hundreds of these on the web
• List of Map & Geographic Listing Sites - from Cyndi's list, a great resource for genealogy sites, that in this case provides dozens of links to sources for getting geo-content listed 
• The Internet Public Library's Associations Directory - virtually every topic and geography has associations on the web specific to them; join them not just for the links, but the great networking opportunities (there's also this great list of international associations on the web).
• The classic blog directory lists from TopRank & MasterNewMedia for those who have blogs or feeds to submit

The beautiful part about these link sources is that anyone and everyone can benefit.  Even if you don't have the right kinds of content today, by spending some time and effort expanding into areas like downloadable content, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, software and feeds you can earn significant link juice from some worthwhile sources. Just don't stop at this brief list I've created - if there's a type of content, a way you present it or a vertical it can apply to, there's almost certainly an opportunity to get links to it - you just need to brainstorm and start searching.

p.s. Tomorrow I'm heading over to Microsoft for a full day of SEO training, and didn't have time to send Rebecca any suggestions for the weekly roundup, so if you have any, please shoot them her way!

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Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click?

Posted by rebecca on Oct 28, 2008

Posted by rebecca

 

Instead of automatically redirecting me to the School of Law's new homepage, the page let me sit there and stare at the link until I finally sighed and clicked on it. Not only would implementing a 301-redirect be beneficial to users and reduce that extra click, it would move nearly 70 links over to the new homepage. Granted, our own site, SEOmoz.org, has a "Click here to continue" prompt whenever you save changes to your user profile or a blog post, but we also automatically direct you to the appropriate page after a few seconds (which I never wait for because I'm impatient):

 

Example #2: The "Joke's On You--That's Not Clickable!" Click
The next couple examples are courtesy of our own site, lovely little SEOmoz.org. Our recent site redesign resulted in a new side-navigation box that runs along the blog. Several times I have fallen victim to clicking on the little plus sign bullet point icon that sits to the left of my user name and the main navigational categories because I think they'll collapse the category content. (They don't. Much like nipples on men, they're just there for looks.)

I pointed this out to Rand and he was like, "Holy crap, I click on them too! Okay, we've gotta fix that..."

Example #3: The "Are These Many Clicks Really Necessary?" Clicks
Another SEOmoz example, comin' your way! Say I want to edit my profile avatar. I go into my profile and account settings and scroll down to where my photo is. Next to my grinning mug is a checkbox that says "Delete Photo." I click on that, then hit "Save Changes."

Once my changes have been saved, I'm taken back to the My Account page, where I have to go back into "Edit Profile & Settings." I scroll back down to where my photo would be and browse for a new one.

I find my avatar and hit "Save changes." Done! I've just changed my avatar...in about 6 clicks. Whenever I go through this process, my brain internally screams "There's got to be a better way!" Yes, the "change your avatar" process has got me sounding like an infomercial audience. A better approach would be to give the option to "Change my avatar" instead of just deleting it, which would eliminate a few of the steps and thus, the clicks. 

Example #4: The "I Can't Believe You've Taken My Eyes Hostage" Click
You've all experienced this: You're clicking through a site's article that has been broken into multiple pages, or you're looking at a slideshow of images. Then, without warning, instead of page 4 of the article or the 7th image in the series, you're looking at a page-filled ad for Axe Body Spray with a teeny, tiny "skip this ad" link jammed into the furthest corner of the screen. This happened to me when I went to The Onion's homepage:

First of all, what the hell is that an ad for? A cyborg that serves you martinis? (Wait, that actually sounds pretty cool...damnit, I should have clicked on that.) Secondly, I'm not going to your site to buy a cyborg (well...), I'm going there to read satirical news. Promising your users one thing and serving up something completely different AND forcing them to click past what they didn't want in order to see what they do want (effectively making your user click twice) is just bad, bad, bad. I understand that the site's trying to make a buck off its advertising and this method probably works on some folks, but it's a nuisance to me (and to a lot of you, I'm willing to bet).

Example #5: The "No I don't Want to Sign In" or the "Why the Hell Didn't You Keep Me Signed In?" Clicks
There are instances where you want to be signed in and there are instances where you don't. Let's start with the Don't. Lots of retail sites require you to be signed in or have an account before you buy something. Take Amazon as an example. Once you try to add something to your shopping cart, you're taken to this page:

If you're a random user who happened to find the product you're looking for and just want to quickly buy it, you're probably not happy about having to create a login, especially if you're unfamiliar with the site. Amazon's not an ideal example here because it's a trusted site that offers millions of products. But say you're looking for a present for your uncle, who happens to love vintage model cars. You find a random site that sells model cars and other uncle-approved stuff, so you find something for him and try to buy it until you are taken to a "Create a new account" page. Why would you create a new account for a site that sells stuff you're not even interested in? Can't you just do a one-off purchase and be on your way? Now you've got to spend extra clicks creating an account you'll likely never use.

A nice alternative for retail sites would be a setup like this, which delias.com (a female clothing site) employs:

The site gives you the option to sign in if you're an existing member or, if you're a new customer, to checkout as a "guest" and not be required to sign in or create a new account. How lovely!

As for the "Why the Hell Didn't You Keep Me Signed In?" click, it seems like Digg and reddit are pretty chronic offenders. There's nothing more annoying than logging in, checking the "Keep me logged in" box, working for a bit, returning to the site later, finding a story you like, clicking to upvote it, and pulling up a "Please sign in" prompt. A few clicks later, you still haven't voted up that story. Argh.

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The above examples are a small sampling of how superfluous clicks can aggravate your user. They can be small-scale and cause nothing more than brief gripes, or they can be a large nuisance and adversely affect your conversion process. Regardless of the result, when designing your website keep a few things in mind:

• Try to accomplish your goal in as few steps as possible while still remaining logical. Can you shorten a 7 click path down to 3 clicks? Start thinking of ways to cut corners without compromising the user experience.
  
• Don't force your users to do the work for you. If you've moved a page, use a redirect.  Your users and your links will thank you! (Well, they probably won't even notice the redirect, but hey, ignorance is bliss.)
• Don't create "false clicks." Don't make non-linked text look like a clickable link, don't use icons or buttons that look clickable but aren't, and don't feed your mogwai after midnight. (Wait, I think the last tip pertains to something else...)
• Don't promise your user one thing and deliver something else. If you ask your user if he wants to stay logged in, keep him logged in. If your user wants to buy an item and clicks on the little shopping cart to begin the checkout process, don't force him to create an account or try out some "free trial" magazine subscriptions. Don't show a big freakin' ad when your user is expecting to see a picture or an article.
  

Of course, these tips have exceptions. If your goal is to generate a ton of signups, maybe you want to force your user to create an account. Or if your site is ad-driven, maybe you want to sneak in the occasional flashing advertisement. Maybe your conversion process does require 12 steps. But as a general best practice, consider the clicks you're forcing your users to make and determine whether all of them are absolutely crucial. If so, fantastic, keep up the good work. If not...well, then it looks like you've got some optimizing to do. :)

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SEO Diagnosis: User-Generated Duplicate Content

Posted by randfish on Oct 27, 2008

Posted by randfish

The Problem: You run a website that allows for user-generated content like job listings, rental properties, classified ads, personals or even UGC products (think eBay or Etsy). Thoughtless users, thinking only of themselves and the time they're going to save, wreck your SEO by posting the same content they've put up on ten of your competitor's sites. This creates duplicate content issues for you instead of that dream of Web 2.0 SEOs - free, unique content. It can definitely be frustrating.

The Symptoms: The search engines start by simply not listing your pages, but sometimes it gets more severe and whole subsections of your domain go unspidered or unindexed because the engines' algos have determined that you're a clearing house for material they've already seen and don't need again. In rare cases, this might even cause completely unique, valuable material to be excluded from the visible SERPs.

The Treatment: Don't let your users get away with it. Force them to create new, interesting, unique content when they post material on your site by creating new fields, unique categories, encouraging (and possibly even rewarding) more depth and detail. If the standard job listing looks like this:

• Company Name
• Industry
• Job Title
• Job Description
• Compensation

Make yours look like this:

• Name of Hiring Manager/Job Poster
• Company Name
• Company Website
• Company Type (Inc, LLC, Corp, etc.)
• State of Incorporation
• General Industry
• Specific Niche
• Job Title
• Field of Specialty
• Basic Job Requirements
• Advanced Job Requirements
• Desired Skills
• Desired Experience
• etc...

When you craft a more interesting, robust form, two things happen. First, the number of people filling them out goes down. Normally, this is bad, but in these scenarios it can actually work in your benefit as those users creating less interesting content (generally the drones sent to post the same thing far and wide without thought for relevance or quality) drop off, while more dedicated users persist. Second, your site goes up in quality because the content contributed has gone up - and the signal to noise ratio increases.

Results: Less duplicate content and more unique material means that you're in the engines' good graces. You might even find that you're outranking the competition because you have higher quality, more detailed listings (even on the duplicates), along with more ways to sort, search and organize the data. Visitors win because they have better listings and more information. Posters win because they get to be specific and provide details that can help close the deal. You win because your site has the best version of that content on the web.

And you didn't even have to open your mouth and say "Ahhh..."

p.s. While laid up on my couch the past two days recovering from a cold, I've been addicted to medical mystery programming (and chamomile), hence the cheesy formatting :-)

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Copyright and Cacheing: What Happens If You Change Your Mind About Letting a Search Engine Cache Your Site?

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire on Oct 27, 2008

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

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SEO Company Search Results - An Embarrassment to Google and the other Engines

Posted by randfish on Oct 26, 2008

Posted by randfish

One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that offer this service. After all, if you're going to police the practice and claim that "white hat" techniques are effective and permissable while manipulative ones don't garner results, you've got to take the most caution on the results for those seeking SEO services. If you're not careful, and those who manipulate wind up ranking in top results for queries related to getting their sites and pages ranking, this could (nay, would) give the impression that manipulation is, indeed, par for the course.

It was therefore to my dismay to see the following search result at Google for the query "SEO Company:"

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you know I don't lightly call out manipulative activities in the search results very often(even though I love ID'ing gamers almost as much as these guys). In fact, I usually do it only when it really raises my ire, and this is one of those cases for two big reasons. First, I think that the SEO-related results, particularly those on page 1 for popular queries need to be among the most carefully monitored. Otherwise, you're treating the symptoms instead of curing the disease - allow manipulation in these results and you encourage it everywhere else. Second, I find Google's endorsement of this site via sitelinks (and make no mistake, sitelinks send a definitive message to a searcher that this singular site is not "a" result, but "THE" result for this query) especially egregious.

Here's an excerpted SEW blog post from earlier this year:

This morning I got an email (my tenth) from a company that hadn’t read my rules: National Positions, an “SEO” firm out of California, promising me “five times the RELEVANT traffic at a substantially reduced cost.” The site, which I’ve linked to above using a 302 redirect so as not to give out any of my link juice, said they could place my “website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN” using their “proprietary techniques” and “valuable closely held trade secrets,” without using “link farms or black hat methods.” And they charge “less than half of what other companies charge!” Awesome.

So I checked out their site, and their SEO service includes: Keyword Market Intelligence (umm…keyword research), Meta-Data Optimization (sweet), Title Optimization and a Best Practices Doc. Considering most companies give away most of that info for free, their prices must be excellent. Their “proprietary trade secrets” don’t seem to include, as far as I can tell, any blackhat techniques, so there is no need to worry about National Positions being the next Traffic Power (who cold-called me back in the day), but it’s still a rip-off.

Sadly, while they're engaging in may not technically be black hat, it is certainly not the kind of SEO I'd like to see rewarded (and not the type I think the engines want to encourage either). Let's take a look at just how they've achieved that position using our new friend, Linkscape and our old friend, Site Explorer:

SIGNAL 1: Linkscape shows me 757 juice-passing (non-nofollowed) links pointing to the URL from 493 unique fully-qualified domains. Since Linscape also says that there's 777 links to the pay level domain (*.nationalpositions.com) from 442 unique pay-level domains, that tells me nearly everything points to the homepage.

SIGNAL 2: Anchor text distribution. Linkscape is showing me that their earning an incredibly disproportionate share of what I'd call "optimized" anchor text. Have a peek:

If, like me, you've run a lot of reports like this on a lot of domains, you've probably noticed that this almost never happens naturally. The homepage of companies that aren't called "SEO Company" don't usually accumulate anchor text that contains "SEO Company" - it's almost always indicative of spurious behavior.

SIGNAL 3: The links themselves usually have a story to tell. Let's look at a few of the ones passing the most value (in particular, those using "seo company" in their anchor text):

Those look pretty bad - pretty much all low quality directories (and digging down the list of the other 700+ links we've got doesn't help much). These are the kind of links you hope wouldn't help rankings, particularly for such a competitive search phrase. In fact, clicking through to many of these, it appears they have no visible toolbar PageRank (not all, but many), which suggest Google probably already discounts a lot of them. However, a ton of these are in Google's index (and their link builder made it easy by using the same description when submitting to a lot of these) - note SERPs like this one and this one.

If we check out Site Explorer's link list, the prognosis isn't getting much better:

Yahoo! reports about 2X the number Linkscape does, but the samples look pretty much the same. Low quality directories all with external links that say "SEO Company." If this is the kind of SEO we should be performing for our clients to help them rank competitively (which is precisely what the engines suggest when they rank them so highly), why exactly do we work so hard on quality content and attracting links naturally?

BTW - Google's not the only with this issue:

That's Yahoo! above. SEOCompany.ca is, if I remember correctly, Bob Mutch's firm, and they do solid work and have earned a big following with the great lists of SEO tools and resoures they put out free to the community. I'm not sure what they did to tick off Google, but I see them ranking around #250, maybe because of geo-targeting to me in the US?

Live doesn't do a terrible job here (seo company SERPs at Live), although the first two results aren't geo-targeted very well and there's some other manipulative folks in the top 10. And poor Ask.com is also putting our friends at #1 (seo company SERPs at Ask).

Let me cut straight to the point. I don't have any problem with what NationalPositions.com is doing. They found a way to rank well, leveraged it and are now getting dozens, maybe hundreds of daily inquiries for SEO help from companies who want to emulate their success in their own markets. Where I struggle is with the engines claiming that SEO in this fashion doesn't work and shouldn't effective, but then rewarding this kind of behavior with clients who are now going to get and apply these exact same tactics. A relevant analogy might find the court system giving out win after win to attorneys pursuing frivolous lawsuits - propping up their background with winning records and thus ensuring that more needless cases enter the system.

I know web spam is hard. We actually tried to build a spam metric into Linkscape at launch and found it to be a real Mt. Everest sized problem. But after 10+ years in the game, to find Google, the leader in this arena, giving sitelinks on results like these just doesn't sit well with me, and it shouldn't sit well with anyone else who employs best practices in white hat SEO.

p.s. If you're planning to report web spam of your own in the search engines, Google likes to receive it from your Webmaster Tools account, Yahoo! appreciates it at their Site Explorer Suggestions Center and Microsoft/Live has a spiffy forum. Many in the SEO sphere have found that, perplexingly, spam gets dealt with fastest when it's blogged about - making sites like YOUmoz and Sphinn havens for this activity.

p.p.s. No, SEOmoz is not trying to rank for "SEO Company" and yes, there are some great results that could show up in those SERPs - like:

• Jim Boykin's SEO Company (WeBuildPages), who has a remarkable track record with success, though they are quire expensive.
• Wil Reynolds and the excellent SEO Company, Thinkseer.
• Jessie Stricchiola's San Francisco SEO Company, Alchemist Media.
• Matt Foster's excellent SEO Company, ArteWorks.
• A fairly decent, if simplistic article from Yahoo! on When to Hire an SEO Company.
• Another good piece by Scott Buresh on Lockergnome about Using an SEO Company.
• And, of course, anyone on our extensive list of recommended SEO Companies.

Just trying to illustrate that it's not a vast wasteland of results - there's good stuff that could be showing for that query.

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Fish Don’t Fry in the Kitchen (and blogs don’t become awesome on their own)

Posted by chris.whiteley on Oct 25, 2008

Ok so there is a really good chance that I have gone Adsense bonkers in my posts recently, but for good reason.  I mean I have actually started to make a bit of money from it.  OF course now that I am movin’ on up, I  find that the more successful I become, the more I check my stats.  I figure that the Google Adsense OCD is permanent and has no cure.

So for this post instead instead of Google this and Adsense that, I have decided to write about…

Making your blog more awesome.

Some people would write things like ‘Increase Traffic to Your Blog in 5 Steps’ or ‘Cash in on Your RSS Feeds’ or ‘Top 5 Wordpress Plugins’ but not me, this is all about making your blog awesome.

So what defines awesome?

Well for me it is people coming to Living on Adsense, hanging out having a good time, learning something, and then come back for more the next day.

So for me to make this happen I have decided to do a couple of things that I think will help bring in people plus I need to measure the results.  For this, I will measure the results in RSS subscribers.  I am going to do something that a lot of people tell you not to do when you have less than 100 subscribers.  I am going to share my RSS numbers near the top of the page beside the subscription link.

So here is how I am going to do it:  Teach People.  I am going to bounce from place to place sharing my blogging knowledge, then if someone learns from or enjoys the blogging wisdom I have dispensed, the will have the option to come to my blog and hang out, learn something, and then come back for more.

This isn’t entirely fleshed out yet.  I just thought of it while watching and episode of The Jeffersons.  Here is what I have fleshed.

Forums: 2 forums that I frequent quite often are The Bloggeries, and Adsense Chat.  I plan on heading to those forums and effectively assisting as many people as I can.  I will also start stellar threads that teach people.  I will use content from my blog as a starting point for these threads.

Blog Catalog: I will search through the discussions and groups looking for people that may need help with some aspects of blogging or Adsense.

Yahoo Answers: I will scour through the unanswered questions and try to answer questions as best as I can and use my blog as a reference.

Twitter: I will get involved with Adsense and blog based discussions and provide insight wisdom to those crazy birds.

I am sure there are many other places that I could spread my wisdom and I will explore them as I find them.  My goal is too have 75 RSS readers by the end of October.  I encourage you to do the same, test it out, see if being a teacher will help make your blog more awesome.