Anyone who’s been in the Internet marketing industry more than a few weeks knows about tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, and Keyword Discovery. However, I wanted to focus more on the underdogs of the keyword research tools.

There were three requirements to make it on this list: the tool had to be free, useful, and provide something you can’t get with the full-service tools. You may have seen one or two of these before, but no SEO should go without having all five at their finger tips. Why? Because they’re awesome but also because they offer additional insights and ways to manipulate your keyword lists that the other tools don’t offer. And for free. What’s not to like about free?

Übersuggest – Alphabet Keyword Suggestion Tool

Übersuggest is a thorough keyword suggestion tool that takes your keyword and pulls Google’s suggestions for it. The tool first displays the top ten keyword suggestions for that phrase, and then it offers up to ten suggestions for each letter of the alphabet. You can check the “txt” box under the search bar to download the results in a text file.

Soovle – Keyword Suggestions from 7 Search Engines

Soovle is one of my favorite tools because it allows you to look up keyword suggestions for seven search engines at once: Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Answers, and Wikipedia. Last week the Chrome version was also experimenting with a weather search engine and Netflix, but those are nowhere to be found this week. I’d still expect to see more in the future.

How to use Soovle:

• Add your keyword to the search bar in the middle of the page. This will generate up to ten keyword suggestions for each search engine.
• Toggle through the search engines by hitting the right arrow key, or by clicking the icons under the search bar.
• Press ‘Enter’ to search for your keyword in the selected search engine (in curly brackets).
• Click on one of the keyword suggestions to search for that term in the search engine it was generated in.

One thing to note here is Google and Bing’s search suggest start with the term you enter, whereas Yahoo’s suggest includes search phrases that include your search query but don’t start with it. That can be very useful.

Ranks.nl – Keyword Combiner

Ranks.nl provides a keyword research tool that creates a list of keyword combinations based on the words you put in the two fields provided. You have the option to make reverse combinations of the two lists and to mix the keyword suggestions between the two fields. There is no login or subscription required to use the tool; simply enter the three-digit captcha each time you run it.

This tool is also a great resource for PPC campaigns. There is an option to surround all the keywords with quotes or brackets for phrase and exact match keywords, respectively.

You can also post straight to Google AdWords with the Power Posting tool. Add your maximum bid and destination URL, and you’ll be on your way to getting those keywords for your next campaign.

Yahoo! Search Clues – Trend Analysis

This tool is very similar to Google Insights. However, Yahoo’s Trend Analysis tool does have some unique qualities, including its sleek look.

Features:

• Compares two keywords over a number of days, months, or years
• Shows the percentage of male and female searches for those terms sorted by age
• Includes a map with a breakdown of the top ten countries searching for the keywords
• Displays the search flow of the average users along with the most popular terms searched before and after the compared keywords
• Suggests ten related searches

YouTube Keyword Tool

This tool provides keyword suggestions based on search terms people use to search for videos on YouTube.

Features:

• Gives you the option to either have YouTube show new keyword ideas or restrict the results to the keywords you entered
• Shows the monthly search volume for each of the keywords displayed
• Gives up to 100 keyword suggestions

So if you want to be an SEO hipster, able to brag that you were using these tools before they became mainstream (or Google bought them), save these tools and try playing with them a bit. You won’t be disappointed!

This panel features Danny Dover, Senior SEO Manager at AT&T, and Greg Boser, the President of  Products and Services at BlueGlass Interactive.  They will be discussing the localization of search and its impact on businesses. Loren Baker will moderate.

How does local SEO fit into your overall online marketing strategy?

Local affects absolutely everything. He doesn’t think of local as a vertical because of his perspective as a business owner. These channels are for broadcasting your local message.

Make sure to take the time to plan. What is your local message? What are you trying to say about your company?

Five questions to ask yourself:

1. What do you provide for potential customers? (relevancy)
• Identify the actual product/service, do keyword research and use the results on anything that is input through a keyboard.
2. What are you the best at? (differentiate)
• Identify what people fear with your product/service, identify what your competitors are not good at and craft your difference into an easy-to-spread message.
3. What locale are you relevant for? (where)
• This is everything! What cities do you offer services for? What neighborhoods to you offer services for? If you don’t provide a product, what limitations on location do you have?
4. Why should I trust you? (reviews)
• Trust metrics for humans are very different than trust metrics for search algorithms.
• For humans you need reviews to prove you are trustworthy and useful.
5. How do I contact you? (NAP, which is explained below)

How can you use review incentives? Add notes to Wifi cards with review suggestions. Their laptops will be in front of them when they read the mini advertisement. He doesn’t know how it works with the terms of service, though.

Business that say, “Follow us,” makes him wonder, well, why? What’s in it for him? He’s all for promoting social things, but if you’re a small business owner, you have to realize it’s not about just getting fans but about utilizing your fan base.

Other ideas include a raffle for email (that includes suggestions to review) and telling employees to promote the specific review site when customers ask how they can help. Give your teams a heads-up about deals and have them on their game.

Okay, so now that we’ve planned, how do we execute?

Take a nap? Ah, NAP: Business Name, Address and Phone number.

If you can get consistency on these, it’s more than half of your battle.

Manually claim listings on search engines. Entering data manually gives you the ability to update it later and has the added benefit of providing search engines with a trust signal for ranking.

Go to getlisted.org, a free website tool that helps you get listed where you want.

For small business, have a title tag with a city name, neighborhood and zip code. Try to include locality in the h1, as well. Be certain to include your address and phone number on the page and try to have the local area code.

It’s Greg Boser’s turn now, and he’ll be talking about some of the stuff BlueGlass is working on.

If you’re going to do SEO, you have to find out what it takes to be the person who sits above the localized rankings — there are only a couple of people who get that spot.

Google’s focus on geolocation is changing the way search results are returning. For example, when you search for “online dating” in Los Angeles, an LA Times article will show high in the results when you’d expect online dating websites.

It doesn’t show up in national “online dating” searches, but because they keyword tag it with the search terms and it gets crawled with the location connected to it, it ranks in LA. While it only ranks in one city, it’s a large city with a lot of people searching, so it definitely matters.

Keep this in mind when thinking about your own content and how it’s searched. Take advantage of local results.

The way Google treated the LA Times article gives us insight into how much it’s weighing domain and content when tying websites to a location. 

You can actually find a significant source where you can get your page to rank if you take the time to explore it.

Many sites are getting more traffic just because of how their data is being collected. You can identify what it is that’s going on and what’s triggering those results.

Spend time in your analytics and look to see if you have multiple entry points for the same key word and see if it relates to city connections.

There’s a strange correlation with behavior and what scope of area you’re allowed to rank in. But these things are opportunities to develop your content in a way that will work with a subdomain structure linked to location.

If you’re struggling with the Panda situation and you have regional content, you can come up with a logical way by state or city to group a tightly focused batch of content all about that city.  Go out and see how links are being built about that city and try to put your content back metro-by-metro.

Well, that about wraps up BlueGlass TPA 2011. I’ve loved blogging throughout this amazing conference. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ve learned as much as I have!

This panel features Ben Cook, the CEO of Direct Match Media, and Simon Heseltine, the Director of SEO at AOL Inc. Chris Winfield will moderate.

We’re starting today with Simon Heseltine, who will be going through industry stats, what’s been going on with the Huffington Post and how SEO and social media work together.

He’s showing graphs about how people are using social media primarily to increase brand awareness and increase traffic. Also, the large businesses didn’t see as much of an impact with social media compared to small-medium businesses.

He said 23% of social media messages include links to content and 27 million pieces of content are shared every day.

Now for the Huffington Post, which uses a lot of social sharing icons and badges to encourage web visitors.

An example of a badge is a community moderator badge, which is given to people when they’ve flagged about 20 posts that were removed. Once they have the badge, their flags carry 5x more weight than others.

The Huffington Post has more than a million followers on Twitter and engages with its users. For a while, they were just tweeting out different articles, but now they’re interacting with others. They also have accounts for more specific parts of The Huffington Post, like HuffPost Weird News.

The Gauge launched about a week and a half ago. It’s their new social experiment. (http://thegauge.huffingtonpost.co.uk/)They do a search on Twitter, looking for the terms “agree” or “disagree” about an article, and they compile the opinions on the website. If you share the page on your Facebook wall, people can vote right on the post. It’s all about engaging with users.

They wanted to compare their social traffic with their SEO traffic and found a fairly good correlation, but not necessarily any causation — this is because they’re posting news, information people are searching about anyway.

For their site Joystiq, a gaming site, there’s low correlation between social media and SEO. So you can’t necessarily say what the correlation is between the two in general based on this data.

So what do we know that social can do for SEO?

Platform for users to discover your content = links/more sharing = higher rankings.

Search results are showing opinions of peers through social media (for example, via Facebook or Google+), which brings other URLs into the search and makes it a more personal experience. Even a link that’s fourth on the page can get clicks for this reason.

Even if you don’t have ranking on a term, because you have social media recognition, you can get organic clicks.

He mentioned that Google News is now part of the social division within Google, and there’s already a lot of integration with Google+.

Social media is going to drive organic traffic through the search engines, whether through personalization, algorithmically or through real-time search widgets.

Social media needs to be integrated with your SEO strategy.

Favorite out-of-context quote from Simon: “I did a search for NFL Picks. As you can tell from the accent, I have no idea what that means.”

Next up is Ben Cook, who’s going to talk about how you can get social and use that to get people to do what you want via SEO. And apparently his PowerPoint is full of sweet Lego pictures.

He drew inspiration for this presentation from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.  “It changed the way that I view almost every piece of marketing,” Ben said.

Reciprocation is key. Social contracts are binding and can be initiated unilaterally. You can retweet something without knowing the person or Like something a stranger posted.

In social media, if you’re not sincere or honest, it’s going to become obvious quickly. Don’t share something and then ask for a favor. Take sincere actions.

Also, social media interactions are independent of sentiment. It doesn’t matter what people think about each other — it exists outside of these opinions and people will share content regardless.

Other social media principles are commitment and consistency. People have a desire to line up their past actions with what they believe and justify it in their minds. We don’t like to admit we’re wrong. It’s tough for somebody to say hey, I was wrong; it’s much easier for us to talk ourselves into remaining consistent with our previous stance.

So if you ask for a favor, make it something small — a Like or a retweet. Once you’ve got the support, it’s going to be easy for them to keep their future actions in line with their previous commitments to support your content. Start small and keep your requests consistent.

Another social media principle is social proof. Put a social profile up, but direct people to where you’re actually interacting.

“I’m a fan of doing very clear call to actions with my social media,” Ben said. He prefers only a couple of social media buttons to narrow the target. People like social proof; they like to know that they’re following the crowd.

People as a whole follow the crowd, so make your call to action very clear, let them know what you want them to do, and they’ll probably do it.

Another major principle is about “liking”: tweeting, stumbling Liking, +1ing.

If somebody likes you, they’ll be more likely to engage, so you can leverage your relationships. Even though earlier he said social media isn’t associated with sentiment, if the sentiment is there, you can take advantage of it. If you can get a few popular influencers to share your content, you’re more likely to get their followers to tweet your content.

Also, people don’t necessarily care if you’re getting paid for your opinion if they like it, so incorporate affiliates. Keep referrals in mind, as well. Request them from people who like or repost your content.

Authority is a currency — lend or borrow as needed. Convey responsibility and authority onto the person you’re asking something of.

Take advantage of the concept of scarcity. Offer exclusive content to different social communities. Create deadlines and limits to promote more urgency. People don’t like missing out. Also use reverse psychology; a really easy tactic is to act like you don’t want to give up whatever you’re giving up.

Favorite out-of-context quote from Ben: “Apparently a Lego man died, and it’s a tragedy.”

Don’t forget to follow our conference via #bgtpa. Get ready for our next session: Turn Web Analytics Data into Conversion Driven Gold.

Greg Boser, the president of products and services at BlueGlass, and Rae Hoffman-Dolan, the CEO of Sugarrae, are reviewing submitted websites on the spot and offering free tips. Lindsay Wassell, a partner and consultant at Keyphraseology, will moderate.

And as they’re speaking, trays of Red Bulls are being ushered into the session to re-fuel the attendees. Clearly BlueGlass knows the importance of an energy boost.

In order to respect the brave souls who entered their sites into this audit, I won’t list who they are, but I will post some great, general takeaways everyone should consider.

Tools to use:

• SEM Rush
• Majestic SEO
• Raven Tools

From Greg:

1. Set Google to the city that you’re in and pay attention to how you rank in the city. Then see how you stack up against other cities.

2. Incorporate longer titles and use semantic variations — Google’s really big on that.

3. Increase ways for people to search. Implement iPad interfaces to revamp old information. Bundle a bunch of features that would me more expensive to use for the original website.

4. Go through blog posts with no comments. Focus on getting humans to engage your blog. Human engagement is going to be the new link juice.

5. Remember that date-stamp content and evergreen content is different. Not paying attention to this will affect how Google ranks the titles.

6. If you can’t use search to market a product, take advantage of content creation.

7. Always lock yourself into an established, organic and algorithmic space.

From Rae:

8. Each page should have a separate title tag. Take every opportunity you can to differentiate each page.

9. Search for “canonical redirects” if you don’t know what the term means. It’s a basic and important strategy.  Use a one-step backward re-direct instead of simply deleting pages. Repurposing is important.

10. Make sure people know they’re in the right spot. Don’t leave the most important content below the fold.

11. Set up blog URLs so that it’s blog/category/post name and not just post name.

12. Watch out for split link popularity. It sometimes happens if your site has http and https versions that aren’t carefully controlled.

13. Your top keyword should always be in the title tag of your homepage.

One last miscellaneous takeaway: Rae highly recommends Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. “I honestly don’t think people should be able to build websites without reading it.”

Time to nom on some delicious DoubleTree cookies before the last session of the day. But I’d like to finish this post with my favorite out-of-context quote from Rae: “We geeks like to drink.”

The conference kicks off with some opening words from Chris Winfield, who says, “We’re here to network, we’re here to learn, and we’re also here to have a great time.”

Well put, Chris.

We also have some lost wedding rings. Looks like the fun is already getting started.

Our first session is about SEO theory and features Dennis Goedegebuure (or Dennis G., as we’re calling him) and William Sears. Greg Boser is moderating.

First up is Dennis G.

He’ll be covering the following topics about his previous work at eBay:

• SEO Theory
• Platform
• Results
• Analytics

He talked about how if you’re not on the first page, you’re hardly getting any traffic. But if you’re on the second page and you’re able to push to the first page, that can dramatically increase your page views.

So eBay tried to identify which keywords were ranking on the second page and then push them to the first page. All of this work was difficult because eBay works on such a large-scale and involves countless keywords.

He said strong sites can rank based on internal links. eBay, for example, tested with relevant linking between eBay and SDC and changed the footer link on eBay’s Video Games category pages.

They set out to introduce an internal linking SaaS system. They used an analytical approach to in- and external-link optimization.

If you know which keywords you’d like to rank and form a list, you do some share of voice reporting.

And that’s about all I can say. Everything else is highly classified, secret-agent stuff. I suddenly have an inflated ego

However, eBay’s efforts left them with these key points:

• Internal linking can be very powerful on large (old) sites

• Scale and latency is an issue at large sites
• The relevancy of source vs. target KW is key
• Internal politics matter
• Most importantly: test, fail fast, and test again

Take risks to get good results. He learned a lot of lessons doing it!

Next up is William Sears.

He works on Family.com, FamilyFun.com, Babzyone.com and others, and it was difficult to communicate all of the analytical information with so many keywords and page landings involved.

He just posted something that looks like some weird EKG or seismograph, but I’ve discovered that it’s neither. The main takeaway for this graph is that there’s a lot of detail his team is always looking at, and his team is trying to make it manageable and actionable.

So how can people build manageable subsets focused on impact?

His goal was to make information digestible, understandable and actionable. He wants to share this info with the marketing department, editorial department and with executives.

To do this, his team creates the following:

• weekly site reports
• keyword portfolios
• update newsletters

Weekly site reports involve summary of metrics, top keywords and pages, gaining keywords and pages, decliners, content generation recommendations, and notes.

Everything he shows can be pulled from nothing else but raw data and everything can be assembled with Excel. He uses summary metrics to compare years, then shows top keywords along with their ranks. Then it features landing pages with their performance metrics — if they went up or down and by how much. Other boxes show keywords based on gain and decliners.

This can show if SEO has work to do. It will also show that if the rank is quite strong, the content isn’t compelling enough or there’s just been a drop in search volume, which is telling for the people concerned with brand.

Keyword portfolios track their performance, which involves current status, impact, and competitive landscape. Each portfolio lists competitive keywords. By doing some wizardry, you can calculate a theoretical number of results you get. They report on this to show how sites are doing this month compared to last month. Are we rising or falling? They also show what they could be able to get if they aced the portfolio.

He can see how well his site is going but also see what’s happening with the competitors. The competitors it shows come from the SERPs, so they know who they really compete with in search. Sharing this information was a huge eye-opener for his team — some people don’t realize how objective competitive listing is and that it’s not always obvious.

The reports also summarize information for the whole month in a single line in order to see at a glance how they’re doing.

He talked about the role of search in regard to promotion You have to show people in your own organization why they should value the things you value.

His team creates update newsletters featuring performance metrics, his own team’s productivity, and a “Did you know?” section about some element of search they’re trying to communicate.

They also show what the top keywords were from the previous week and core strategies for the year. Basically, this how he organizes and conveys a mass amount of information for people.

Key takeaway points from Greg:

• You can become paralyzed by masses amount of data. Our speakers showed you can do this stuff at the smallest micro level. Take the time to really collect data and see what it tells you. Use Excel!
• Large enterprise stuff can be overwhelming. Start with segmenting key areas you can log and track and see what happens. Pick an area to work on, show a win, and use that to come back and beg for more.
• You have to have a higher-level evangelist in the company. You have to find the person in the organization who champions what you do.
• Competitors in search are so often not who you’d assume. Universal sites can pose large competition without even realizing it. Make sure you know who you’re real competition is in search.

After a bit of Q&A, our first session has concluded. Look out for coverage of our next four sessions and follow us on Twitter via #bgtpa.

The numbers – The data in this spreadsheet is based off of Majestic’s fresh index pulled using a standard report which restricts the total number of links shown to what they feel are the best 20,000. That means that when you see things like total percentage numbers (which are rounded to the nearest 1%) or the number 0 for things like total backlinks or anchor text, it doesn’t mean that links of that type don’t potentially exist. It just means they don’t exist in this sample set, and therefore (based on a great deal of cross checking) probably aren’t relevant in terms of impacting what we’re seeing.

The assumptions – I am completely aware of the fact that the data in this spreadsheet is based only on one keyword phrase. However, that doesn’t mean the opinions/assumptions I may make throughout the remainder of this post are based solely on this spreadsheet. Consider this exercise a composite of something I’ve spent a great deal of time looking at across a large number of phrases in many different spaces. That said, whether we like it or not, SEO is an always will be an extremely correlation-based discipline, so don’t be lazy and interpret what I may infer as any kind of set-in-stone rule. Instead, use what I say as the starting point for your own analysis.

Ok, now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming….

The Important Data Sorts

The cool thing about Excel dumps is that you can sort the data in all kinds of ways, which can help you see a lot of things you might not see looking at a traditional grid in a web app. The downside to Excel dumps is that it’s also easy to waste a lot of time, or get frustrated because you can’t find anything that seems meaningful. In order to prevent that from happening, it’s important to have a plan regarding what you want to look at. My approach is to look at the following metrics using individual sorts starting at the global level and then moving to individual sites:

1. Exact Match Anchor Text

This is the obvious first place to look because we live in a world where a huge chunk of the SEO population believes that link building and SEO are synonymous. And that means that most SEOs will take the approach of building links with anchor text containing the phrases they want to rank for.

That fact means that looking at this data in aggregate will allow us to get some great insight into whose link building strategies I might want to explore in greater detail because I can compare what they want to rank for with how they actually rank.

Let’s get started by looking at what’s going on with online dating. The first thing you will want to do is filter the data by the anchor text column.

Now we can see just the data for that phrase, and we can now do some sorting by the various columns we’ve included and see how things stack up.

Note: In the screen shots below you will see that I’ve added some color-coding to help explain what we’re looking at. I’ve also added a couple columns that weren’t in the first spreadsheet. The first is a domain visibility score. The next thing I added was a column for domain age.  And the final adjustment was removing the sites that were truly local in nature.

Visibility Score

(Click on the images to view them full size)

The domain visibility scoring process is an internal metric we use that calculates estimated search volume combined with estimated CTR SERP positions. In that model, multiple listings from a single site are calculated the same as if they were from unique sites. The idea being we want to try and quantify the potential value and impact of things like double listings.

However, the specifics of how we calculate that number aren’t that important right now because for the purpose of this exercise it could be calculated a lot of different ways. The key takeaway is that it simply represents how well each site did across our sample.

Having an understanding of what the global performance of the sites might be is important because it lets us get into some areas that very few people are looking at. On the surface, when you just search for the phrase or do a top-level metrics comparison between two sites like OkCupid and eHarmony, things look pretty much dead even (both sites trading off for the #1 spot). But when you start seeing the differences in areas like OkCupid’s ability to generate double listings across multiple metros, things change quite a bit (the difference in total score is dramatic).

• Knowledge Nugget #1 – Understanding how Google’s localized URL selection works, and developing a site architecture that leverages it needs to be a big part of my strategy.

Total Backlinks and Backlink Percentages

The next sorts that are very insightful are total external backlinks and percentage of total volume backlinks.

Things are becoming a little clearer now. When you sort by total backlinks or overall percentage of links containing an exact match for online dating, all the sites that are having issues ranking for the phrase jump to the top.

• Knowledge Nugget #2 – Google potentially has issues with excessive exact match anchor text. We need to take that into consideration when we are building links to our new site.
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• Knowledge Nugget #3 – It doesn’t look like exact match anchor text directed at interior pages is part of Google’s URL localization thing.

Page and Domain Authority

The reason I added SEOmoz’s page and domain authority metrics is because in a perfect SERP world, there typically is a strong correlation between SERP position and these numbers. However, regardless of how good a third party algorithm is, it can only show you what the numbers would be IF Google is actually counting all of the signals that they are looking at.

What that means for us, is that these metrics are a great way to spot sites/keyword phrases that are potentially filtered or penalized in some way. In a spreadsheet like this, we simply want to sort those columns in descending order.

Now this is pretty interesting. Three sites that show page and domain metrics that are definitely in the ballpark of the metrics for the power sites in the space are having all kinds of trouble ranking for a phrase that they have all put a lot of effort into (based on the exact match anchor text numbers). Yet, when you randomly sample many other obvious phrases, they all rank very well.

• Knowledge Nugget #4 – These sites don’t seem to be penalized in the traditional sense. Instead, it looks more like there might be some kind of query level filtering going on due to excessive exact match anchor text.

2. All Anchor Text

Now that we’ve looked at some specific metrics for the phrase that started this whole investigation, we want to spend some time doing the same thing without filtering on specific anchor text.

After we remove the filter, we should probably start with the total backlinks and total backlink percentage sorts again. This view is important because it lets us see how the exact match numbers for online dating we just looked at stack up in comparison to all kinds of anchor text. (domain/URL, brand, partial match, etc.). It’s also a great view because it lets us identify other phrases to investigate, which means we can spot check those phrases as well to see how they are ranking.

Once again, when we sort by volume and percentage, our troubled sites are back at the top. And now we can see how out of whack and “unnatural” that volume of exact match really is.

• Knowledge Nugget #5 – By an overwhelming margin, the dominant type of anchor text in terms of total volume and total percentage across the best performing sites is brand focused, not keyword focused .  The top performing sites also have a lot of links with no anchor text at all.

Conclusion

By now, I’m hoping you are seeing that what we’ve done so far is just the tip of the iceberg. And for now, it’s a great stopping point. But we’re not close to being done.

Next week, we’ll look at putting it all together and using what we’ve learned to select our “algorithmic role models” which will form the foundation of our further research efforts.  So be sure to become a fan of BlueGlass on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed so that you get alerted as soon as it’s live….

Unfortunately, I have found over the years that most companies don’t invest the kind of time necessary to properly research their space. Instead, the most common approach has been to grab an obvious keyword list, and start cranking out links.  And to some degree that approach has worked in the past. But the organic landscape has changed pretty dramatically over the last year, so I think it’s a great time for me to renew my “research first” campaign.

But rather than simply tell you it’s important, I thought it might be a worthy exercise to actually walk through a hypothetical scenario using off-the-shelf tools/services (no custom programming of any kind) combined with the type of approach we like to take at BlueGlass, so that you can get a solid understanding of not just the “why” but the “how”.

The Scenario

Let’s suppose that I’m an entrepreneur that has developed a new technology that is going to revolutionize the online dating space. I’m all pumped up because IAC recently spent $50,000,000 to acquire OkCupid.

I also know that a huge chunk of the money was paid because “online dating” is an extremely popular search query, and that OkCupid ranks really well for it. So I make the decision that organic search definitely needs to be a part of my plan.

But what exactly do I need to do?

SERP Profiling

The place to start is with a process I like to call SERP profiling.  Our goal in the profiling process is to collect a great deal of data about who is ranking where, and what are the possible factors driving those rankings.

Once we have all the data, we’re be able to sift through it and find all kinds of hidden nuggets of knowledge that will help us:

• Build a roadmap based on the path of least resistance.
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• Set realistic expectations regarding time and resource investment.
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• Identify areas that might become problematic before they actually do.
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• Establish common sense guidelines for you marketing team to follow.
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• Identify opportunities that the competition doesn’t see.

OK, lets get started….

Step 1. Collect SERP Samples

The obvious first step is to find out who is ranking well for online dating. In the past, this has been a pretty straightforward process; drop your keywords into a position reporter of some kind and hit the start button.

Unfortunately, due to Google’s obsession with localization/personalization it’s no longer quite that easy. In order to get a solid understanding of what’s really going on and who is really doing the best, we need to sample SERP data from multiple locations.  The approach we like to take is to try and look at what comes closest to representing a default set of results, and then also a look at a sample that represents a large chunk (in terms of potential volume) of SERPs that will have a significant degree of customization.

The way to accomplish this is to use Google’s location tool to look at results from different locations. The ones I like to look at are:

USA

Obviously, there aren’t many people who will intentionally set their geo location to the country level before conducting a query, but there is still a lot of value in looking at this view because it represents what is typically served in smaller markets across the country.

Large City Metros

Once we’ve collected the country level SERP, we’ll want to spend some time collecting data from locations that will contain a much higher level of customization.

The specific group I like to start with is the top 10 U.S. cities by population. (You can find a complete list here )

• New York
• Los Angeles
• Chicago
• Houston
• Phoenix
• Philadelphia
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• Dallas
• San Jose

(An important thing to remember when collecting your results is that you should clear your cookies before each query. If you don’t, your search behavior during the collection process will potentially skew what you see).

Step 2.  Dump all of the URLs into Excel

The key is we want to do this for every city we sampled. That way when we’re done we’ll be able to see who shows up the most, and with what types of URLs. (homepages, interior pages, or a combo of both).

At this point, it’s also good  to throw in some domain and page level metrics (from Open Site Explorer) so our final spreadsheet will look something like this:

From this point, we can start sorting through the initial data in various ways and start making some notes of interesting things that jump out at us. The items we spot at this level are going to help us prioritize what we spend our time looking for when we move on to the next step.

Here’s a couple quick examples of the types of things that might be on that list:

Total number of root domains

This can vary quite a bit. In this particular case, out of 11 sample locations, there are only 20 unique domains showing up. (For this exercise, I’ve omitted Wikipedia). Out of those 20 domains, 8 are truly local. (only show up in a single metro and only of content for that area).

OkCupid has great double listings

Very interesting. Notice how they use city/state instead of a traditional directory structure of state/city?

Where is Mingle2.com’s Homepage?

Most of the other sites with comparable page/domain authority have regional urls show up with the homepage, but not mingle2.com. Why is that?

There are quite a few more interesting bits, but that should be enough to get us going. Now let’s move on to the next step.

Step 3. Pull backlink data for each URL

Now that we have all of the urls that ranked across all of our samples, we need to pull backlink data for each and every on of them. At this point, our focus should be primarily on anchor text distribution, so we’re going to pull a standard anchor text report for each URL using Majestic SEO’s fresh database.

Why Majestic Fresh?

We’ve spent a lot of time doing comparisons between OSE, Majestic Historic and Majestic Fresh. They all have their strengths for different kind of research, but for this type of anchor text analysis, it is the best because it doesn’t miss much in terms of big important links when compared to the other two, and you can calculate more accurate percentage numbers, because of the freshness.

The Majest metrics we want to pull in are anchor text, external backlink count, and the number of linking root domains. Those are combined with the OSE page and domain authority data, and then we are going to add additional columns for backlink percentage (rounded to the nearest 1%) and links per domain.

When everything is said and done, your spreadsheet should look something like this:

This gives us a nice, and easy to manage data set with a ton of data points that will provide a great deal of insight into what is actually going on.

In part 2 of this post, we dive deeper into the data and look at some things that might impact our decisions regarding how we might want to proceed. In the meantime, get busy building some spreadsheets…

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In my previous posts about block and link placement and visual page segmentation (VIPS), I mentioned that the main area content block is the most preferred area for links to be placed. Microsoft patented a system to recognize blocks of content in a basic template website in 2003, which allowed search engine crawlers to give links placed in the body of the website more importance than links placed in the header, footer, and sidebars. This is because the majority of links placed on the sides, top, and bottom of pages have a higher likelihood of being paid links, which isn’t desirable to the search engines, who want to promote links that are being shared organically and as a resource.

The Development of Innovative Design

However, because website design has evolved beyond the basic template above and may include organic links and information in all blocks of the website, search engines like Microsoft’s Bing need a better way to segment content and figure out how much weight to put on links. According to Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea in February 2011, Microsoft patented another system that is described as follows:

“A classification system trains a classifier to classify blocks of the web page into various classifications of the function of the block. The classification system trains a classifier using training web pages.

To train a classifier, the classification system identifies the blocks of the training web pages, generates feature vectors for the blocks that include a linguistic feature, and inputs classification labels for each block. The classification system learns the coefficients of the classifier using any of a variety of machine learning techniques. The classification system can then use the classifier to classify blocks of web pages.”

This means that Microsoft is attempting the place classification labels on blocks of content on a website based on the actual “linguistic” content of the block. This becomes crucial because another part of today’s design and webpage blocks is how each block may affect the surrounding blocks, as information is sometimes spread against multiple blocks.

Content in Certain Blocks

Most web designer and CMS systems still follow the “basic” rules of web design, meaning that the footer usually contains links to other areas/sections of the site, as well as occasionally the address and contact information of the company the website is for.

In the header, the user will most likely find the company or website logo, an advertisement if it isn’t for a private company, and then a menu navigation system. Many websites also incorporate a search bar in the top left corner.

However, the most important block, the main page block, has now become more segmented, which separate boxes of content that surround the “main” content. The Microsoft patent is hoping to use linguistic patterns to decipher which, if any, of these blocks have more weight and contain organic and applicable links.

How Blocks Affect One Another

Because blocks are more segmented and folded into one another (meaning there are now several “sub-blocks” in each main content block), there is a greater likelihood that one block can affect another especially if it directly correlates to the central main block content. For example, if the central block contained a blog post about guitars, the affiliate text banner block placed below and above it would still have weight because it directly relates to the content. This is the same with sub-boxes in a normal blog post layout, summarizing key points or helpful links. Even though the box was separated from the main blog post content, it still holds relevancy and importance.

However, just how blocks can be positively relevant to one another, they can also negatively impact each other. Placing a block of links or content about Arizona on a blog post that mainly talks about vacations to Australia may lessen the overall value of links in all the content blocks, as varying subjects on a single page can hurt page rank and validity according to the search engines, as explained by Srinivas Vadrevu and Emre Velipasaoglu of Yahoo Labs: “If the retrieval function treats all blocks of the web page equally without attention to structure, it may lead to irrelevant query matches.”

Because of this, designers and content producers alike need to be aware of how blocks of content on a blog or website affect one another, especially when it comes to links. For now, search engines are still attempting to figure out how to improve their method of indexing pages and serving them in search results, but until search engines are perfect, making sure that all content is cohesive and applicable to the overall topic can help increase search result relevancy.

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Search rankings are based on a combination of signals from various locations. Successful link building means incorporating multiple efforts into the plan. There was a time when buying paid footer links, only using exact match anchors and spamming commenting on a few blogs would get you pretty decent results. Today, you would not want to do any of these things. Instead, modern link building requires less exact match anchor text, strategic social traffic/signals and fewer links overall.  Here is a look at one well thought out linking plan which entails fewer links….

Less exact match:

• Exact match anchors have been over used and abused for some time now.
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• Penalties, as opposed to rewards, are being reaped for too many exact match links.
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• Don’t be afraid to vary your anchor text. Incorporating branded terms is important.

An example of modifying anchor text:

Let’s pretend I own Joannasbakery.com. I want to rank for red velvet cupcakes. Instead of focusing on red velvet cupcakes, I would want to vary the anchors and methods for reaching my goals. Using methods like blogger outreach and viral marketing are going to be very important. Get people in the blogging communities to love your product and they will comment and share and provide positive feedback. In order for your content and product to be appreciated, it must be of valuable quality. I can’t stress that enough.

So I would shoot for a link graph that would look something like this:

• 20 % to internal page -> red velvet cupcakes
  
• 20 % to internal page -> red velvet cupcake
• 20 % to internal page -> cupcakes Red velvet
• 20 % to internal page -> Joanna’s velvet cupcakes
• 10 % to the homepage -> Joannasbakery.com
• 10% would be random

Importance of social traffic:

Viral promotions to high end content is key to obtaining quality linking these days. Having a strong presence on social communities is still a very important factor. Social news aggregators are becoming very strict as time passes and are allowing people to submit less and less spam-like content.  Don’t just submit anything, it has to be content that will be interesting & relevant to the community.

This is another indicator that Google is varying its methods for determining rankings. Social sites realize the penalties of poorly written content and are making adjustments to remain valuable. Niche forums also hold great significance. Links must be placed in forums that are relevant to the site you want to obtain back links and traffic for. These efforts are time consuming but they can have tremendous results.

More focus on quality over quantity:

• Google’s algorithms place more impact on ONE really high quality link opposed to hundreds of randomly placed links.
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• Links that are not strategically placed appear to be forced. It is very unnatural looking.
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• These outdated linking tactics hurt your rankings. In fact, many of these types of links will likely get removed from Google’s index over time.

Are your current link building methods bringing you more pain than joy?  Let us know in the comments or by contacting us here.

Your diet cannot consist of purely artificial ingredients.  You need to mix in organic, earthly foods for long term sustainability and optimal health.

Pixie sticks (AKA paid search) can induce short term awesomeness & sugar highs; a nice buzz. But in the long run, you need to be strategic in how often and where you consume these to avoid health shocks (aka, not getting enough ROI from your campaigns or really having great enough results to justify having this in your spend). You can’t necessarily only eat pixie sticks and survive.

Healthy stuff (AKA social strategies) can be a little intimidating at times- no instant shocking results. But if you keep at it, in the long run you’ll see the benefits and results you want. You have to learn how to spice it up a bit- get rid of the dull stuff and cook something that really stands out.

Sometimes you’ll see brands that swing to one extreme- they become very keyword focused and neglect the social aspects of any strategy, or they become completely engulfed in social but aren’t doing any search marketing.

The key is to find a happy medium and use strategies that compliment each other. Like corn beef and cabbage.

When building out a brand strategy, you shouldn’t focus solely on the quick lifting strategies on badgering the hell out of one keyword because you so desperately want to rank for it. There are lots of other factors and techniques that can help you build your brand, and brand presence- you need a healthy mix of both.

In other words, it does’t pay to put all of the same exact (COLORFUL EASTER) eggs into one strategy basket and execute.

Since my normal fashion is to write extremely long posts, I thought I’d keep this one a tad bit tighter… especially since going into detail about these would probably take a good chunk of time off your life. I want to give this a quick overview to show you how a social strategy can help you in organic search results as well as how a paid strategy can actually compliment your social efforts and vice versa.

Holistic Approach

A holistic approach is never bad- it may not give you instant results in a short amount of time like a paid campaign might, but it’s great for you in the long run.

You want your brand mentioned naturally. You want your links shared naturally. You want others to friend and follow you naturally.

If you’re engaging with your fan base correctly, you’ll get tons of natural social signals and links that can help how you’re ranking organically. Social media and blogger outreach are both great ways to achieve the above, and a nice sound strategy.

Benefits of Social in your Strategy

• Allows one-on-one engagement with clients and consumers
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• Accrues natural mentions
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• Builds strong relationships
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• Subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) lead generation
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• Ability to gain useful user data, demographics and analytics for further targeting
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• Builds your brand presence
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• Allows your brand to engage with other similar brands- opening up partnership opportunities
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• Running contests through social media can acquire natural mentions and visibility
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• With proper monitoring, it gives brands a channel to react immediately to positive/negative brand news
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• Availability of plugins that allow you to integrate social onto site/landing page (Facebook connect, etc) and on the post level (Retweet, like, etc)
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• Tapping into a social circle of trust- others have a tendency to share from friends and family

All of the above, when done correctly, will lead others to you – increasing fans and followers, shares, retweets and likes without implementing any kind of paid strategy.

It’s been drilled in our heads time and time again about the benefits of social, and I can’t reiterate this enough. Social is something that’s extremely important to utilize- and can actually have a positive effect on your rankings.

It’s become well known that social has an impact on search but it’s important to preface with this because not everybody realizes how search has changed over the past years. Once upon a time, the search engines showed absolutely NO social signals. Then slowly, they started appearing and getting fed in- causing us to wonder how much authority and power a social signal actual has.

You’ll notice tons of different signals.  They each carry different weights in their own respect:

• Retweets
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• Links shared on Twitter
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• Facebook Shares
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• Facebook Likes
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• Google +1′s (really? I wish this had a better name)
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• Diggs
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• Stumbles

Blah blah blah, the list goes on. Let’s focus on the top three. Retweets, links shared on Twitter and Facebook shares actually do effect rankings positively AND they also are integrating pretty seamlessly into search.

You’ll notice below that this chart shows the correlation of social media based factors with higher rankings in the top 30 results of a Google search (credit: SEOmoz- Social influence on search rankings). Data doesn’t lie, and while this may come to a shock to some people who aren’t truly convinced that social carries weight in the search world, it gives you something to think about when planning out your strategy.

Social in Search

Facebook & Bing

Yeah, I’m beating a dead horse, I know. But I want to be sure to include this as not everyone reading this might have noticed. Here’s an example of a search in Bing Social, while signed in, to show shared links from Facebook. You’ll note that links being shared in an environment that once acted like a wall between search and social are actually being indexed.

Facebook allows for natural sharing to occur because there’s a certain level of social trust that exists in here.

Sharing Links & Curating Twitter Lists

Links shared through Twitter also have an impact on rankings, and those are judged by various factors such as authority, followers, context, ratio of links to tweets from user, among other things. One thing that I’ve noticed (and I’ve only seen this with Red Bull so far) is that if you’re curating lists, or on curated lists, it’ll show up underneath the first query. For example (and please ignore the fact that I didn’t put a space in between Red and Bull. Clearly, I need one right now):

So assuming this rolls out to everyone and isn’t just being tested, curating lists will not only have an effect socially (it’s a great way to reach out to other brands and users and give them some recognition) but it will also be pulled up in the SERPs as well.

You’ll also notice (and I think this FINALLY rolled out to everyone) that when you’re searching in Google, if a connection on Twitter shared a link, it’ll pull this in under the result- one more way for a brand to appear in the SERPs by being active on their Twitter page.

Utilizing Social Media & Blogs for Outreach

Blogger Outreach

This area, in my opinion, is under appreciated and deserves more credit than it gets. Having been working with some extensive social media outreach campaigns (among other things) for a year + now, I started to realize that the benefits of achieving brand mentions was amazing, however, not always very certain.

Google’s algorithm can smell someone building links with intent- which is why outreach is such a beautiful and natural way to acquire back-links and exposure. When tons of links show up with the same keyword (as a bad link builder would do) it raises a red flag, however, with outreach, people are genuinely interested in sharing your brand, your news, your product, your SOMETHING, and have no other intentions except that.

One of the nice things about outreach is that when a blog links out to a brand, they’re either going to be using a branded keywords because it’s easiest- helping out the brand in the search arena without necessarily intending to.

The other way they would go is to link a phrase relating to the brand or what they’re linking to- and chances are, if they’re not using a branded keyword the majority of their phrases won’t be identical; looking extremely natural.

‘Use Facebook as Page’ capability

Something new that has been released recently is the ability for a Facebook page to actually reach out, as itself, to other Facebook pages.

When you’re using Facebook as your brand page, you can:

• “Like” other Facebook pages, as your page
• Comment on other pages status updates, wall posts, pictures and links
• Have a personality behind the brand that isn’t tied to one person in particular
• Share relevant links as your brand on other Facebook pages
• Introduce your brand to others through natural engagement
• Utilize Facebook questions & polls

Just a side note on community pages: Make sure you don’t have multiple pages. Community pages are automatically curated and you’ll have no access to the insights for this and no control. You can request that these be rolled into your brand page so you’ll gain fans that come along with it.

Social Media for Customer Service & Outreach

Another thing about Twitter- I’ve noticed some great customer service. And there is no doubt in my mind that social media customer service is a very effective strategy, And while this may not have an impact directly on search, it’s still something to point out.

Sear’s BlueCEcrew actually sticks out in my mind. Not because I Googled something and found them, and not because of a PPC ad, but the fact that they:

• Responded to an open ended tweet I sent out, asking about a camera (not picture below as it’s in a different thread)
• Gave me some advice as to different makes or models
• Circled back with me two or three months later to see if I found that camera

To me, this type of company branding (excellent social media customer service) has more benefit than a link ever would- a great, natural way to engage with possible customers. And because of this, I’m writing about them and linking to them.

Paid Strategy

PPC in the Search World

PPC campaigns are great. You may be saying to yourself, “oh, well I rank number 1 or 2 for such and such, why on earth would I want to run a PPC campaign and waste money?”

Running a PPC campaign can give you great insight into both your new and old target market. You can run a/b split testing to see what’s more effective and you’re also getting that extra impression on a searcher’s brain when you show up not only on the first page, but also in an ad.

When you have an active social channel and are in tune with the conversation around your brand, you can also slowly introduce tailoring your PPC copy to react or respond to these conversations.

PPC in a Social World [Collision!]

WHAT are Facebook ads doing disrupting our little happy social family? Being awesome, that’s what.

Facebook ads are a great short term strategy (that could turn long term) to target users. The nice thing about having these ads coexist within Facebook is that when you’re setting up your advertising campaign, you can actually see the “reach” and scope of your advertising within the set platform. You aren’t necessarily putting out an ad because someone was looking for it, but tapping into their likes, interests and other factors to gently nudge them and say “HEY. You might like this too”, introducing a sense of familiarity.

People like the familiar.

Remember up above when I said PPC campaigns shouldn’t necessarily be a lone strategy, and you need other supporting ones going on in order for it to be fully effective? If you’re advertising within Facebook for a FB page, you definitely need to make sure that your page is in order- you need to be engaging with your users on your wall, sharing images or links, polls, using Facebook Questions, and just being active in general.

If you’re not using your page effectively, your ads are going to be a waste of money and while you may get a ton of impressions and possibly clicks, you’re going to lose your users at the “like” button.

For instance, I started up a Facebook page (which will remain anonymous because I’ve been pretty strapped for time to build it out and I’m not gonna lie.. it sucks) and since I’ve run a FB advertising campaign on an extremely active page before, I decided to see what would happen if I was using a really small budget on a page that wasn’t built out or engaging- but was still an interesting topic that could potentially attract likes because of its uniqueness.

My CPM was cheaper than my CPC, and because of the cost of CPC, I would have only been able to obtain 5 clicks due to the really small budget I was experimenting with. I decided to go with CPM because I knew a click wouldn’t necessarily mean a conversion, and if I did by chance get clicks, I didn’t want to limit that to a certain amount per day when I could have a high amount of impressions for cheaper.

It turns out that I got a decent amount of clicks (more so than I would have been able to with CPC) by using CPM, however, nobody converted into an actual fan because the fan page didn’t have much going on.

Whereas on a bigger and more engaging page, the conversion rate was a lot high from those clicking. It just goes to show that advertising doesn’t always work if you aren’t taking care of your brand socially and really putting time into it.

So, this post was longer than I anticipated. For that, I apologize. I would have made this into a two part-er but I feel like there wouldn’t be an opportunity to really show the benefits of using a multifaceted strategy. Don’t put all of the same eggs in one strategy basket- make sure you intertwine strategies and have them coexist together. After all, what would ham be without mashed potatoes?

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