Custom Seo Search Engine

Archive for March, 2009

Monthly Blog Theme Contest, New User Ranks, MozPoint Madness and Upcoming YOUmoz Features

Posted by rebecca

Hiya folks! I’m pleased to announce some new features, functionality, and funtastic contests that we’re rolling out in order to make you lousy masses happy (wait, did I just type what I was thinking?). I’ve listed them below:

Top Ranked Users is Now Free of Rand’s Bearded Mug

Some of you may have noticed weird changes afoot on our Top Ranked Members list. If you check it out, you’ll notice some differences in who’s ranking highly:

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Webfluence: Move Over Big Three, SEOmoz Built a Better Search Engine

Posted by Danny Dover

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Once every 100 years, a technology is developed that changes the way that people view their world. Today, I am fortunate enough to be able to introduce one such technology. Internet, please make way for Webfluence, the world’s first and only search engine by SEOs for SEOs.

Background:
At SEOmoz, we have been trying to reverse engineer the search engines for years. Up until now, our biggest breakthrough had been the creation of Linkscape. Through studying the Internet’s link graph via our flagship product, we have been able to make several observations that have helped us write algorithms that are far superior to those used by modern day search engines.

This new software coupled with the easy availability of cloud computing has given us the ability to build a world class search engine. But don’t take our word for it, read the information below and try it out for yourself!

Key Features:

Never Link Build Again - Webfluence is the first search engine that enables any user to add any website to any search result. If you don’t see your website in a given search result, simply click "Add result" and provide us with information about your website.

Your addition will instantly be added to our index and will propagate throughout our system so that your addition can be viewed globally.

Remove Your Competition - See a result that you don’t like? Simply hit the "remove" button and that result will be completely deleted from our index.

We are providing the power of the most sophisticated black hat techniques with the push of a button.

Technical Feats:

• 1 Trillion and 1 URLs - Our index is the biggest in the world. We accomplished this by utilizing our superior intellect (We Googled " * ") and our patented technology (See Steves below) to find the one page on the Internet that our competition couldn’t. Our next planned milestone is 1 googol pages. Given the rapid explosion of copycat Digg/Facebook/YouTube sites, we expect this to happen on Tuesday of next week.
• Our Algorithm - In much the same way that PageRank ® was named after Google’s founder, Larry Page, Webfluence’s algorithm was named after our founder Rand Fishkin. The secret sauce behind RandRank ® is the use of time to help determine results. This is a metric that is generally overlooked by information retrieval experts.
• Recommended Results - Astute users may notice that on some queries, Webfluence automatically suggests pages that don’t seem to be related in any way to the user’s original query. This is the result of our manual reviewing staff. A long time ago a strange unidentified man in a tuxedo dropped a basket on our porch containing two twin boys. Eventually, the two youngsters, who we affectionately named Steve and Steve, grew up to become our manual review team. Now, whenever we need a page to return to a user, we just Ask Steves.

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Mike Grehan Interview

Many thanks for talking with us today, Mike. We’ve spent a few messy evenings drinking girly Merlots, but for those who don’t know you, can you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

Ahhhh… those halcyon Merlot fuelled days… I remember them well… (truth be known, with all that Merlot, I don’t remember much at all!).

So for those folks who are new to the industry, I can give a little background.

I first invented the Internet back in the 1960s. I had a young whippersnapper working for me as my assistant at the time. Al Gore was his name. I believe he grew up and took some sort of job with the government. Not sure where he is now.

In about 1965 I coined the term “hypertext,” which I was thrilled about. It didn’t actually mean anything, but it sounded really cool. I used to drink with a guy called Ted Nelson who thought this was a pretty cool word, too. Ted’s an old scientist living here in New York. And we do laugh when we get together about all of those people who have assumed that it was him who coined the term. Boy, must we have been drunk that night.

After messing around in physics (it being the new rock and roll, of course) I moved to Geneva, Switzerland and took a job at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It was a pretty dull job actually – same thing day-in, day-out. Atomic nuclei can get pretty boring to interact with. Plus I didn’t like the special suit.

On one occasion, I was working with a complete dunderhead by the name of Tim Berners Lee. He was one of those guys that you just knew was never going to amount to anything in life. I explained to him that, during my morning shower, I had this brilliant idea to apply hypertext to the internet. He was so excited.. Mike, he said, I think you’ve just invented the… interweb!

Stupid boy!

Anyway, after being knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for my sterling work inventing what we now know as the “World Wide Web,” I thought I’d better do something practical with it. By now there was a lot of stuff out there and it was getting difficult to find anything. I was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University at the time and hooked up with a couple of kids called Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

This was not a good experience for me. These guys came to my dorm one night and stole a paper I had written called, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” I even had a pet name for it. I called it “Google.” I thought that was quite cool and trendy, what with Google being a play on the word goggle, which means to ogle women. Some time later, I read some bullshit from these guys who stole my idea that it had something to do with “googol,” which is the Californian pronunciation for a word which also means to ogle women… er… I think.

I’m in the process of suing these Google jokers for almost 600 bucks to cover the amount of time it took me to write the paper. I’m not stupid… I’ll get every penny of it, I bet!

Eventually, I moved away from search, mainly because it doesn’t work properly and never will. So, I invented my latest toy, which I call Twitter. I called it Twitter because it’s full of twits talking bits of shit to each other. Shitter.com had already gone by then, unfortunately.

Oh! Fancy me forgetting to mention Wikipedia! I actually invented that as a joke and people started taking it seriously. What fun!! People are failing exams because it’s full of false crap. Some people have been seriously injured for the rest of their lives for taking some of the medical advice… ROFL

I’m on the verge of leaving the internet space to work on my new invention, which is very much a green thing. Imagine this: Reusable toilet paper! Heh! How cool is that. Some people have called it a flannel. In fact, some have called it a face cloth. Dood, I wouldn’t want that near my face knowing where it had been before. Eeeuuwww!

Anyway… these are just some of the excellent things I’ve done in my extremely interesting life. What other brilliant things do you need to know about me? Being as modest as I am, I may not be able to answer all of your questions of course…

Every word Mike says is true

In your paper “New Signals To Search Engines“, you frame search in a historical context - where it has been, where it is now, and where it might be going. What are the major changes coming up that will have the most impact on current SEO practices and goals?

Grehan now puts serious head on…

I’ve talked about how search engine optimization evolved in the first instance. It was driven by the limitations of the technology used by search engines. Basically, the World Wide Web was developed to do one thing – but everyone wants it to do another. So, crawling the web using the HTTP protocol was the obvious route to go for search engines back then.

But if Google is saying they now have seen a trillion URLs and have no certainty that they’ll ever be able to crawl them in a timely fashion, maybe we’ve reached the zenith of the crawl. Not only that, the end user is expecting a much richer experience. So if the main job of SEO was to optimize static web pages and make them available to crawlers, it’s all becoming a little passé now.

Have we seen the end of HTML and the crawler? Absolutely not. But the level of requirement for SEO work is going to diminish, rather like that of the blacksmith when motorized transport was introduced. Do we still have blacksmiths today? For sure, but they’re not as required as they used to be.

The main changes will be in existing SEO shops either moving into other technical/development work or retraining in other online marketing disciplines. It’s a very exciting time in search. Most marketers can see that. But those people from a purely technical background and used to just doing geeky code for a crawler don’t see it that way.

You mention that user trails - as provided by the toolbar, tagging etc - will become some of the strongest signals. That’s pretty much the death knell of traditional SEO, isn’t it?

If we take what I said in the answer to the last question, you can see that traditional SEO as we know it has had to evolve anyway. I don’t really think of link building as SEO, to be honest. For me, link building is the by-product of good marketing. Whereas fixing pages for a crawler is purely a technical process.

What needs to be taken into account most importantly is not where SEO goes to next, or whether it survives at all. It’s about where search goes to next and how the end user evolves with those changes. Making pages for crawlers and getting links for the sole purpose of getting links omits one thing from the equation: the end user experience.

So, now that search engines can follow end users they can see where they started and where they dropped off. That kind of data is so important. It’s the wisdom of crowds. It’s the people’s vote. So how does a marketer get involved there? It’s going to be a little clichéd, but create an experience - not a web page.

Last year, Eric Schmidt CEO of Google, said an interesting thing in an interview. He mentioned - and I’m paraphrasing here - “that the Internet is a “cesspool” where false information thrives, and that “brands are the way to rise above the cesspool”. Do you think brands might be an important signal of quality?

I read that interview too.

He was stating the obvious to be honest. People have long bemoaned the fact that smaller businesses don’t get the same shelf space in search as the big brands (the same applies offline, of course). Brand building is all about good marketing. It’s all about building trust and reputation. But wait for this… It’s not just about the big boys. A local store can build up as much trust and reputation within its community as well as a high street chain.

Social networking sites are all about people building up trust and reputation on a personal level. So, I think the notion of brands as we’ve known them – such as multi-nationals like Exxon – is going away. I think we’re moving more into social search and that’s all about tapping into a network of trust.

Addressing your question directly: “Do you think brands might be an important signal of quality?” As long as those brands belong to the end user and not large corporations, and that’s certainly what’s happening, then yes, a great signal of quality.

Social media, for want of a better term, is a “place” where most content is being generated, and increasingly where many people are spending their time. What are your thoughts on, say, Twitter? What are the implications for Google and other big search engines when people rely on real-time wisdom-of-crowds, and communities, for answers?

So we’ve already touched on this a little when talking about tapping into a network of trust. Absolutely this is a very important move. The results you get at search engines are hardly verified results and they can be manipulated. That means you have what a mathematical formula (the algorithm) believes are the best ranked documents. And then you have a little re-ranking going on when Ralph Tegtmeir gets to them!

However, if you tap into a network of trust, such as a parenting group, and ask them a about a child’s allergy, the information is likely to be much more verified. If 500 parents all agree that a certain method works then that’s more trustworthy information than a search engine algorithm can provide.

But there’s a whole lot more to it than me Tweeting my followers and asking which is the best Irish pub in New York and wanting an answer now!

Can we talk a little about formats. You make the point that HTML may have served us well up to now, but things are changing. The web is becoming media rich. What does this mean for SEO? Do search marketers become multi-media positioners?

I saw a quote from a senior scientist at Google where he said we’re moving “away from a web of content to a web of applications.” So it’s more about the end user experience and the method of delivery, as opposed to one protocol over another. I don’t think HTTP/HTML is going away anytime soon. But it’s not going to be the primary method for internet search going forward.

People are already talking about new platforms. One idea is Flash. I like that. Or maybe pure java. Most certainly social search into networks of trust and live search via apps such as Twitter will further develop in the future.

We spend a lot of time on SEOBook connecting-the-dots between areas such as seo, brand and traditional marketing. You’ve said “connected marketing” is the future of marketing. Can you talk a little about this? This is the point where big worlds collide, isn’t it?

Connected marketing is a kind of generic term for the new audience of always-on, 24-hour-a-day networks. I use the iPhone as a primary example of how to connect with your audience in so many different ways. Sure, it could be the HTTP/HTML route as it comes with a browser. But there are also so many apps you can download. You can get to your audience via email, txt, Twitter. You’ll be surprised at this… you can even use it as a telephone!

It is about big worlds colliding. It’s not just that technology has changed so we market via different channels to the same people. It’s more about how the audience has changed. And so we have to change the way we connect with them.

I don’t think that conventional methods such as the 30-second spot are going away anytime soon. But we need to examine all areas of this new marketing mix and get our messaging aligned.

If traditional SEO is at a point of diminishing value, what are the things an SEO can do to adapt to this brave new world?

First of all, stop using just SEO. The job we’ve been doing to help search engines do a job they should have been doing themselves is not as critical as it was. Crawlers are getting smarter and the communication between search engines and SEOs is much more transparent now. Search engines provide many tools to make the process of letting them know that you have good indexable content available.

But as the end user demands a much richer experience, search engines need to know a lot more about other types of content. Not just the textual HTML pages that SEOs labor over.

It is a brave new world of marketing. It’s tremendously exciting. But you do have to start and think more about smart marketing and less about smart HTML coding.

There’s a plethora of books and information on social media, optimizing video and perhaps, more importantly, analytics which open up this whole new world of marketing. As the value of providing pure SEO services diminishes, the value of new services increases. This is not a bad time for search marketing: It’s the best it has ever been!

Many thanks, Mike.

Mike Grehan is Global KDM Officer with Acronym Media, a leading search marketing company based in New York’s landmark Empire State Building. Follow Mike on Twitter here.

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Review of SES NYC by Khalid Saleh

Conferences are especially interesting especially in a tough economy. Truth be told, I had low expectations for SES NY when all I was reading was companies scaling back and downsizing.

But the first tweets about SES painted a brighter picture. And with close to 5,000 marketers registered for the conference it was shaping up to be an excellent conference. As I walked through the exhibit hall vendors had a very good show and were very pleased with the large numbers of crowds that showed up. Of all the different SES shows I have attended over the last few years, this particular SES NY had to top the list in both the quality of the lectures, the speaker list and even the small details such as quality of the food J.

Here is a quick wrap up of some of the highlights

I thought that Guy Kawasaki’s choice of topic on using “Twitter As A Tool For Social Media” was an interesting one. And although I am a fan of Guy, my assumption was that most everyone in attendance must have used twitter for some time. I was really wondering if I am going to learn many new things from session. The room was over flowing with people and the few who showed up late had to spend the hour or so standing.

Guy made 9 main points:

1. Forget the A list (sort of funny coming from A lister )
2. Defocus
3. Increase your followers
4. Monitor the conversation
5. Copy best practices
6. Use search
7. Use the right tools
8. Squeeze the triggers
9. Make it easy to share

Guy’s favorite tools to use in conjunction with Twitter

• Retweetist which measures how many times a person is retweeted.
• Social Too allows you auto follow those who follow you.
• Twibs shows you how some of the big brands are using twitter.
• TweetDeck
• Twhirl
• CoTweet
• Twitter Hawk

My favorite portion in the presentation was the section on search and utilizing advance search parameters to look for terms people are using. That can be a valuable tool to increase business. Let say you are a web designer who is looking for work. You can setup a search for a term such as web design referrals. That is an excellent time to jump in and introduce yourself.

Twitter hawk is a tool that can be used to send automatic “paid” messages when people search for a term. I am not familiar with the tool but I see the potential to use it for business development. I am sure there are many who will debate the tactics Guy suggested in the session. If you are a believer in pure social media, I think there are many things that will turn your stomach.

The session on Meaningful SEO Metrics focused on measurements that help generate better ROI. Traditional metrics focus on number of visitors, pages per visit, time on site, etc. Ray "Catfish" Comstock discussed how bounce rates for keywords is critical in the process of conversion optimization. Ray suggested examining:

• High Bounce Rate keyword phrases: which indicate keyword phrases that are generating traffic but users are not finding what they want.
• High Conversion Rate keyword phrases: which indicate keywords that are working and therefore which phrases you should focus more resources on.

I did not really appreciate the importance of mobile SEO until I chatted with an SEO for a large auto site. He mentioned that their site traffic usually peaks on Mondays and Tuesdays. That is the time where people are searching for cars. The traffic usually dies off on weekends when people are out shopping. If you think about it, people actually shopping in real life is perfect time for Mobile SEO. That discussion was enough to convince me to attend Mobile seo best practices. Cindy Krum who specializes in mobile marketing consulting did a great job covering Mobile Marketing Strategies. While visitors of traditional marketing can arrive at a site at different stages of the buying process, mobile search usually indicate immediate intent. Cindy pointed out that real mobile web browsing, flat-rate data pricing, and faster download speed are all factors help that make mobile web more relevant. Cindy’s advice for basic mobile seo includes:

• Follow all Traditional & Local SEO Best Practices
• Submit your Site to Mobile Search Engines & Directories
• Avoid using flash, scripts, popup windows.
• Follow XHTML standards
• Use external CSS

The panel discussion on the most common search marketing mistakes CMOs make promised to deliver an interesting topic. My favorite of the mistakes was failing to assign $ value to every conversion on a website. There are too many times when we focus on a generating sales or leads via a website and forget about the other conversions that can take place. These other conversions might not have the same dollar value as a sale but they are the still conversions. A visitor might subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or subscribe to a blog. Assign a dollar value for each of these activities.

The extreme makeover session with a focus on conversion made for an entertaining afternoon. Jeffry Eisenberg of Future Now, Tim Ash of SiteTuners and Ethan Griffin of Groove Commerce took on a discussion of one of the sites Groove Commerce worked on. You can tell right away the different approach to optimization each of these guys takes. Jeffry is evaluating different customers, looking at what might work for them. Tim is focused on the testing aspect. Ethan is considering optimization as well as implementation details. Jeffry and Tim seemed to disagree even when they were making the same point. As a listed to the panelist go back and forth on what to test and what to remove, some sitting next to me asked, so who should we listen to here? I smiled and said, listen to your visitors!

Night time at conferences is as valuable as day time and SES New York was no exception. So, on the first night of SES NY I stayed up until 4 AM with Frank Watson (AussieWebmaster AKA crocodile man in some Hollywood circles) and Patrick Sexton (who you know from SEOish or his latest venture GetListed.org), every muscle in my body was aching. I am just not sure how Frank was planning to stay up for few more hours.

B2B complex sales involve longer cycles, many stages and different people in each stage. The session on B2B marketing focused on search marketing tactics that can help deal with some of these complexities. Segmenting data becomes more critical in complex sales. This can be done through allowing customers to identify what segment they belong to (enterprise, small business, etc). Another important factor when it comes to complex sales is going beyond the cost per lead to cost per action which is a good indicator of the quality of leads.

Another panel discussion I attended at SES was Slash Your Search Budget. As you can imagine the title hit home with what many companies have to deal with nowadays. Unfortunately, this session was perhaps the most disappointing discussion in the conference. The speakers did not offer real ways to slash marketing budgets. The talk of mobile SEO as an alternative to traditional SEO threw me off completely. How would that relate to slashing a marketing budget? Talk of utilizing social media as a way to generate hits did not resonate with me either. Social media takes a lot of nurturing and a lot of budget. So, at that point, I could not help but raise my hand and ask how is using social media help in cutting SEM budgets? There was a bit of silence there.

The only exception was Aaron Kahlow of the online marketing summit. He offered candid suggestions: It is better to take charge of the budget discussion. Approach your manager/boss and tell him you want to slash the budget. Evaluate which parts SEM activities are not producing results. By doing so, you will be guaranteed a seat at the table.

The 2 nd night at SES included attending live web master radio show hosted by David Szetela, learning more about the SEO community from Jim Hedger and enjoying a lengthy discussion on online marketing with @webanalytic J .

On the third day of SES, I attended News search and SEO. Most notable on that panel was John Shehata of who specializes in news search seo . John provided many valuable tips that ranged from the basic to more advance level. Some of the tips included:

• Use trends/buzz keyword tools when writing news for online audience (Google hot trends, Yahoo Buzz, Google Zeitgeist, seomoz popular)
• Print headlines sell the story, optimized web headlines tell the story

Well, before I sign off, I have to congratulate Matt McGowan and his team for an excellent show and raised the bar for upcoming search events. I think Matt is on his way to Australia at this point. If you enjoyed this post and would like to connect, then follow me on twitter.

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Review JonWaraas.Com & Get Free Stuff

Well its that time of year again. I have tried this once before and it seem to work pretty good in getting new readers and getting the word out about my blog. So I am willing to try it again.
Here is the deal, if you post a 300 word (at least) write-up/review of either jonwaraas.com [...]

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An SEM’s Guide to Surviving Redundancy

Posted by RobOusbey

I hope you read this post and enjoy it. I also hope you never need it.

In the ‘current economic climate’ there is a chance that any company may have to ‘restructure’ or even cease trading altogether. These events are no fun for any employees involved, but I’d like to share some advice that will help you prepare for and cope with the worst situation if it arises.

Negotiating Your Redundancy

If you are being made redundant, do ask your employer if they would be interested in reducing your working hours instead. Particularly for in-house SEMs, you may be able to persuade them to continue employing you for three days a week (for instance) - leaving you with time to pursue other work but still having a regular income.

Check your original employment contract and any waivers that you are asked to sign when leaving. Look out for ‘non-competitive’ clauses that might say you can’t work in the same industry for six months after leaving the company, and ask that these are canceled as part of your leaving agreement.

At this stage, you may also try to negotiate a bigger redundancy payment. If the company is closing down, there is unlikely to be much spare cash for this, so try informally asking for any resources the finished company will not need - for instance, laptops or domain names.

As something of an aside, the negotiation tactic book Getting to Yes is a very short, very worthwhile book to read before any negotiation.

Finding New Work

If the situation has arisen, then it’s likely that other business in your industry may be suffering too, making finding your next position harder. Fortunately, we Internet-types are a hardy, flexible bunch, and we can use this to our advantage.

If you worked in-house, you may consider finding an agency to apply to. In downturns such as this, agencies and freelancers are attractive to companies who may need to adjust their budgets quite often. Indeed many agencies are thriving and actively hiring at the moment - for instance, Distilled is recruiting a Business Development Apprentice right now.

Be aware that you might need to brush up on some different skills and take a slightly different position to what you’re used to. For example: your last three years as an SEO still put you in a good position to manage PPC campaigns, even if you’ve never logged into AdWords in your life.

To begin your search, you could visit the targeted job boards at SEOmoz Marketplace, Blogstorm’s Jobs Board or SEOGadget’s SEO jobs page.
If you think there’s any potential that your job security isn’t 100%, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep a list of names and numbers to call in an emergency.

"Hi Dave, it’s Rob Ousbey. We met at that conference last month. Acme has just gone out of business, so I wanted to see if there’d be any value in us meeting up for a drink to talk about opportunities you might have, now that I’m available? I can be at you office in 15 minutes."

It might sound negative to consider it, and brash to actually do it, but I know people who this has worked very well for.

Going It Alone

If you’ve ever considered being your own boss (and honestly, who hasn’t?), then having no job and a redundancy payment to get you through the first few rocky months can be a great opportunity. A lot has been written about starting out as a freelancer and plenty more will be written, but here are my top suggestions for finding your first freelance gigs:

• talk to other departments in your former company
• get in touch with all your professional contacts, telling them about the kind of services you offer
• if your company went out of business, contact your old clients and offer them continuity by taking on the work you previously did for them
• if the company is still going, then talk to the clients/suppliers/partners you had good personal relationships with, but don’t offer the same services your former company does
• make sure everyone you come into contact with knows what you do (even if it is as simple as ‘internet stuff’ for instance) - you can quickly have an army of people selling you on your behalf.

The Freelance Switch blog is a great place to start for tips and a good community, and I’ve seen a lot of people talking up the Rockstar Freelancer book.

Beyond freelancing, you may feel that the skills you have put you in a good position to start up your own ventures instead. Internet Marketers I’ve met would typically have a set of skills to dive straight into projects such as:

• launching a blog or site focused on some particular niche that interests them
• getting involved in the wonderful world of affiliate marketing
• domaining.

If you have the cushion of some redundancy cash behind you, you can even use the opportunity to change direction and see how it works out. Enjoy wood working in your shed? Make some spice racks and see if you can flog them. Love taking photos? See if you can sell some of them, or get commissions from newspapers.

Again, you can think about this now and even begin implementation of some of it. If you have a blog that you only post to once a month, then you could spend the first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life writing posts and promoting it. By the end of Week 1, you could be in a much stronger position than if you’d started that venture from scratch in the same week.

Again, there’s a low chance that this will happen to you. I hope it doesn’t, and I really do feel for the people who’ve found themselves out of work in the last few months; I know that there has been some restructuring in our industry recently.

Good luck with your work, and if you do find yourself in this situation then let me say an extra bold GOOD LUCK! Enjoy your new challenges, and remember that SEOmoz is still here to support you.

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Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference: An Extraordinary Experience

Posted by randfish

This past week, as Sarah, Adam, Jeff and I left the office for our Tuesday lunch meeting, they asked me how the Iceland conference went. I believe my exact words were "It was the most fun I’ve had since my wedding." The more I reflect on the experience, the truer it is.

I arrived in Keflavik airport at 6:15am last Thursday morning. I walked outside to take the bus to Reykjavik and was promptly greeted by a frozen wind flinging rain that stung like pebbles against my cheeks. The landscape seemed utterly barren - almost like another planet. As the sun came up while we drove into the city, a violent seascape and miles of mossy, green rocks filled the horizon. I’ve traveled to a lot of places, but never seen anything like it.

At our hotel - Arnarhvoll - in the center of Reykjavik, Pauline Ores, IBM’s senior marketing manager for social media, offered to take me along as she and her daughter Lea explored the Icelandic countryside. Despite being up for 24 hours straight, I knew I needed to power through the day or I’d never get on the right schedule.

A bit punch drunk, I photograph the landscape outside Reykjavik from the car window

We visited geysers, including Geysir, the original spout from which the English word was adopted. We saw a massive waterfall - the giant Gullfoss, and got caught in a foggy snowstorm that gave us less than 20m of visibility on the road. 

The mighty Gullfoss waterfall pushed freezing cold wind & spray onto the overlook

Near the original geyser, "Geysir"; it smells of rotten eggs (from the sulfur)

On our return, we were whisked out to dinner by Kristjan Már Hauksson, the director of Nordic E-Marketing and founder of the RIMC.

The conference itself was exceptional, particularly given the short program and great distance speakers needed to travel. Kristjan managed to pull together some amazing talent, and after experiencing Iceland for myself, it’s easy to see why - everyone should want an excuse to go. Some interesting bits from the conference itself included:

• Sion Portman, Nike’s European marketing manager, had some phenomenal slides about the branding power of their advertisements, particularly leveraging UGC - and user-driven campaigns like Wayne Rooney’s Nutmegging
• Mark Killingley, NFL Europe’s director of online marketing, shared an equally fascinating success around advertisements the NFL built for their Fantasy Football programs - "Pick Me" (note the millions of views). Again, the unexpected virality of it has made them into a use-generated success - so much so that players who weren’t featured are filming and submitting their own clips for the campaign
• During a site clinic, Adam Lasnik revealed a site issue I was sure Google had solved. Anne Kennedy called attention to an Icelandic optician website’s lack of canonicalizing the non-www and www versions. Adam noted that via his tools, he could see that Google was not automatically canonicalizing these two (although they were virtually identical; a slightly older version was on the non-www), and thus they were losing out on link juice and rankings. It was a great reminder to 301 to a canonical version!

However, this show wasn’t just about the content, and in fact, since it was mostly a beginner-level conference, I’ll instead share the experience visually. These photos can’t nearly do the trip justice, but it’s far better than the thousands of words I’d need to describe RIMC and Kristjan’s incredible "Day Money Can’t Buy" the Saturday following the show.

I get a little excited during the morning keynote on how to derive value from multiple Internet marketing channels

Kristjan, Ingvar, Andy, Adam & me on the "Meet the Search Engines" Panel

The crowd listens intently during a presentation

 
Kristjan attempts an American Football toss at a party thrown that evening at the Nordic eMarketing offices (thankfully, he didn’t break any of the large monitors in the room)

Kristjan’s stunningly beautiful wife, a professional singer, serenaded the crowd at the Nordic eMarketing party

The dinners, the conference, the party - these were not all Kristjan had in store. For weeks leading up to RIMC, we’d been receiving emails about the "Day Money Can’t Buy." It started early - 8am for breakfast, then downstairs, set in cold-weather hiking gear for a day adventuring around Iceland’s natural beauty in massive jeeps.

Haraldur Friðgeirsson (Halli) was our driver, and he gave Geraldine, Anne Kennedy & a day we’ll never forget.

When Halli, our driver, handed me a beer in the car at 11am, I thought he was kidding, but when in Iceland…

While our guides forded the rivers, we crossed via a rickety bridge in the background 

The glacier Eyjafjallajökull covers a volcano (and we had front row seats)

Apparently, we should have eaten a lighter breakfast (note the bridge bending down)

Amazing shards of glacier ice from Eyjafjallajökull

In the volcanic valley, Þórsmörk, nestled between two Icelandic glaciers, we took an hour hike to the top of a tall overlook

After the hike, our hosts prepared a traditional Icelandic BBQ - hot dogs & hamburgers!

Left to Right: Pauline, Lia, Katya, Patricia, Gisli, Andy, Ashley, Richard, Oli, Dan, Paul, Mel, Siôn, Alex, Matt, Geraldine, Rand, Adam, Mark, Ben & Dixon at Þórsmörk

Next, we visited the grand waterfall, Seljalandsfoss, where an indented cave allows you to "walk behind the falls"

Geraldine & I get soaked behind Seljalandsfoss

 
To celebrate life, we drink Icelandic "Black Death" before heading back to Reykjavik

A dramatic snowstorm gives way to sunshine - nearly the first we’d seen on our visit - as we drive back

When we reached the hotel, we had two hours before the relaxing ended and a night on the town began. First, dinner at a traditional Icelandic restaurants, where we dined on fish salad, tender Icelandic lamb and skyr - a sort of dessert-like yogurt. After dinner, drinks were served and Kristjan thanked us for coming & broke into song.

 
Oli & Kristjan sing a traditional Icelandic folk song as we sip armagnac after the conclusion of dinner

Dixon & Mel follow up the Icelanders with a song to defend England’s honor

Tragically, I have no photo evidence of what followed - the Americans were asked to contribute our own piece. Anne looked at Adam; they looked at Geraldine and me… We panicked, briefly, until Anne stood up and belted out Janis Joplin’s classic, Mercedes Benz. The entire room joined in - it was magical. On the plane flight, we talked about the experience and Geraldine said, "I want to be Anne Kennedy."

From dinner, we went downstairs to the touristy, but fun ice bar, where more Brennivin awaited.

I hoist up my wife for a photo in the glacier-carved ice bar

 
Finally, we ended the night in an Icelandic disco, where Richard Chinn had been invited to DJ. We made it back to the hotel at 1:30am, but heard that many were out until 5am the next morning.

Looking back over this photoset, I’m reminded not just how lucky I am, but how lucky we all are to be in the search marketing industry, where relentless spirit, goodwill and hospitality shine, even in the harshest of climates and even in the darkest of times. Our thanks go out to Kristjan, Halli, Oli, Gisli and the entire Nordic eMarketing crew. I only wish we could repay the favor in kind.

BTW - Next year’s RIMC should be equally exciting, and if you live in Boston or New York, the flight is only 4.5 hours (shorter than coming to the West coast)!

p.s. Expect blogging from me to be very slow this week, as I’m leaving tomorrow to keynote Australia’s SMX Sydney conference on the subject of SEO for the CEO. From one side of the globe to completely the other!

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SEOmoz Tools - Top Pages on Domain Kick Ass

Posted by richardbaxterseo

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The SEOmoz team has been beavering away lately, adding more and more data to Linkscape and chipping away at the coalface of cutting edge R&D with SEOmoz Labs. One of my favourite new toys in the Labs section is “Top pages on domain”.

“Top pages on domain” gives you a page by page analysis of your domain (or someone else’s) ordered by the number of linking route domains:

Where this tool really adds value is the ability it gives you to investigate old domains and their previously indexed (and linked to) pages. Take the example above. This old domain is 301 redirecting somewhere else, but the following URL in the list, with another 3 links, leads us to a 404 error page.

What we just did in the example is pretty difficult to do with an actual search engine. The problem is with old domains is past a certain point, if a site has been taken down, Google and Yahoo will eventually stop reporting the number of indexed pages with the "site:" operator. That’s because eventually, 404 error pages are removed from the their indexes. You don’t know what URLs were previously in the index so your investigation into previously indexed URLs can only go so far.

With "Top Pages On Domain," you can easily find old, deep URLs that contain lots of great quality links that aren’t being properly redirected to your site or choose to redirect specific URLs to other regions of your site.

Here’s my checklist of 5 things you should be doing with the top pages on domain tool:

1)    Run all of your owned domains through the tool. Check for linked to pages that should be redirected, but aren’t.

2)    Redirect URLs that have link value to deeper sections of your website for better rankings.

3)    Run the tool on your main domain to understand where your highest value URLs are, and gain value by getting internal links from those pages. You might even find a few old but valuable URLs from a legacy version of your site that have no redirects set up!

4)    Redirect old / “out of stock” product pages or vacancy pages that have links to newer, more competitive products or jobs.

5)    Analyze your competitors strongest URLs, get a list of their back links together and start link building!

Enjoy, and have fun with all those redirects

Richard Baxter is an SEO Consultant in London and chief blogger at SEOgadget.co.uk

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International WWW Conference 2009

Lots of reading material submitted for the 18th International WWW Conference panels.

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Whiteboard Friday - Flat Site Architecture

Posted by great scott!

How deep or flat your site is can have a lot to do with how thoroughly indexed it is. Minimize the number of "clicks" it takes the bots to get to your content, and the more likely it is to get indexed.

In this video we’ll look at some simple strategies to help flatten out even the most labyrinthine sites. 

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Flat Site Architecture from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Also, Whiteboard Friday finally has its very own category on the blog!!  If you’re a WBF junkie you’ll be able to find them all in the new category.

p.s from Rand - We also shot 14 more new PRO Video Tips on everything from social media marketing to moving domains to what to do if your traffic from search engines tanks. They’re short - almost all under 5 minutes - and designed to be easy to consume, short resources that answer many of the most common questions we get asked in Q+A

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