Author Archive
E-Commerce SEO: Making Product Pages into Great Content - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Danny Dover
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Today we’re talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them
unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural
links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites –
it doesn’t matter what you’re selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example — you’ve got a big
problem in that people just don’t want to naturally link to those pages.
The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to
change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the
same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product,
your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think
this can be a big, big positive.So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example.
Here’s Acme Store. They’ve got the standard manufacturer’s picture that
the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing
data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly.
Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the
description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add
to Cart" button.You haven’t added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I
don’t know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not
exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see
that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it
uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price.
But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web
is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I
have some vested interest. The search engines don’t like to count those
kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight
from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to
every other ecommerce provider.Let’s take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here
I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I’m going to
walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much
more exciting, and they’re not that much additional effort. Right? To some
degree, but that’s what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page,
everyone would be doing it and you couldn’t have the competitive advantage.Here I’ve got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I’ve sort
of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there.
But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they
essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are
searching for it, you probably don’t want to change up the title
dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might
consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure,
maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at
what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and
add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don’t have to do this. I could
just keep the standard title if that’s what it takes, and I can add
uniqueness in other places.Let’s start with the images. If you just take the one image that the
manufacturer suggests, you’re really losing out. A great example of this
story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They
make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single
angle. They’ve got the shoe. They’ve got the side of the shoe. They’ve
got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom.
They’ve done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The
great part about this isn’t just that these images are now yours and yours
alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say,
"Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do
use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page.
You’ve got tons of opportunity.I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and
different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people
the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger
version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images.
Sometimes you’ll see websites where you click a different one of these and
the URL changes. You don’t want that unless it’s in a hashtag, because it
will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at
companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A
unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well.
It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so
compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people,
who weren’t interested in the products at all and probably never bought
something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and
read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that
were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different
products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got
a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we’re
aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If
this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who
are passionate about it, you’re going to get such better content there.Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit
with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the
popularity in a specific category. I think that’s a good one. It lets
people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write
books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on
Amazon, they can see how well they’re performing in the category. Other
people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about
this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You
could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do
people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they
buy them at the end of summer? I don’t know. Let’s see. Those sales
trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this
and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they
also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product.
Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data
points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your
customer database, that are anonymous. It won’t be sharing privacy issues,
but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link
to it and make this page more unique and valuable.Number five, I love the comparisons. If you’ve ever been to a site like
CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell
phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against
each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn’t
have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are
a real unique value proposition, because now you’re not just the source for
where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can
do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are
also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they’ll
buy from you.Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be
done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You
can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There
can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don’t Like." The
comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out
like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or
not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What’s your
experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or
five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you
have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we’re an
office supply store. Let’ see if we can get everyone to rate the usability
of this, whether it’s travel worthy versus whether it’s rugged and durable
versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different
aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites
from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don’t know. We’ll see how
long it takes to develop. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this edition of
Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.
Transcription done by http://www.speechpad.com
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Answering Hard SEO Questions - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Danny Dover
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.
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Video Transcription
Hi, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO.
Today, I’m going to try to tackle answering the hard SEO questions. I
don’t have them all on this list, so feel free to ask me other ones below
in the comments. These are the ones that I came up with, so I’m going to
try my best to answer these for you.Number one. I get this one a lot and it’s kind of awkward. Why don’t you
rank number one for SEO? Right? If I’m in SEO and I’m trying to sell my
services to somebody, why do I not rank number one for the service that I
claim to do? This one is kind of awkward, actually. Right? I probably
should rank number one for one. Awkward turtle, if you’ve ever seen this.
It’s awkward. Okay. The reason, and we’ve talked about this internally at
SEOmoz, the reason we think we don’t rank number one for it is that the
name SEOmoz is being combined when searching to see it, as opposed to Aaron
Wall’s website, SEO Book, has two words that search engines know about, SEO
and book. So he gets credit for both of those every time he gets a link
saying SEO Book, right? Whereas with SEOmoz, we only get credit for the
word SEOmoz.There’s some other things that go into this as well. QDF algorithm. QDF
is query deserves freshness algorithm, which means new information we’ll
sometimes write at the top. We see this with some smaller companies.
There’s a lot of geolocation stuff that goes on. We’ll rank better in the
United States than we do in the UK, things like that. Frankly, what it
comes down to is that we do not have the best website optimized for just
the term SEO. We’re trying to rank for other things. SEO tools, we’re
trying to rank for learning SEO, that kind of thing. My way to answer this
to potential clients and other people is just be completely honest with
them. Like, "Yeah, we put a lot of thought in this and smart question.
Here’s the reason that we think it was." It was just the stuff that I
covered.Number two. How can you do SEO if you don’t actually work for a search
engine? This one is similar to the one above. I do not work for Google.
I do not work for Bing. I have never read any of the code that they’ve
written to do their search engine algorithms. But I have put a lot of
thought, and more importantly, and actually the only important part is that
I have practiced this a lot. I have created a lot of websites, and I’ve
changed variables on them to figure out what helps rank better. I’ve also
relied on people who are much smarter than myself, so other SEOs in the
industry. I have kept abreast of the news. So there’s Search Engine Land,
for example. There’s lots of news things where they talk to people who do
work at Google and Bing and get their information about what they’re trying
to spread. I also learn from conferences, and I learn from other people
who are successful at SEO and are willing to share their tactics or their
strategies with me. In those ways, I have been able to learn SEO even
though I don’t work at the search engines.Number three. Is Company XYZ a Google killer? This comes up, I’d say,
once every other month. So is it Wolfram Alpha or is it Bing or is it
Facebook? Are any of these companies Google killers? The answer I usually
give is, "I don’t know, but probably not." Google’s extremely good at what
it does, being a search engine. Right? The thing that I think eventually
will kill Google will be something that looks absolutely nothing like
Google at all. It’ll be a completely different way of searching the
Internet or maybe searching something else. Right? Maybe more like Star
Trek or Star Wars, where you just talk into thin air and then an answer
comes to you on some beautiful girl on a screen that came out of nothing.
I’m hoping for that to happen soon actually. But what will kill Google? I
don’t know, but I bet it will not look like anything we’ve seen today, my
best guess.Facebook does have an edge being able to make search results that are very,
very customized to your friends. If I’m looking for what’s the best TV,
I’m going to care about what Best Buy has to say, which is how Google
currently works, right, with these leaders in the industry. But I also
care about what my friends think. Maybe a better example is clothes,
right? What is the best shirt for me to buy? Target might be able to tell
me something or Abercrombie & Fitch or somebody else, but what I really
probably care about is the other people in my social network, what they
think. Facebook has an example there, but we’ll see if they’re a Google
killer. My guess is probably not.Number four. This one’s tough. Why don’t I just buy links? A lot of
times it’s a lot easier and, quite frankly, buying links in some cases does
work. But when you’re doing that, you’re betting against the very, very
small people at the search engines who are working on algorithms to detect
paid links. So while it can work in some cases, my advice is not to do it
just because it is not a good long-term strategy. I’d much rather use that
same money and buy content or pay writers or pay people who are likely be
able to create links for themselves. This, I just feel, is a much better
long-term strategy. This is what we usually recommend at SEOmoz is not to
buy links but instead put it into other strategies that will work better
long term.Number five. Danny, will you marry me? No. But if you have a hotter
sister, let me know.Number six. How do I increase my PageRank? This one I usually break into
two areas. First, I break down PageRank. The PageRank that we normally
see in PageRank toolbar, I just don’t think it’s very helpful at all. The
exception to that is if it’s zero. If it’s zero, it means you have a
penalty or you haven’t been crawled yet. In both those cases, you need to
figure out what’s going on. (Edit: I left out the cases that the page really doesn’t have enough links to round up to PR 1 or that the page PR hasn’t been updated to reflect new links) The other part is how do I increase my
PageRank? If the person asking this question is just really relying on the
fact that PageRank is still important, the way to do it is to get more
links. If they’re going to ask a silly question, it’s okay to give them a
silly answer. The way to increase PageRank, even though in my opinion it’s
not important, is to gain more links.That’s all the time I got here. I appreciate all of you paying attention.
I will talk to you next week. Thank you very much. Bye.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
How to Pitch SEO to Potential Clients and Employers - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Danny Dover
Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host’s CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage. Also, I shaved my beard and now look like a 12-year-old boy. (I don’t recommend that as a pitch tactic.)
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Video Transcription
Hello, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I do SEO here at SEOmoz. Today
for Whiteboard Friday, I’m going to tell you about something that I think
is extremely important, and you should, too. Pitching SEO. By pitching
SEO, I mean presenting the idea of SEO to either potential clients or to
potential employers. So when I am giving this pitch, I have a few key
points I make, and then I’m going to go through a couple of rebuttals that
people usually make back to me.The first key point that I make, and I always, always do this because it is
very important, is to acknowledge the snake oil salesman. SEO is an
industry where there are a lot of people who just kind of suck. They do a
very poor job of service and it makes the entire industry look bad. So,
you need to acknowledge those people exist so that the person who is
hearing the pitch takes into consideration what you are saying. You’re
acknowledging that, yes, they are correct. But there is also this
alternative that they might now know about. My favorite way of doing this
is you just acknowledge it and then explain why, what proof you have to
show that is not how you do your service, be it past clients or
testimonials or actual data you can show from your results. I prefer the
latter if possible.Number two. Strategies are easy but tactics are hard. A lot of times when
I am explaining SEO, I will come into contact with someone who is like,
"Oh, yeah, I get it. You’ve got to build links and content." They’re
absolutely right. That’s correct. That’s what you have to do. But what
they are talking about are strategies. Bigger ideas. Building content,
that is just a broad idea. The actual content you write and the way you do
it and the way it is formatted, those are tactics.In SEO, I think that the strategies are easy. They are easy to comprehend.
They’re big and they make intuitive sense. But the tactics are hard. My
favorite example of this is URL rewrites. The idea is yes, we’re going to
make all the URLs go from here to here. It turns out that doing that can
be very, very troublesome, and you run into lots and lots of side cases
just like anything you do with programming. So, I always try to
acknowledge that yes, the strategies are easy, but you are going to
probably want a specialist so that you make sure you nail all your tactics.Number three. PPC and SEO equals the top of the conversion funnel. To be
completely honest, there are other things at the top of the conversion
funnel as well. There’s email. There’s direct traffic. There are lots of
other things. The two that I focus on are PPC and SEO. PPC is pay per
click, which is the ads you pay for in search engines and elsewhere and SEO
being search engine optimization, of course.These are both tops of the funnel. So, you can either chose to pay on an
ongoing basis for PPC and get some traffic that way, or you can do it
through SEO and if you adhere to best practices, it can be free for you.
Just learn how to do it once, continue with the best practices, and it
costs you no money. The nice thing about this is that, while 90% of
budgets go to PPC, only 10% of clicks go there. The reverse of that is
only 10% of budgets approximately go to SEO, but 90% of clicks from users
are going to organic results and search engines. Huge opportunity here and
if you do it right, it won’t cost you a dime.The next one, rebuttals. When I am giving this pitch, there are a couple
of responses I get from people that I think are very genuine and they make
a lot of sense. These are the rebuttals they give, and then how I help
deconstruct that a little bit.The first one being SEO takes too long. They are absolutely right. SEO
does take a long time. The way I break down SEO in my head is into
popularity, which is links, and relevancy, which is onsite, although there
is an element of links in that too. I’ll write a little bit more about
this in the blog post below. The idea being that SEO takes too long.
That’s true, but not for on page. If you want to just do on page
optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly.
Just do on page to start with. Another trick like that is just installing
a site map if they don’t have one. I’ve seen that this is easy to do. You
can have an automated generator do it. Submit it to the engines, and within
a week or so you’ll see results on that assuming they’ve never had one
before and other variables are not acting awry.Number two, it will happen organically. This is one of my favorites.
People will say, "Oh yeah, we’re building links anyway. There’s variety in
our content. We have professional writers. So it’s just going to happen
organically." That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating
life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it’s not happened
organically. Same thing with SEO. You can try to do all these things, but
unless you have some focus, some actual goals, and some plans, it’s just
not going to happen. Search engine optimization, you’re not optimizing
anything. You’re just letting it happen. So by putting in just a little
bit extra effort, you can get a lot more results. That’s usually what I
use there.The last one is, "I’m too busy." That’s something I can totally
understand. Learning SEO is a complicated process. But, it turns out you
can have other people do this for you. If you are trading it for money,
you can just pay someone to do a little bit on it, SEO for you, do an SEO
audit, and give you some recommendations. Or you can trade, you can do
some bartering or something else. You can just make it happen. So, yes,
being busy is an excuse, but not with the potential there is to make a lot
of money with SEO and a lot of conversion on that.That’s all the time I’ve got today. I appreciate all of you paying
attention, or some of you. Not that guy. I appreciate it, and I’ll talk
to you next week. Bye.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
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If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
How to Pitch SEO to Potential Clients and Employers - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Danny Dover
Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host’s CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage. Also, I shaved my beard and now look like a 12-year-old boy. (I don’t recommend that as a pitch tactic.)
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Video Transcription
Hello, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I do SEO here at SEOmoz. Today
for Whiteboard Friday, I’m going to tell you about something that I think
is extremely important, and you should, too. Pitching SEO. By pitching
SEO, I mean presenting the idea of SEO to either potential clients or to
potential employers. So when I am giving this pitch, I have a few key
points I make, and then I’m going to go through a couple of rebuttals that
people usually make back to me.The first key point that I make, and I always, always do this because it is
very important, is to acknowledge the snake oil salesman. SEO is an
industry where there are a lot of people who just kind of suck. They do a
very poor job of service and it makes the entire industry look bad. So,
you need to acknowledge those people exist so that the person who is
hearing the pitch takes into consideration what you are saying. You’re
acknowledging that, yes, they are correct. But there is also this
alternative that they might now know about. My favorite way of doing this
is you just acknowledge it and then explain why, what proof you have to
show that is not how you do your service, be it past clients or
testimonials or actual data you can show from your results. I prefer the
latter if possible.Number two. Strategies are easy but tactics are hard. A lot of times when
I am explaining SEO, I will come into contact with someone who is like,
"Oh, yeah, I get it. You’ve got to build links and content." They’re
absolutely right. That’s correct. That’s what you have to do. But what
they are talking about are strategies. Bigger ideas. Building content,
that is just a broad idea. The actual content you write and the way you do
it and the way it is formatted, those are tactics.In SEO, I think that the strategies are easy. They are easy to comprehend.
They’re big and they make intuitive sense. But the tactics are hard. My
favorite example of this is URL rewrites. The idea is yes, we’re going to
make all the URLs go from here to here. It turns out that doing that can
be very, very troublesome, and you run into lots and lots of side cases
just like anything you do with programming. So, I always try to
acknowledge that yes, the strategies are easy, but you are going to
probably want a specialist so that you make sure you nail all your tactics.Number three. PPC and SEO equals the top of the conversion funnel. To be
completely honest, there are other things at the top of the conversion
funnel as well. There’s email. There’s direct traffic. There are lots of
other things. The two that I focus on are PPC and SEO. PPC is pay per
click, which is the ads you pay for in search engines and elsewhere and SEO
being search engine optimization, of course.These are both tops of the funnel. So, you can either chose to pay on an
ongoing basis for PPC and get some traffic that way, or you can do it
through SEO and if you adhere to best practices, it can be free for you.
Just learn how to do it once, continue with the best practices, and it
costs you no money. The nice thing about this is that, while 90% of
budgets go to PPC, only 10% of clicks go there. The reverse of that is
only 10% of budgets approximately go to SEO, but 90% of clicks from users
are going to organic results and search engines. Huge opportunity here and
if you do it right, it won’t cost you a dime.The next one, rebuttals. When I am giving this pitch, there are a couple
of responses I get from people that I think are very genuine and they make
a lot of sense. These are the rebuttals they give, and then how I help
deconstruct that a little bit.The first one being SEO takes too long. They are absolutely right. SEO
does take a long time. The way I break down SEO in my head is into
popularity, which is links, and relevancy, which is onsite, although there
is an element of links in that too. I’ll write a little bit more about
this in the blog post below. The idea being that SEO takes too long.
That’s true, but not for on page. If you want to just do on page
optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly.
Just do on page to start with. Another trick like that is just installing
a site map if they don’t have one. I’ve seen that this is easy to do. You
can have an automated generator do it. Submit it to the engines, and within
a week or so you’ll see results on that assuming they’ve never had one
before and other variables are not acting awry.Number two, it will happen organically. This is one of my favorites.
People will say, "Oh yeah, we’re building links anyway. There’s variety in
our content. We have professional writers. So it’s just going to happen
organically." That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating
life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it’s not happened
organically. Same thing with SEO. You can try to do all these things, but
unless you have some focus, some actual goals, and some plans, it’s just
not going to happen. Search engine optimization, you’re not optimizing
anything. You’re just letting it happen. So by putting in just a little
bit extra effort, you can get a lot more results. That’s usually what I
use there.The last one is, "I’m too busy." That’s something I can totally
understand. Learning SEO is a complicated process. But, it turns out you
can have other people do this for you. If you are trading it for money,
you can just pay someone to do a little bit on it, SEO for you, do an SEO
audit, and give you some recommendations. Or you can trade, you can do
some bartering or something else. You can just make it happen. So, yes,
being busy is an excuse, but not with the potential there is to make a lot
of money with SEO and a lot of conversion on that.That’s all the time I’ve got today. I appreciate all of you paying
attention, or some of you. Not that guy. I appreciate it, and I’ll talk
to you next week. Bye.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
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If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday - Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.
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Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
Build YourBrand.com
Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc…) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com
Build an Alternative Brand Site
After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.
Create Social Media Profiles
This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc…) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.
Do Interviews/News
Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.
Do PPC
This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der…) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.
Update: You can see 4 more excellent suggestions from seo-himanshu in the comments below.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less rude)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday - Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.
if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed(’wistia_156841′,640,360,{videoUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/68002269a24d03accbf2f4055daa8840e3e2b51e.bin’,stillUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/62386dc87c43d53083393f18e766a2e421b95a3d.bin’,distilleryUrl:’http://distillery.wistia.com/x’,accountKey:’wistia-production_3161′,mediaId:’wistia-production_156841′,mediaDuration:355.36})
Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
Build YourBrand.com
Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc…) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com
Build an Alternative Brand Site
After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.
Create Social Media Profiles
This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc…) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.
Do Interviews/News
Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.
Do PPC
This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der…) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.
Update: You can see 4 more excellent suggestions from seo-himanshu in the comments below.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less rude)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday - Outsourcing Content Creation
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.
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Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite SEO diagram. You can read more about the SEO Pyramid here.
Step 1: Requirements Gathering
Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.
Step 2: Locating Potential Resources
You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.
Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match
In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company’s written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.
Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track
Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.
Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.
SEO Chrome Toolbar is Here! Download the Mozbar for Chrome Today
Posted by Danny Dover
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Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. 
Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google’s Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
Whether it’s from Twitter, Facebook, email or comments here on the blog, almost every day we get some sort of request for a Chrome Toolbar. We knew there was a high need for it, and wanted to make sure that we didn’t rush and put together something unmozworthy. The new toolbar is pretty baller if I do say so myself (which I just did). It works very similarly to a toolbar in Firefox where it displays across the top of the screen, but with the ability to easily drop it down to the bottom of the page as well.
The new Chrome toolbar has most of the same features as the Firefox edition, but if you want to learn more… please keep reading. 
So How Does This Help Me?
1. Search Results Overlay
This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.
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"I get the best ‘feel’ for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I’m familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." –Will Critchlow
2. Quickly find important SEO information with the Analyze Page Overlay
Our analyze page overlay provides quick access to useful data points which include:
- On-page Optimization Elements – All of the essential SEO on-page elements (title tag, meta description, meta robots, rel canonical) are in one place.
- Location Data – As local search becomes more important, the value of information like server location increase.
- Google cache – Want to see exactly what Google saw when it’s bot crawled a given site. The link to Google’s cache will get you there.
"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it’s using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using ‘view source’ and searching through code; overlay FTW!" –Rand Fishkin
3. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties
The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain information.
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What if I find a bug?
Reporting Bugs
The best way to report bugs is to e-mail us at customerservice(at symbol)seomoz.org. This is the quickest way to get into our development queue.
Known Issues
1. The toolbar overlays some of the page content. We attempted to inject the CSS into the page and push down the page content, but this ended up breaking some useful sites (like Twitter) so we overlay the page instead , but do now offer the ability to display the toolbar at the bottom of the page, which should hopefully help, when you’ve just got to see the Facebook nav.
2. Because of the way the toolbar is rendered as part of the page, it only shows up when the page loads, so if the toolbar is turned on while other windows already have loaded content, you will need to click refresh to see the toolbar. Unfortunately, this is also the case when you open a new chrome window, since chrome shows cached content on open to appear faster.
We hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to post feedback in the comments below.
Not yet a Chrome fan? Still plugging away in good ol’ Firefox? Well we haven’t forgotten about you! You were our first love, and can still be downloaded here.
Whiteboard Friday - How to Get an SEO Job
Posted by Danny Dover
Guess who’s back. Back again. Danny’s back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won’t see coming!
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Apply for an Internship
- Leverage Start-ups - Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can’t afford to pay people
- Use the "Godfather Approach" - Make the company an offer they can’t refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,)
Dive Right In
- Build Test Sites - After reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms.
- Offer to Help Charities - Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering.
Create a New Niche
- Leverage What You Already Know - Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche.
- Educate Others For Free - Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn.
Join the Community
- Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences - Get your name out and build your network by participating online.
- Take Advantage of Osmosis - Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday - The Biggest SEO Mistakes SEOmoz Has Ever Made
Posted by Danny Dover
This week’s Whiteboard Friday features the return of Rand (woo hoo!) and his self declared biggest SEO mistakes. We screw up a lot here at SEOmoz (hell, they hired me), so we feel it is only appropriate to take this opportunity to share what we have learned in an effort to prevent you from making similar mistakes. SEO is complicated. The best we can do is practice, work hard and compare notes.
1. Reciprocal Links + Robots.txt NoFollow
Back before the formal SEOmoz days, Rand used to dabble a bit in some grayer areas of SEO. The first mistake he mentions is a tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value. This tactic didn’t really work and he ended up having to do a lot more work to get in the good graces of the webmasters he had fooled. Head smack!
2. Buying Links for Clients
This tactic also took place before formal SEOmoz days. At the time, Rand spent client budgets on paid links. This is a bad idea because the value of the links can’t be determined (was Google even counting them?). He later found out through Google employees that the links were not being counted and that they may actually be hurting the client’s site ability to rank. Oops!
3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords
This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn’t actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s.
4. Recommending People Not To Use XML Sitemaps
When XML Sitemaps first debuted, Rand and SEOmoz recommended not using this. While the idea was sound in theory (having a XML Sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) the observation ended up being outweighed by the impact we saw with the increased indexation rates of sites that employed this tool.
5. Incorrectly Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer
Recently we decided to 301 redirect all of the old Linkscape reports to our newer, better converting, Open Site Explorer reports in a 1-1 relationship. This was in theory a good idea but unfortunately including various tracking components on the redirect URLs resulted in us losing a significant amount of traffic. We later fixed this with rel=canonical but a lot of the damage was already done. Ouch!
Do you have any lessons you have learned after making some noteworthy mistakes? If so, we would love to hear what you learned in the comments below.