Go Atlanta SEO

The days immediately following Thanksgiving kick off the beginning of the holiday shopping season and are some of the busiest days of the year for retail sales.  Retailers offer some of their best deals of the year in order to lure in shoppers and shoppers often camp out for hours to score the most popular items. 

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The term Black Friday was coined in 1966 and has come to be recognized as the day that many retailers become profitable for the year. Steadily growing in popularity, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005.

Black Friday falls the day after Thanksgiving when many non-retail employees are off work.  Deals generally start long before dawn and are now being increasingly offered starting at midnight as well.  It is estimated that 212 million shoppers visited stores on Black Friday in 2010 spending $45 billion dollars- an average of $365 per shopper. Spending increased 6% in 2010 and has doubled since 2005.Gift related items such as toys, clothing, electronics, multimedia, sporting goods, jewelry, and gift cards are the most popular items to purchase on Black Friday.

The introduction of Cyber Monday is more recent, named in 2005. Cyber Monday shoppers hit online stores the Monday after Thanksgiving once they have returned to work, often purchasing items they saw and liked on Black Friday. Last year, Cyber Monday brought in a billion dollars in revenue, growing 13% over 2009.  

A few of these tools also qualify as resources or guides, but every one of these tools has made my life just a little bit easier this year. To all of you in this list, and to those I've missed or forgotten but who have offered free tools in 2011, THANK YOU!

If you're thankful for any other new free SEO tools, please give a shout out and begin a discussion about them in the comments section below.

1. GA Data Fetch Tool for Google Docs

This is a handy tool I’ve been using quite a bit recently to pull Google Analytics metrics into Google Spreadsheets.

Thanks to Jamie Steven of SEOmoz and Mikael Thuneberg of AutomateAnalytics.com.

2. Schema Creator

Raven Tools published built this with impressive speed after the announcement of Schema.org.

3. Excel for SEO

This is part tutorial, part tool, generously made available by Distilled and @MikeCP.

4. SEOmoz Toolbar for Chrome

The on- and off-page metrics provided in this toolbar are incredibly handy on the fly in an agency setting, and let’s not forget their Firefox toolbar. Here is more information about SEOmoz's Chrome Extension - thanks to SEOmoz for this tool.

5. Chrome Scraper Extension

Thanks to Justin Briggs putting this tool on my radar. Here is his summary on the tool and how it can be used for data extraction and SEO.

I’ve already found this tool useful for extracting data from a website for a redesign, and for gathering current on-page elements for analysis such as title tags, heading tags, etc. from a group of pages.

6. Competitive SERPs Analysis in Google Docs

Thanks to Tom Anthony for posting, and SEOmoz for hosting.

Very useful for competitive analysis, keyword research, and beyond (e.g. identifying competitors for on-page analysis and link opportunities, etc.).

7. Search Volume in Excel

Thanks to Richard Baxter for posting, and SEOmoz for hosting.

8. Bing Webmaster Tools Improvements

If you haven’t used Bing’s improved WMT suite, it’s time to start! Aside from tool improvements and multiple-user access, these updates are proof of Bing’s willingness to take feedback and listen to users and webmasters.

A large set of improvements were announced and launched in June, and even more updates were announced earlier this month.

9. Open Site Explorer Improvements

Open Site Explorer is better looking, more user-friendly, and sports some reporting upgrades that are more than worth a mention (and a thank you to SEOmoz for making this tool available for free).

10. Google+

I had no choice not to list Google+, because of its influence on search and communication in our industry this year. I’m a big Google+ fan btw – my Facebook use has remained the same but I’m never on Twitter anymore.

11. Google Analytics v5

Watching the new version of Google Analytics (v5) evolve over the past year has been a fun ride.

A few improvements worth noting:

• Multi-Channel Funnel visualizations
• It measures Site Speed
• Custom Dashboards
• It's prettier
• Webmaster Tools integration 

12. Future Rank

In-house and agency SEO professionals alike have been able to use this tool since April 1st to shock supervisors, get promotions, and land giant deals by predicting ranking improvements more accurately than ever before.

* If you haven’t heard of Future Rank, pay close attention to that launch date.

This is a guest post from Kaila Strong, Account Manager at Vertical Measures

Internet Marketing Infographic by Vertical Measures

Other than revenue, a website's success can be measured by the amount of targeted visitors that it receives. More targeted traffic often translates to more revenue. To achieve this objective the site must rank highly in the SERPs for keywords that your target group is actually using to search. The only way to enjoy a websites continued success is by retaining this high number of targeted visitors month in and month out. Listed here are five tasks to help achieve this, in no particular order.

Content

A constant flow of fresh content is the main objective for any website to maintain a consistent following of readers. A well written search engine optimized article involves the proper placement of just the right keywords, an engaging headline, and often a creative or interesting writing style to make the piece stand out from the rest.

The subject matter of content, and the way it’s delivered are of the utmost importance. When an article is written strictly with SEO in mind and no thought is given to the article's continuity, the piece is likely to be a flop – no shares, no links to it, and probably very little traffic to the page which equals little help to building your domain authority. Sure, it is important to write articles that are search engine optimized; however, it's equally important to keep the readers interested.

So what type of content should you provide? A variety of media can act to facilitate the process of building authority through content. Here are five of them: 

#1 Video

An effective tool at your disposal is video. In May of this year alone, Google reported that YouTube reached a whopping 14.6 billion internet video views and that's only 43 percent of the total online views for that month. That’s 34 billion videos viewed on the internet in one month!

Drive traffic, leads and business through the use of video marketing and optimization. A recent webinar discussed this very topic and gave great tips such as:

• Start with keyword research and other market research to determine the best topic your audience will love
• Try informational keywords and long tail terms
• Optimize videos for search engines: Have compelling titles, add a description, add tags, make sure it’s high quality resolution, pick the best thumbnail image, have a video sitemap on your site, include a transcript on the page where your video is embedded, use microdata, and limit it to 1 video per page.

#2 Infographics

An interesting and creative Infographic can be used to build site authority when done correctly and executed well too. You’re able to show your site visitors an interesting and unique take on a set of data, helping them to connect to the piece on a sensory level.

Coming up with a creative concept, working with a designer to execute your idea, and then promoting the Infographic may seem easy on the surface but require a bit of strategy and planning. A few tips:

• Have a brainstorm session with your team to come up with possible topic ideas.
• Conduct market research and keyword research too
• Any sources you want to use – verify them first before you develop the graphic!
• Stick to a simple layout
• Include SEO rich copy on the page where your Infographic resides
• Include an embed code on the page
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#3 Webinars

Just about any industry could use webinars to help build their site authority. Using presentation software, like PowerPoint, and presenting to a group of users through webinar software or even a video sharing program can help build notoriety for your brand, can be leveraged for links, and be added as content to your site. A few pointers:

• Conduct market research to see what topics you should cover in your webinar. Do a bit of keyword research too.
• Record your webinars and upload to video sites. Pay careful attention to their terms of service however, to ensure your content won’t get reported and taken down.
• Use slide decks on sites like SlideShare. Opt to have the notes section of the slides added to the upload.
• Embed webinars on a site on your page – sticking to one video or slide deck per page.
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#4 Blog Posts

Regular old blog posts are of course a great way to get down on virtual paper what you think your readers are interested in seeing. Whether it’s a top 10 post, an editorial, a post on a controversial subject, or any one of these 50 corporate blogging topics, the use of blog posts to help you build site authority can be effective. A few more tips:

• Don’t just limit yourself to blogging on your own site. Try out guest blogging on a few of your favorite industry blogs and become a regular writer!
• Optimize your posts for search engines paying special attention to H1s, adding custom meta titles and descriptions, and custom tags to the post as well.
• Link to others and let them know about it. They might just help you promote the post when it’s live.
• Add a plugin like Zemanta to help you build relevant backlinks from other blogs.

#5 White Paper or Free Guide

Have an industry expert at your company who likes to write? Have them develop a white paper or free guide. If you don’t have the resources, try sourcing it out to a freelancer who has a knack for writing educational pieces. White papers and free guides aren’t just great for lead capture; they’re also great for building site authority. If it’s useful and interesting, more people will be willing to read it, share it and link to it. A few tips:

• Decide whether you want your guide to be free to all or if you want it to be available for users who give you some information (such as e-mail, name, phone number, etc…).
• Conduct research to see if there is enough information to provide on the topic for your guide.
• Optimize your guide for search engines by paying attention to SEO PDF best practices.

Simply put, building your sites authority in any niche is a matter of making that website popular and growing its following through any and all means available. You want engaging content that will keep users on the site, get shares through social channels, be found by search engines, and receive lots of backlinks. By diversifying the types of content you develop you’re sure to find a method that your audience appeals to and that can aid in the pursuit of building your sites authority. Check out the below infographic to view a few other ways you can use content to build the authority of your site.

What type of content have you found works best for your target demographic?

Many companies regularly use humor in their marketing efforts.  Old Spice comes to mind, with their ridiculously funny spots featuring Isaiah Mustafa, and recently Fabio (although I’d contest the latter isn’t as funny as the originals were, but I digress…) Since Google dominates the search engine market in America, it’s a good bet that when they change up their home page with a doodle, or add a couple of Easter eggs in the mix, people will notice.

Even though these tricks provide no real value for web SEO, they’re fun to play around with, talk about, and especially blog about!

FEELING LUCKY TRICKS

1. Google Gravity

A site created by web developer Ricardo Cabello.  At first glance, it looks like the familiar Google home page, but suddenly all the elements of the page fall down.

2. Google Sphere

Here’s another one from Cabello.  The Google logo and search bar are in the center of the page, and all the other elements are orbiting around them.

As Pubcon 2011 wraps up, it's difficult to reflect on the past 72 hours on so few hours of sleep. Wednesday, we attended Alan Bleiweiss' #EpicDinner with 120 attendees. It was fantastic. He did an incredible job. Afterward, we went to karaoke and watched several of our own rock the mic and the dance floor.

Content & Link Building

Arnie Kuenn shared the following content and link building strategy: focus on generating content (interviews, videos, promotional, humorous, etc.) that can attract natural links from multiple domains. Not all pieces of content should be expected to received hundreds or thousands of links.

• Content generation idea #1 – search your competitors top linked pages in Open Site Explorer (OSE) and review why the content was impressive enough to demand a link
• Content generation idea #2 – Browse the Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, Quora, etc. for the most frequently asked questions and discussions that you can bring insight, process, or direct answers through content created on your site

Wikipedia ranks for 92% of the 100 most searched terms on Google. Imagine if you ranked in the top listings for 92% of your industry terms. – Matt Tuens

Competitive Analysis

Mat Siltala shared the following 10 things you should track when researching competitors:

1. Domain Authority
2. Total Links
3. Social Media Activity
4. LinkedIn Connections
5. Blog Activity
6. Identify Promotional Pages
7. Affiliate Programs
8. Shopping Cart Spying – look for remarketing and other competitive advantages
9. SpyFu
10. ReverseInternet.com

Jane Copland shared the following points that were extremely interesting:

• Never try to copy someone else's backlink portfolio — get creative with "your" opportunities
• Pay attention to the number of C-class IP's in your competitor's backlink profiles
• Look at "why" they have those links, not the links themselves
• Relationship links are not paid links
• Track links/rankings over time — you should never be surprised by a competitor

Resources

• Outwit Firefox Plugin
• RavenTools Competitor Analysis Checklist

Data & Intelligence are Central To Qualified Marketing

Data and intelligence is only as smart as the interpreter. Gathering data is barely a step in the process of doing qualified marketing but it is one still missed by many.

The key to using data is:

• Regular and comprehensive tracking. (For instance in links – tracking not just C-Class IPs but also B and Hosted to look are variants overall and overtime)
• Knowing what can be tracked and just how to do it; there are still many metrics not yet built out by tools or available to all of us. Discover these metrics and develop them.
• Track not only results (analytics) but measure what you can control. (For instance, how much content you put out, time spent on creating content, redevelopment frequencies of your own site and competitors etc.)
• Evaluate relationships. Just as there is a lot you can learn from watching a husband and wife interact and recognizing they’re married – they is similar immediate knowledge to be gained from knowing who is related to your clients business and competitors businesses and how, what and why.

Quotes:

• “If someone else can get that same information it really isn't a true inforgraphic” – Tom Critchlow
• Competitive intelligence is not about copying. It's about knowing what you're up against.” – Jane Copland

Day 2 of PubCon Las Vegas 2011 was full of great information!

Here are some of the highlights from Wednesday's sessions:

Content

Take advantage of user-generated content for your site.

• Peer reviews can be effective to encourage conversions on a page.
• Websites typically are seeing a 555% increase in click-through rates when reviews are posted on the site, according to Adam Proehl with Nordic Click.
• User generated content is even more vital for B2B.
• Bad reviews can spark many positive reviews from your fans who will openly defend you.  

Social Media

If social is the future (and the present) of search, let's incorporate more social media tactics into our SEO efforts.

• Implement Facebook's "Open Graph" into your sites.
• Google wants Plus to become the central experience of search.  So content discovery, SERPs and even ad delivery may be based on Plus profile information.
• "View Ripples" in Google Plus is a great way to see the effects of an action or event.

Keyword Research

There are so many tools available to help you with keyword research!  We shouldn't just stick with one particular method of gathering keyword data.

• Tools like SpyFu and Soovle help you expand your keywords, and get you thinking "outside of the box".
• The competitive landscape is fluid, so your keyword research strategy needs to adapt to the market.
• You must have knowledge of the business, including an understanding of profit drivers, where the revenue comes from and the overall business goals.

Search Engine Penalties

We've all heard the stories surrounding the Panda algorithm update from Google.  If you've been penalized, there are a few things you can do.

• Rule out the easy culprits.  Check the Robots.txt file, the meta tags and even egregious server downtime.
• Perform competitive intel.  A drop in rankings is not always blamed on a penalty.
• Work, work, work!  Be legitimate!  Confess your sins to Google and promise to be good from now on!

Neuromarketing

This is one of the hottest topics in marketing right now.  This is the process of studying consumers' responses to marketing efforts.

• Social interaction before a deal is made has proven to decrease business failures by 45%.
• Neuroscientists proved GoDaddy’s superbowl ad was bad (from a neuroscientific brain activity generator viewpoint) but GoDaddy’s had some of the highest website traffic as a result.

Up until this point, Google+ users have had only the ability to connect with other people. This Monday, however, Google announced the introduction of Google+ Pages, a service that allows you to connect with organizations and brands you care about. 

As Google describes it, “Google+ has always been a place for real-life sharing, and Google+ Pages is no exception. After all: behind every page (or storefront, or four-door sedan) is a passionate group of individuals, and we think you should able to connect with them too. For you and me, this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world.”

It’s likely that Google+ Pages will have a high level of visibility thanks to their integration with basic Google search.  Pages places will generally turn up in the regular search results below an organization’s own website.  Google also plans to enable a feature they call Direct Connect. Limited pages have this feature at the moment, but Google states many more are coming in the future. You will be able to go direct to pages that have Direct Connect enabled simply by adding the '+' in a search query followed by the name of a page.

Although the service is promising, a few hangups still exist.  Currently, only one user can be registered to any given page, making management of a page difficult for a larger organization or department.  Some early users have also noticed that it is far too easy to accidentally publish information to an account  unintentionally.  Finally, a Google+ pages steer users away from companies’ actual websites in favor of their G+ Page.  This may be a drawback to some users, however, owning a space on Google+ is yet another web presence that no business will want to miss out on.

Ready to get your business set up on Google+ Pages?  Head to the Google+ registration page to get started. Businesses are asked to classify under one of the following categories:

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

Businesses are allowed to create as many pages as they like, providing you the ability to have a separate page for a particular product, product line, or event.  Your Google+ page will have a +1 button, similar to those now found around the web.  As a page however, you won’t have the ability to +1 other pages. 

Local business pages have additional functionality which allows you to provide a phone number and address that will add a map and local contact information to your page.  Although similar to the already existing Google Places service, they presently remain two separate services that must be managed individually. 

We’re excited about the new ability to connect with our audience on G+.  Check out the SEO.com G+ page and let us know what you think.

Circle SEO.com

on Google+

As Pubcon 2011 wraps up, it's difficult to reflect on the past 72 hours on so few hours of sleep. Last night, we attended Alan Bleiweiss' Epic Dinner with 120 attendees. It was fantastic. He did an incredible job. Afterward, we went to karaoke and watched several of our own rock the mic and the dancefloor.

Content

Keep your content fresh, quality and with purpose. More than any other the focus in discussion today revolving around content had to do with creating it with the user in mind. If your content doesn't serve any other purpose than optimization than it isn't going to produce the ultimate SEO results.

• Google is no longer "page focused" but "site focused." – Greg Boser
• We need to change the idea of keyword research to the concept of "content research." Google is smart enough to equate phrases and allowing you to rank simply on relevance, not exact match. - Joe Laratro

Social Media

The way the SEO world views social media as an ranking influencer seems to have taken a roller coaster ride over the last few years. Finally it seems we are discussing HOW social can influence rankings rather thean IF it does. 

• People are becoming the primary focus of search, as opposed to links in the past, and the speed of shares, amount of shares, length of time something is being shared, etc. are some of the indicators the search engines are looking to understand. - Rob Garner
• A 1:1 ratio of Twitter followers will work against you for any automated algorithm written to judge quality. – Joe Hall

Keyword Research

Tools, tools and more tools. And the best yet, the majority of them are free. The takeaway from discussions on keyword research and targeting is that a good SEO does not just use one tool. The strategic use of tools to build out a strong keyword list and then set priorities through a filtering process will drive stronger results.

• Quite whining about the lost keyword data in Google Analytics. – Will Reynolds
• Research your competitors! What do your competitors say they’re about? What do they blog about? Compare that to the “Website: feature” in the keywords tool. - Laura Lippay
• SEO's always target the head terms and forget about the long. SEM does just the opposite. We need to marry this data to get the best results. – Will Reynolds
• Name your products like your customers do, with common keywords. – Rob Snell

Reputation Management

The topics covered today around reputation management touched on processes in monitoring more than any other. Monitoring and maintaining your brand before a crisis hits, monitoring the most relevant phrases (brand, product, executive names) as well as monitoring social interactions and mentions.

• Implement the 80/10/10 rule. Focus 80% percent of your time on owned web properties, 10% of your time on web properties you can control (flickr, facebook, youtube etc.) and 10% on web properties you can influence. – Andy Beal
• Look Into Incorporating social media policies for your employees to ensure they are not fueling the fire by responding to complains and creating more content. – Tony Wright

Site Structure

• To create the best information archictecture company and website goals should be the first item identified. - Kristina Schachinger
• Increase site speed by having less calls mean faster loading, limiting your use of multiple javascript libraries and avoid making IDs and classes when possible. - Jon Henshaw
• Microdata (schema.org) should be used because is up to date (based on HTML5), an accepted standard by the major search engines and can improve SEO. – Tony Wright

Resources mentioned:

html5readiness.com

schema-creator.org

caniuse.com

css3.info

Link Building

Branding and diversity were certainly the focal point of link building today.

• Brute Force is Dead! Building exact match links will no longer be the biggest factor. The biggest percentage of your links should be branded. – Greg Boser
• Canonicalization is a hint, not an absolute. You are better off using the noindex, follow or rel="next" rel="rev," or the robots.txt to manage content and resolve duplicate content issues. - Jill Sampey
• Exact match anchor is no longer the way to do link building. If anything. Branded partial matches are usually best. – Greg Boser
• Don't just look to acquire links from HTML pages. PDF is a great option as well. - Stephan Spencer

Resources mentioned:

linkresearchtools.com

ubersuggest.org

soloseo.com

Conversion

• Don't forget the secondary conversions. Actions are conversions, subscribed to RSS, Email addresses, social subscribers. – Joanna Lord
• Don’t use captcha to avoid spam for forms. It helps to control spam but it stops conversions. Create a blank hidden field and if there’s data, verify it because no regular user will fill it out. - Brad Geddes

Google announced the freshness algorithm update this morning. It’s intended purpose is to provide the best results for the most recent information you’re seeking.

This algorithm update follows several Panda updates and last year’s caffeine update, which focused on the speed of indexing new content.

If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played). Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type [olympics] without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for.

Several searches appear as normal, in my quick review. One that stands out is a search for Las Vegas (We’re attending Pubcon next week). It shows a few more universal search components (maps, images, news, etc.). One another unrelated search, I noticed that Google+ Circle information is beginning to appear next to a picture of those in my circles.

As social indicators and author rank continue to be of interest, we see the correlation of people and their interests rollout as important search factors within Google. Bing, as the decision engine, seems to be lagging behind in this space but I’m expecting more in 2012. Just a gut feel at this point.

Credit to Wisconsin Historical Images

The hairy month of Movember is upon us once again. Continuing the tradition started last year, we manly men of SEO.com have decided to take up the cause by lifting not a blade to our faces over the entire month of November.

There is indeed a worthy cause behind all the fine moustachery that you’ll find at SEO.com over the next month. From the Movember United States website:

The funds raised in the US support prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. The funds raised are directed to programs run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, the Prostate Cancer Foundation and LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Together, the three channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programs in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

A worthy cause, no doubt.

At signup, each participant receives his (or her) own Mo Space page that serves as a base for requesting and tracking money donations. You can also upload a photo of your neatly groomed mug, post updates, and promote the cause over your social network of choice.

And so, Mo Bros and *Mo Sistas within the sound of my voice, take up the cause and join our Movember team. Or start a team of your own. Or participate as an individual – it really doesn’t matter how you participate, just that you get some hair on that upper lip. At the end of the month, show us your face-grown and hand-brushed mustaches, and be proud.

*Mo Sistas are not expected to grow a mustache (but nobody’s judging). However, they are welcome to support their Mo Bros by donating or promoting.