Broadband: the Future of Broadband in the UK

Read more March 17th, 2009

Florida Blogger Gets California Defamation Lawsuit Dismissed For Lack of Jurisdiction

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

The world is filled with all kinds of nutty people. Mostly, this is a wonderful thing. But sometimes it’s not.

The case I want to discuss today involves two lawyers, a messy breakup, and a blog about "Guns, God, Food, Beer, Tools, Politics, and Whining."

Stephen Hogge, a Florida attorney, operates the blog Hog on Ice. He was sued in California by a former Miami School of Law classmate, Fatima dos Santos Fahmy, over statements he made about her on his blog, including calling her a deadbeat, maligning her work ethic, and falsely claiming that she was Hogge’s former girlfriend. To get right to it, he falsely labeled her "a mentally ill alcoholic prostitute." Not surprisingly, Ms Fahmy didn’t care for these remarks and tried to put her legal education to good use.

Representing herself, she sued Mr. Hogge on her home court, California.

Generally, if you’re bringing a lawsuit you’ve got to sue the defendant where he lives. It’s a basic fairness issue. Now, the fairness equation changes if you can successfully argue that the defendant sought you out in your home state to commit his wrongful acts. Why should you have to sue him over there if he went out of his way to  do something illegal in your state, right?

Mr. Hogge, also representing himself, asked the California court to dismiss the case because the California court has no jurisdiction over Florida residents. This is a standard legal challenge to multi-state jurisdictional issues.

Ms. Fahmy countered by arguing that Mr. Hogge subjected himself to jurisdiction in California by targeting her for his tortious remarks. He targeted her and she lives in California, ergo, California courts should have jurisdiction over Hogge.

Hogge replied by arguing that he didn’t know she lived in California, so he couldn’t have been targeting California.

At first, the court agreed with Ms. Fahmy. However, the Court later reconsidered and decided to go ahead and dismiss the lawsuit. But not without issuing a bit of a lecture to both parties for their alleged technical blunders in the case. Ms. Fahmy didn’t properly authenticate her documents and Mr. Hogge filed over-length briefs. This proves again the old adage, "a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client."

Technically, this is a win for bloggers who are now less likely to be subjected to out-of-state suits. However, I can’t help but feel this is a loss for exes  of nutty bloggers everywhere.

Eric Goldman and The Citizen Media Law Project also cover the case.

Best Regards,
Sarah

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Read more November 25th, 2008

Benchmarking Your Website: Metrics to Review Before an SEO Engagement Begins

Posted by randfish

Many SEO projects begin with a site review or audit, identifying potential weaknesses and opportunities. However, a great number of these analyses leave out a healthy dose of collecting metrics - a critical factor in helping to benchmark future progress and see how far you’ve come (and what effect your SEO changes have had). Thus, I figured it would be valuable to review, in full, the pre-review puzzle pieces essential to beggining an SEO campaign or overhaul. 

Identifying the Site Development Process & Players

Before we begin on the metrics and site analysis itself, it’s wise to consider  - shock, shock - the people! Although it may seem like websites spring from the ether of servers and code, in fact, human beings are behind every piece of content, page, file and domain name on the web. Figuring out the responsibilities and duties of the people on the web development team is an essential part of the auditing & review process for every consultant or in-house SEO seeking to implement change.

If you’re a small business or an individually run site, you can skip this section. For those of you that have an internal organizational hierarchy, here’s the process I like to follow:

• Step 1: Identify the website management:
  • Who manages the front-end design & production?
  • Who handles back-end development and databases?
  • Who is responsible for content approval?
• Step 2: Where is approval required?
  • Which pages need approval from who in order to make changes?
  • What permission is required to make sitewide changes or add new pages/navigation/content?
• Step 3: Who has access to website reporting data?
  • What programs track visitor activity on the site?
  • What are the logins to the visitor tracking software?
  • Is log-file access or spider monitoring available?

Next, you’ll need to consider the site’s content management system and flexibility. SEO upgrades often require changes outside the scope of a typical CMS, and knowing this early on will give you the foresight required to prepare and accurately estimate the resources you’ll need to allocate to the project. Ideally, you should create and maintain a document that tracks the areas above and records the responsible parties and login information. Once you start making recommendations, this will considerably speed up the development process.

Categorizing and Segmenting Your Site

In order to conduct an accurate analysis of your search engine traffic, you need to have a good idea of not only how much search traffic you’re pulling in, but which sections of content are driving value. Very frequently, more link-worthy and well-linked-to content like blogs, articles and top level pages overperform while other sections languish in obscurity. By effectively segmenting your site into similar groups you can uncover the discrepencies.

My personal methodology for this is to segment search traffic in the web analytics program by restricting to URL matches. Simply view the list of pages receiving search traffic, then filter by URL - you can use either the "contains" or "begins with" settings to help narrow down to the section(s) of interest.

In the example above, you can see only those pages in YOUmoz that brought in search traffic. This same methodology can be applied to all the other areas of SEOmoz, helping tell us which parts of the site are bringing in traffic from the search engines. Once you have this data, it’s time to make some determinations about size and proportions - basically, you need to know how many search accessible pages are in each section and what percentage of those are bringing in traffic. Otherwise, you might be severely mis-calculating value and opportunity.

Take the example of a site with 10,000 blog posts and 200 product pages. The blog posts are bringing in 50,000 search visits per month while the product pages send 1,000 search visits per month. While this might seem like a fair balance (both are bringing in an average of 5 visits per page), it’s not enough data. We need to know what percent of pages in each section are sending any traffic at all, and preferrably, look at the distribution of visits to pages. If only 1,000 of the 10,000 blog posts are sending 95% of those 50,000 search visits, we can quickly make the assumption that there’s a problem and investigate (typically, if that were the case, I’d be thinking poor archiving with lots of ugly pagination is responsible, but it’s always worth a look).

In any analytics assessment, you have to dig deep to find the answers and SEO is no different. Get the right numbers in the right way and you can accurately monitor what’s going on; make assumptions based on incomplete or surface-level data and risk squandering potential opportunities. 

Assessing Historical Progress

As you collect metrics for the SEO process ahead, it’s extremely valuable to get historical as well as current data. My preference is too look at no fewer than 6 months, and preferrably 2 years of data on all of the following points:

• Quantity of content - how many pages have existed on the site?
  HINT: Look at the number of pages listed in the "most popular pages by URL" section
• Search engine inclusion - what percent of these have drawn in search traffic?
  HINT: Refine the list from above by only pages receiving search traffic and see what numbers come up
• Link acquisition - what has been the rate of growth for links?
  HINT: Use referring URLs over time - the data from the engines won’t be particularly helpful here unless you’ve been manually keeping track of it (or using something like SEO Analytics).
• Overall search traffic - how much has it gone up/down in the past?
  HINT: This one’s easy, just look at search engine traffic over time
• Distribution of search traffic across engines - has Google shrunk while Yahoo! rose?
  HINT: Another easy one to solve; simply separate the engines individually

Once you have this information, you can apply it immediately by identifying spikes and drops. What were the events that preceeded both positive and negative changes to the site’s SEO? You’ll want to repeat projects that brought value and ditch those that weren’t worth the time and energy. Particularly when it comes to public relations, press/media campaigns and viral content, watching these numbers can give you a real sense for performance and ROI.

Leveraging Data for SEO Improvements

Once you’ve assembled the data you need, you’re ready to begin an SEO evaluation and get to work improving your site’s ability to perform in the engines. The process of data collection itself is valuable - you’ll know how to assess performance for the future (and you’ve got a baseline from which to compare), but that’s not the only benefit. The information you collect should allow you to be smarter about the methods you pursue for search engine optimization. For example, discovering that only 20% of the pages on your site bring in search traffic can be an instant alert that accessibility, duplicate/thin content or lack of link juice are responsible for keeping a high number of URLs out of the indices. Likewise, many pages targeting high value keywords but pulling in minimal search referrals can indicate that better optimization and possibly more/better links are required to rank competitively.

Please do share your thoughts around benchmarking metrics for SEO and how to apply them in campaigns.

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Read more November 25th, 2008

Whiteboard Friday - Machine Learning

Posted by great scott!

This week one of our mad geniuses in residence, Ben Hendrickson, steps in front of the camera to discuss something a little different: Machine Learning.

Ben is one of the folks that designed and built the technology behind Linkscape, so he’s certainly studied this topic thoroughly. Here he’ll talk about how and why advancements, findings, and theories that emerge from the larger machine learning field have significant relevance to search, and why paying attention to those findings can help show us how the engines may change and adjust in the future.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Machine Learning from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

And for reference, here are two of the papers Ben mentions in the video:

"A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets" by Hinton and Osindero.  2006.

"A Machine Learning Architecture for Optimizing Web Search Engines" by Boyan, Freitag, and Joachims.  1996

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Read more November 25th, 2008

So What Should We Be Asking Bloggers?

Posted by Jane Copland

Last week at Pubcon in Las Vegas, I took part in a session titled "5 Bloggers and a Microphone." Since then, we’ve heard a fair bit of feedback that people were disappointed in the session, mainly because the questions we were asked didn’t allow us to impart any good blogging knowledge. As was reported in many different places, one attendee asked an in-depth paid search question which none of us were at all qualified to answer. The discussion often veered towards Twitter, and we spent the first portion of the hour talking about the U.S. election.

From the perspective of someone on the panel, it was minorly frustrating not to be asked more challenging questions. Both panelists and speakers missed opportunities to get into difficult, controversial or interesting discussions. In the future, panelists should arrive with three or four key points that they’d like to discuss, and they should compare notes beforehand to avoid overlap. In Q&A-focused sessions, panelists often rely on the moderator and the audience to provide all the material: we’re basically led to believe that this is going to satisfy up to ninety minutes of content. Sometimes it does, but when moderation, audience interaction or panelist-involvement fails, you’re left staring at a room of tired conference attendees who want information and entertainment that you are ill-prepared to provide.

Towards the end of the session, we received some good questions; however, there was plenty of room for improvement. It should take less than forty-five minutes for a panel to get going about such a hot topic. It would be a shame to write the panel off, as it has a lot of potential to be informative and entertaining. Unofficially, I suggest we be allowed to show up with a drink in hand… and is that such an odd request, given that it’s Vegas?!

Blogging certainly has its place in the SEO world. For better or for worse, many SEOs have found notoriety through publishing online. We’ve certainly seen big rewards from the activity on our blog, and we know that there are more opportunities to be had in the future. Despite the fact that many of the industry’s best search engine optimisation professionals don’t blog, we have a culture of online publishing. A successful blog is one catalyst to being recognised, respected and offered business. It is not, however, a simple task to maintain a viable blog and sometimes it’s downright agonising.

Here’s what I would provide as discussion points or questions if faced with a panel of bloggers… And here are my replies, because I like talking to myself in an empty room!

How on earth do you find new things to blog about every day or every week? There is so much back-scratching, in-fighting, speculation and repetition in all circles of bloggers. Surely your blog is no better than the next one, and in fact, it might be worse.

It might be. As I said in my second session at Pubcon (Community Hacking: 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ), blogging has liberalised and liberated publishing to the extent that any idiot can do it. You may well be an idiot. I’m most likely one too. I didn’t have to get a degree in anything to write online, and half the things I write probably mean that my English degree should be revoked.

"Finding something to write about" rarely works for me. I either have something to say or I don’t, and when I look at my inventory of posts here, I can clearly see when I wrote because I wanted to and when I wrote because I thought I had to. I am lucky in that, if I don’t write, someone else here will. However, I understand the panic faced by blog owners who don’t have multiple writers at their disposal.

My best advice is that if you don’t have anything to blog about, either don’t write, or don’t be afraid to write something humourous, personal or otherwise out-of-the-ordinary. I’ve attempted to pull good advice out when it’s really not there to begin with. Works about as well as a stuffed meta keywords tag in the poker SERPs.

How do you deal with trolls?

Here’s one no blog owner wants to touch. Calling somebody a troll is a dangerous game. People accuse bloggers and webmasters of covering their own shortcomings by singling out critics and labeling them trolls. The fact is, however, that offensive people do roam the Internet in search of trouble.

We’ve banned people on this site before (and I’m not talking about spammers). It takes a lot of terrible behaviour to accurately label someone a troll: a lesson I’ve learned by doing it inaccurately a couple of times. Set rules for what constitutes trolling or offensive behaviour on your blog and develop a warning system. We’ve published our blog etiquette policies, and it’s useful to have them "on paper." Personally email people who break your rules and kindly point out your policies. Employ an "x-strikes and you’re out" rule and stick to it. Don’t publicise the banning. It’s not a medal of honour and you only invite the troll to return from a new IP. From my experience, both here and (more so) when hearing about other people’s problems, trolls don’t return after they’ve been banned. If they do, they don’t stay for long. Don’t celebrate them and give them reason to rejoin the discussion.

Great, so I have a place to impart my undoubtedly incredible knowledge. What else is a blog good for?

During Community Hacking: 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ, I was asked to talk a little about how we drive links and eyeballs to our site via the blog. It seems to come as a bit of a surprise to many people that blogs aren’t just good for writing up advice. Some other things we’ve done with our blog include:

• Linking to larger projects, such as the Search Rankings Factors, Web 2.0 Awards and our SEO guides. It’s a huge mistake to launch projects and not link to them from a more prominent area. Blogs are easy to keep track of, frequently indexed and generally incredibly SEO-friendly. If a site has no blog, giving new content maximum visibility is a lot harder.
  
  Screen shots of screen shots. Only on a blog, people.

• Another thing we’ve done recently is re-write our Beginner’s Guide to SEO via blog posts. When they’re complete, we’ll compile the individual posts (read: chapters) into one document, relaunch the guide and 301 redirect all the blog posts to the finished article. Thus, we’ve been actively building links to a document that is still under construction. Once it’s finished, we’ll add those new links to those of the old document. This isn’t only good for severely outdated articles (do we advocate reciprocal links and submissions to Lycos in there?! It’s about that old!). Any project that you’d like to build over time could be released in this manner. Just remember the redirects in order to avoid looking like the grand master of duplicate content.
• We’ve done this to an extent (although I don’t recall specifically doing it for link building purposes), but deciding how to handle comments is great for driving links. Sometimes, the comments are what people link to! Think of Sphinn, a social news site with hardly any original content… aside from user comments. People link to Sphinn pages when they want readers to vote on their content, but they also link to noteworthy comment threads. No matter how boring your blog post, interesting comments can still drive some links.

  On the other hand, closing comments forces people to talk about you elsewhere. It would be stupid to talk about a post and not link to it, so they’ll also throw you a link while they’re discussing what you wrote. Win! Of course, they could be horrible and nofollow your link, or copy and paste your URL, but very few people are willing to be this much of a tool. Bloggers must decide when comments should be open or closed. I have no solid figures on this, but it seems that ninety percent of blogs allow comments.

Mind your language, young lady. Or should you?

We’ve used some choice language on here more than once. The person charged with writing the Bank of America’s corporate blog (no, I doubt such a beast exists) shouldn’t be cursing up a storm, but the odd swear word here and there isn’t going to hurt. They say that swearing is a sign of a lazy vocabulary, but I tend to take great care with my choice of profanity and if it adds to the conversation, I’ll use it. We do it very rarely (I believe Rand got, for want of a better term, a lot of shit for it once), but the rest of us have dropped in some language that our grandmas wouldn’t like as well. However, unless the blog is supposed to be a Cracked.com-style catalogue of all things terrible, avoid using curse words as commas.

Should you care about your audience?

This sort of came up during the session, and I noted that audiences change a lot over time. Very few of our daily commenters from 2006 are still active participants now. It would be wrong to mourn the loss of these people, some of whom still visit and comment from time to time, but I agree that caring about a blog’s audience is essential. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that it will change. Also, people who don’t take part anymore aren’t necessarily not reading, and their reasons for backing away aren’t necessarily a negative reflection on you our your writing. Lisa Ditlefsen recently mentioned to me that she used to spend a lot more time reading and commenting on SEOmoz than she does now. However, it was her life and schedule that changed, not her respect for us or our content.

Blogs, forums and other online groups worry that older members won’t welcome new members, but blogs’ ever-changing audiences suggests that this isn’t a huge problem. At SEOmoz, people make themselves known pretty quickly and, aside from the aforementioned trolls, newly active members aren’t ignored or rejected.

Short version: yes, care about who reads the blog and recognise that they make your efforts worthwhile. However, realise that no audience is permanent.

I really hope that Pubcon brings back the 5 Bloggers and a Microphone session again next year. The only thing it needs is some extra structure, both from panelists and moderators. If Pubcon wanted to really push the Q&A aspect of the panel, they should consider adopting an SMX-style question format where audience members email or text in questions. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that a room full of SEOs and online marketers would rather write down their questions than deliver them via microphone! Would extra structure and some better-conceived questions save this session? And what would you ask a table full of search marketing industry bloggers, aside from "what time is Search Bash?"

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Read more November 25th, 2008

Normally, It’s a Good Thing to Get Featured on Techcrunch

Posted by randfish

Well, not this time.

New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz, never one to worry about gray areas when it comes to advertising, has launched a new product today called InLinks.

It’s fairly straightforward - advertisers who want their sites associated with specific keywords simply buy ads. Links to those sites are then added to publishers’ sites whenever those words pop up in content. These aren’t ghost links like Kontera and others include in content - they’re full blown links without any notation (like a nofollow) that they are advertisements, meant primarily for SEO juice.

I’m reminded, at times like these, of Brent Csutoras’ crude, yet masterfully prescient words of wisdom on the subject of manipulative SEO & Social Media - Shut the @#$%! Up. If you’re selling links, you want to be:

• Known to only a few, high-paying customers (and their networks) who can effectively monetize the links you control
• Advertising services or products publicly that are very different from what you actually offer
• Invisible to Matt Cutts, whose personal focus on this topic is exceptional

I suspect that Google will be watching the program extremely carefully and the effectiveness of these links will be limited. The value in thinking about a story like this is to realize that had they stayed "under the radar" to a reasonable degree, they wouldn’t be "outed" on TechCrunch. There are plenty of link sellers who do just that, and earn a lot of money staying off the grid. If your product directly conflicts with the goals of an organization like Google, it’s probably wise to expect that (in typical New Jersey analogy fashion) their guys are gonna make sure you don’t walk no more.

BTW - I could be wrong, but I think that the quote Arrington used by Cutts from the FTC and the UK Office of Public Sector Information only works if those organizations consider a link to necessarily be an endorsement, akin to an advertisement. I’m not sure, but I don’t believe that’s been upheld in a US court to date (will have to check with Sarah).

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Read more November 25th, 2008

Which Social Media Platforms Work Best For Your SEO Efforts?

Posted by randfish

The SEO world, particularly the blogosphere and forum chatter, is overwhelmed with talk of how to leverage social media sites for SEO value. Tonight, I’m curious - which types of social media platforms do you actually get the most direct SEO benefit from? Think classic SEO - higher rankings and more search traffic. Which slice of social media sites help you achieve this goal?

I’d love to hear your examples, too. If you said Wikis - how? What did you do on Wikipedia that resulted in more search traffic for keywords that bring you high quality traffic?

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Read more November 25th, 2008

Pubcon Recap: Booths, Beginners, and Bashes

Posted by rebecca

Pubcon came and went last week in a red-eyed whirlwind (I can never wake up in Las Vegas without emptying a half bottle of Visine in each eye). I actually didn’t attend any sessions except for the two panels I spoke on and the Five Microphones and a Blogger session, but I’ll get to that later. First I want to talk about our booth we displayed.

Boothin’ It Up, Gangsta Style

Our booth and main demo screen

The Pubcon expo hall seemed much smaller than last year. I’m not sure if it’s due to current economical woes, but for whatever reason there seemed to be fewer exhibitors than in 2007. Nonetheless, Pubcon marked the 4th booth we’ve had at a conference and the 3rd one I’ve worked at (I wasn’t at SMX East in New York a month or so ago), and while we’re still booth noobs, I must admit that I think our Pubcon booth was the best one yet. I had previously written about our first booth that we had at SMX West last winter, and I think the main problem with our first booth is that we didn’t really have a single focus–we primarily talked about our various tools and casually pimped our SEO Analytics in a half-ass way. We had no flyers and no "game plan" or definitive structure. That’s not to say that the first booth wasn’t great–it provided a solid learning experience and put us in contact with a ton of new folks and helped get the word out about SEOmoz PRO. Well, after a few trial and errors I think we’ve hit an all-time high this time around. We came to Las Vegas prepared, not just armed with Visine and aspirin for those late night drinking bouts, but with a solid setup of multiple demo stations, a primary focus, a specialized team, and flyers. Oh, and we didn’t forget to bring the t-shirts either.

For our booth this time we had a triangle set up of 3 demos stations, one on either side of our booth and a center demo area that was hooked up to a big TV screen; that way, we could run 3 demos at the same time and also display one demo large enough for curious passerbys to see. We also primarily demo’d our newest tool, Linkscape, thus maintaining a solid focus and reducing information overload. That’s not to say we only focused on Linkscape–we were happy to demo other tools and talk about other aspects of PRO; in fact, I even gave a demo of every single tool that SEOmoz has built at the request of an especially curious conference attendee. After 30 minutes of non-stop talking, clicking, and an increasingly scratchy throat, the guy seemed satisfied…or maybe he felt sorry for me and let me off the hook.

As for our booth staff, well, we were sure to bring a solid team that were confident to talk about every and any possible aspect of Linkscape: Ben, one of Linkscape’s core developers, and Danny, our program coordinator who organized a lot of aspects of Linkscape. These two fools lived and breathed this tool for the past several months, so why not shove them in front of the hungry masses and force them to answer questions?

Judging from the puzzled look on this guy’s face, methinks Ben discovered some porn links…

Danny shrugging and saying, "Look dude, you gotta stop linking to that dancing baby. Get with the times!"

They both did a fantastic job answering questions about Linkscape and patiently going through hundreds of demos. Even when the Internet would fritz out (and it often did) or if the tool got buggy, the Dynamic Duo plodded on and helped out. Great job, guys!

As for Rand? Well, see if you can spot him:

Rand sitting in time out

Yep, even Rand was giving demos when he wasn’t busy running back and forth from various speaking gigs. Gillian was out and about as well, not only working diligently at our booth, but moderating sessions and organizing our Werewolf/Search Spam party (which was "affectionately" dubbed "Nerdfest" by a number of Pubcon attendees who enjoy busting SEOmoz’s chops…thanks guys). We really put in a solid team effort at this conference, and it made me both excited and proud to work with everyone that week.

Overall, I think the booth was the best yet. We had multiple demo stations, flyers (though I think they still need to be improved upon, but at least we had them this time!), t-shirts, and were even able to sign some folks up on the spot. We had people coming to our booth long after the t-shirts were gone, so hopefully that’s a positive indication that we’re doing something right.

My favorite part of working at the booth wasn’t just talking to attendees about Linkscape and our various tools and encouraging people to sign up for PRO, it was actually meeting and talking to existing PRO members. For example, Reid Greenberg from Davis Frame (they offer "authentic custom timber frame homes") and I talked about the PRO tools and I was able to pick his brain a little about which tools he’s using more than others and why. It proved to be a great opportunity to learn more about our members and identify areas of improvement within our PRO suite. Reid was also nice enough to volunteer his site for review at the link building clinic I participated on with Rae Hoffman and Roger Montti. Thanks for being a good sport, Reid!

Other awesome folks I met:

• Kristen Weiss, an SEM strategist from Zeta Interactive who was sporting a lovely cast after having broken her hand during an ATV race. Her story behind the break was pretty bad-ass–anyone who breaks their ribs and hand before a race and still competes is pretty tough in my book.
• Mandy Ison from Intuit, who I had the chance to bond with over our shared half-Korean-ness. (Like many Asian Americans, she looks more Asian than I do. Damn my German/Irish half!) 
• Kiowa Jackson, an SEO/SMO manager for Rank Lab Interactive. I had recognized Kiowa from the last few conference I attended and even jokingly scolded him for walking out on a panel I had spoken on a few conferences ago. He laughed and facetiously said he had a "cat emergency," though I imagine folks like Matt Cutts have used that as a legit excuse…
• Philippe Moreau, co-director of Qc Media in Quebec, Canada. Philippe is currently juggling school and work, and I think Danny and I can relate to what he’s going through. Hopefully he can hammer through and finish up before the consulting gets too burdensome!
• Eric Sprague, the co-founder of FlopTurnRiver.com, a poker strategy guide and online community. Too bad I didn’t know him last year when I participated in David Klein’s poker tournament and busted out in 19th…
• Mohamed Bakr, CEO of Mvix. He’s based in Lynnwood, WA, which is just a short jaunt north of where the Mozplex is.
• Travis Smith from SoccerPro.com, the "authority for soccer gear and training." I think he may have semi-drunkenly promised me a pair of shoes, but Search Bash is a bit hazy for me too…(psst, I’m a size 8, Travis!)
• The guys who work at Blinc Inc. makeup products, who stopped by the booth to test out Linkscape and shared some of their current website woes with me. They even hooked me up with some fancy mascara.

To everyone else I met at Pubcon, it was a pleasure meeting you and I hope we can chat again in the future. As for all you folks who I’ve chatted with online and finally got to meet in person (Michael Streko, Aaron Chronister, Pamela Lund, et al), it’s about damn time. ;P

Bustin’ Out the Beginner Love at Sessions

Since I had committed myself to being at the booth all week, I barely got to see any conference sessions. The only ones I attended were two I spoke on (a link building site clinic and a panel about effective link building strategies) and the Five Bloggers and a Microphone session. I thought the site clinic I participated on was fantastic pretty much because of Rae Hoffman–if you’ve never seen her dissect a site’s links and point-blank tell people what they need to improve upon, you’re definitely missing out. I managed to add some tidbits of advice every now and then, but most of my contributions consisted of muttering "I agree with Rae" every other minute.

The link building panel was okay, but I was a bit irked that one of the panelists and the moderator showed up late. Eric Enge went over some social media marketing case studies and did a great job of identifying topical, useful linkbait that yielded the highest, most relevant ROI. I talked about various link building tips and shared some tools I like. Greg Hartnett from Best of the Web cleared some things up about directory link building, and Roger Montti talked about link building in forums. Overall the session was fairly solid, but I’m bummed that virtually nobody asked questions. I think it was because the moderator took up the first chunk of Q&A time asking some questions to the panel, and by the time he opened up the floor to the audience, people had left or weren’t interested in asking us anything. Bummer.

The only actual session I attended was Five Bloggers and a Microphone - What’s the Worst That Can Happen?, and the worst thing that happened was that the session was extremely disappointing. I don’t fault the speakers in any way–the panel was composed of Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Michael McDonald, Barry Schwartz, and Jane, all of whom are prolific bloggers in the SEO sphere. Rather, I think the session lacked organization and focus. There didn’t seem to be a preexisting set of questions for the bloggers, so moderator Ken Jurina seemed to randomly asked everyone questions about the US Election and Twitter. The loads of Twitter questions were especially irksome and should have been saved for a separate, Twitter-specific session. Twitter is not blogging, yet it still monopolized most of the focus. When the questions were opened up to audience members, some guy stood up and asked a lengthy question about his PPC campaign (admittedly, it was pretty amusing to see the looks on everyone’s faces as they all realized that someone was asking a paid search question to a blogging panel). I’d definitely love to see this session reprised at future conferences–I think it could be a huge hit if some really "meaty" questions were brainstormed beforehand.

Of the session attendees I spoke to, most felt that the sessions were on a beginner level. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, as I met a lot of folks who were attending Pubcon in order to learn more about Internet marketing and improve their websites. I met people who were a one-man SEO team for their company. People who were tasked with increasing conversions while juggling conversations with outsourced web designers. Folks who need to know the basics, who maybe need an introduction to the SEO industry, who need advice on which blogs to read, which companies to reach out to and hire, which tools to use (cough). Sure, a lot of us SEOs who have been to conference after conference may roll our eyes at the "noob focus" of Pubcon sessions, but I’ve found that sessions are typically most beneficial to a beginner-level audience. Advanced SEOs learn by doing, by execution, by bouncing ideas off their fellow advanced colleagues. Hell, even SMX Advanced has gotten mixed reviews (though I suspect it’ll get better each year). Honestly, if you’re an intermediate or advanced SEO, I’m not sure how beneficial large scale conferences like Pubcon are to you. I’m not an expert by any means, yet I’ve seen the same variation of the same presentation at every conference I’ve attended. And that’s fine–there are hundreds of new people at each conference who haven’t seen these presentations and don’t know the material. These conferences are for them.

And Finally…

I must admit to Daron and Brandy Babin from Webmaster Radio that I’ve never been to a party as…let’s say interesting, as Search Bash. You definitely provided some memorable moments, from the silver painted, Hellraiser-dressed, Predator-looking acrobatic dancers to your Neo/Trinity outfits, from an awkward comedian that had to do stand up in front of hundreds of drunk search marketers to a 2007 Playboy Playmate smiling politely whenever her photo was taken, from one debaucherous moment to the next (and believe me, I saw several…), thank you for throwing one unforgettable party.

Matt Inman and a Predator dude on stilts. I’ll let you guess which one is "one ugly motherf*cker"…

Pat Sexton, a Playboy Bunny, and me. Pat’s easily the sexiest one in this photo.

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Read more November 25th, 2008

How to Find Out What Search Engine Users Are Really Asking

Posted by radcotton

As the SEOmoz team have been away at Pubcon I’ve been asked to fill in with a blog post. I’m Richard Cotton and I work for Distilled as their paid Search marketer.

One of my colleagues sent me a link to a fun little tool that he had been using from Wordtracker Labs, the people who brought you the fantastic keyword suggestion tool. You type in a word and it tells you what questions people have been asking on their partner search engines within the last 140 days containing that word. A lot of people have been talking about the benefits for SEO work that a tool like this can provide, and there is no doubt that that is the case, but there is also one massive benefit for anyone running a Paid Search account. For PPC this is a great source of potential negative keywords, particularly for those broad match terms that you can’t switch off but you know produce unspecified quantities of irrelevant traffic. After all, most of these will never click on your ad so they will not show up in the Search Query Report and will allow you to easily eliminate them with negative keywords.

If you are running a PPC campaign for an online bed shop, for example, typing in ‘bed’ gets you 100 results that immediately produce potential negative keywords. Some you will no doubt have already thought of this, but there are always new (and ridiculous) questions for you to create negatives from. In this list of 100 questions about ‘bed’, only 1 was about someone wishing to purchase an item and that was for a pillow. The list of potential negatives includes the usual internet preoccupation with sex:

• How to last longer in bed
• How to please a man in bed
• What to say when talking dirty in bed

Domestic advice:

• How to get rid of bed bugs
• How to build a bed
• How to get cat from under bed

Quirky:

• How long was brian wilson in bed
• How can i wet the bed on purpose
• How do people lay on a bed of nails

And also the downright wrong (and yes, “wetting the bed on purpose” guy is quirky compared to these – read on):

• How to get your sister in bed
• How should i get my mom into bed with me

The point of listing these is to show you the lengths you have to go to eliminate the huge host of irrelevant searches. Albert Einstein once said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Protect yourself from the boundless depths of human stupidity (and depravity), find out what people are really looking for and stop them from lowering your clickthrough rate and, even worse, clicking and costing you money that will never convert. Cutting out the bed-wetters alone will not make a huge impact, but each of these negatives together, time after time, will allow you to make a real difference to the quality of search traffic you are putting your adverts in front of.

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Read more November 25th, 2008

Adsense Alternatives

A lot of people have been hit with an adsense ban at one point or another, and getting back on the program can be extremely difficult. I know one webmaster who has applied back to them 5 times and has been rejected each time with nothing but template letters as a reason.

Well all is not lost.

Have a look here for great list of alternatives to Google adsense.

Read more November 1st, 2008