May 18

Posted by Glen Allsopp

There are over 200 million blogs online, thousands of review sites, sites specific to leaving feedback about companies, and thousands of forums on any topic imaginable.

People can talk about whatever they want, pretty much wherever they want, and with so many people "conversing online," a lot of that conversation is involving brands - their products, their services, and their business.  Knowing how to ‘monitor’ the web is a very valuable asset, and with that there are 3 types of mentions you can find around a brand online:

  1. Positive
  2. Neutral
  3. Negative

Positive

This information is actually very valuable, as people won’t always contact you directly to praise you. You may find out that your staff members are doing a good job or people really like a certain part of your product, which you may be able to include as a marketing angle.

Neutral

Neutral mentions of a brand aren’t particularly useful, but they can be ones to watch. An example of a neutral mention is something like, "I bought a [product name] from [company name] today, hopefully It will work perfectly."These don’t give you any indications of areas or that things may be going well or not-so well, but if you track the site (usually a blog or forum) then an updated feedback response may be imminent.

Negative

These are the ones that you need to pay the most attention to as they can really harm a company’s reputation. Apple stock prices dropped $4bn in 2007 because of an inaccurate post on Engadget, the popular technology blog. Fortunately, Apple responded quite quickly to rectify the situation but it certainly left a dint in stock prices and their brand. 

How the Conversation Has Changed

Before the web, people relied on newspapers, radio, TV, and peer recommendations to help give them an overall view of a product or service before using it. Now, people can just "Google it" and find out exactly what others think of something before they give out their hard earned cash and possibly make a bad decision.

If you own a business that has any presence online, you must be monitoring what is being said about you; otherwise, you could run into some serious issues. You don’t know when somebody is going to complain about one of your offerings and possibly affect your sales.

Who Sees the Negativity?

Negative mentions can be made in numerous places such as the following (who sees them):

  • Forums (forum members)
  • Blogs (blog subscribers)
  • Micro-sites (search results)
  • PPC ads (sites that display Adsense / search results)
  • Review sites (search results)
  • Social networks (site members)
  • etc etc.

The problem is, almost all of these can be found in search results. So, not only will forums users find out something about a company, but there’s a chance the mention will rank for the respective keywords and non-forum members will see the negativity.  

With that in mind, and because I’m writing a blog post for SEOmoz, I present:

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘owning your search results’, but it is relevant and makes sense. Your brand name is probably one of the top referring keywords to your website, but for those who don’t click on the result that is you, where are they landing?

Owning your search results is about having the top results in the search engines about you as something positive in order to stop people being ‘put off’ by what they find or people hijacking your brand. I have my own thoughts on the ‘ethics‘ of this if you want to read more into that.

Amazon (result) and eBay (result) are both great examples of this; I advise you to look at their search results for an idea of how well organised results around a brand term can be. So, how can you start to achieve similar results?

 - Targeted Pages on Your Own site

For the majority of the people reading this, when people search for your name / brand term, you (as in a website you own / page you created) are going to be the first result. 

One way to get another result for this is to create a highly targeted page around the keywords.  For example, SEOmoz ranks for their name and has sitelinks, but a very optimised page around the SEOmoz brand (e.g., the About page or similar) may result in an indented listing like the example below:

What I actually prefer to focus on with these is specific pages around products or services. So for example, you may have a page about a product for sale that is quite popular. In order to get an indented listing for that product name you could create an FAQ or Images page separately that is highly targeted around the keywords.

 - Promote Positive Pages

This is quite straightforward, so I’m not going to ramble on when it can take 2 sentences to summarise. Basically, if there are positive pages around your brand that aren’t in the top results, throw some backlinks their way to try and improve their rankings.

Just make sure that the person writing positively about you isn’t going to remove that page anytime soon or replace it with something negative ;).

- Create Content on Other Sites

Before I start (and this is a point I always make but I’ll say it again), please don’t use the following in a spammy or unethical way. I’m talking about creating content on sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, and to be honest, when I was focused on affiliate marketing these were some of the sites I used for backlinks to help me in rankings. Needless to say, I never felt good about that so I promote their ethical usage as much as possible. 

What you can do on these sites is create highly targeted content on a subject of your choice, so of course you can create one around your brand or your industry. What I recommend though is creating a page that anyone can land on and benefit from.  Let’s say that SEOmoz were creating a page around their brand on hubpages. It would be nice to see information about them, but a nice extra would be if there was an "SEO poll" or funny conference images that people could enjoy.

- Make Use of Sub-Domains

These are thought to be classed as a ‘new domain’ in a sense; therefore, these won’t become indented below other results. If you took a look at the results for the Amazon and eBay searches, you will notice that the majority of results are sub-domains on their site. Such things you could use one for include:

  • Blog
  • Forums
  • Developer section
  • Support section

- Promote Yourself

I see a lot of big brands with results that are from news sources or other popular websites. The reason these sites rank highly is because the domain generally has a lot of authority, and even just a mention of the brand name on a page can be enough to rank highly.

There’s a great post about this over at 10e20 that I couldn’t put any better.

- Profile Pages

These are not something I recommend creating in terms of defending your brand keywords; these are just a possible positive for taking part in niche websites. For a search around my company name you can see my Sphinn profile and possibly some forum profiles in the results.

These tend to do very well in results, but only register on these sites if you are actually going to use them. Sites like Aboutus.org also tend to rank very highly around brand terms because of the authority of the domain and the on-page optimisation / relevance each page has.  

In Summary

Negative search engine results can really affect a company’s sales online, but sometimes those negative search results are deserved, especially if a company is offering shoddy services or a crappy product. You can never substitute being an honest and professional company for relying on hiding the negative from view.

My first YOUmoz post was terrible — I look back at it now and feel embarrassed for writing it; therefore, I put a bit more effort into this one. If you want to know more about me, I write about the subject of online reputation management and all it entails (SEO, social media, communication) at the ViperChill blog.  

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May 16

Posted by great scott!

This week, Rand discusses a few essential strategies to consider when adding a blog to your site. If you want your blog to be readable, enjoyable, and able to generate links and traffic, give this installment of Whiteboard Friday a look.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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May 15

Posted by Nick Gerner

I’ve been reading some of the papers from AIRWeb ‘08, the recent web spam conference, and I came across one called, "A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media."  What was really interesting to me is that the authors quantify the effects of vote spam in "thumbing" systems (like the one we have here at SEOmoz), and that they rank the usefulness of different features in ranking questions and answers.  The results suggest that an average of just six spam controlled votes can half search relevance:

Question answering performance with spammers

The "baselines" here (the bottom two lines) are similar to what you get when you sort answers by votes.  So think about that when you get a highly thumbed answer "Buy Mortgage Loans Cheap" as the number one result to the query, "how to bake apple pie."  The "GBrank" lines take into account a few more features, and the best performing system (represented by the red line above) tries to take into account the fact that thumbs can be spammed.

No surprise here: spammers can alter search results.  But how bad are thumbs compared to other features in the presence of spam?  The researchers conveniently listed the features they used and their relative importance.  I’ve reproduced it below:

Without spammers, here are the top 10 features useful for ranking questions and answers in response to user queries.  I’ve bolded community-based features.

  • similarity between query and question
  • number of resolved questions for answerer
  • length ratio between query and answer
  • number of thumbs down votes
  • number of stars for answerer
  • number of thumbs up votes
  • similarity between query and question/answer
  • number of answer terms
  • number of questions asked by answerer
  • answer’s lifetime

Thumbs up and down are right up there with the traditional IR features like similarity between query and document.
With thumb spam the top 10 features are a bit different:

  • similarity between query and question
  • number of resolved questions for answerer
  • length ratio between query and answer
  • number of stars for answerer
  • similarity between query and question/answer
  • number of answer terms
  • number of questions asked by answerer
  • answer’s lifetime
  • number of question terms
  • length ratio between query and question

Suspiciously absent are thumbs up or down.  The seeming cornerstone of community engagement doesn’t even beat the number of words in the question!

This sounds like pretty bad news for sites relying on community interaction.  Recall that, by at least one measure, even an average of about six spammer controlled accounts (just six spurious thumbs up) can half the performance of search at question answering sites.

There is, however, a silver lining to be pulled from this paper.  Notice the number two feature in both lists: "number of resolved questions for answerer."  Also present in both lists are, "number of stars for answerer" and "number of questions asked by answerer."  While this paper didn’t consider attacking these features, it is comforting to know that these remain valid (and very useful) features.  One might also argue that some of these community features are going to be harder to attack, and easier to monitor by moderators.

It should come as no surprise that deeper forms of social engagement are more useful to the community site, in this case for search ranking.  Also, if you’re trying to improve your visibility/authority in that community, and get your content (in this case, answers to questions) in the hands of more readers, you’re much better off spending your time and energy on these deeper forms of engagement.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, rather than just thumbing this post, add a comment.  Or better yet, write a YOUmoz post in response (here’s an idea: What did this paper miss?  What have I pulled from this paper which doesn’t generalize to the outside world?). 

And if you’re a spammer and think you can get away with thumbing your Yahoo! Answers to the top of their SERPs,  know that they’ve got their eye on you! …but state-of-the-art algorithmic detection still has a long way to go to really catch you :(

P.S. I’m headed to Costa Rica for the next 10 days without internet, phone, etc.  So if you post a comment and I don’t respond, that would be why.

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May 15

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Two star links:

  • The Industry Standard provides us with the 25 top B to Z-list blogs. Why am I giving the link 2-star status? Because the stupid site spaces the list out over multiple pages. ARGHHHHH. Take your page views and ad impressions and shove ‘em up your arse.

Three star links:

Four star links:

Five star links:

YOUmoz entries:

Best of YOUmoz:

  • Twitter Insights and How Coke Pissed Off Danny Sullivan by Rishil uses one of Danny’s Coke tirades as an important lesson learned: don’t underestimate the power of social networking. He also highlights the benefit of using Twitter for research and for venting your frustrations.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added this week.

Upcoming events:

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

UK/Europe:

Featured resumes:

Happily employed:

  • Sandy Allain is a multilingual SEO who works in the Travel and Educational industry.

Looking for employment:

  • WJ Muller is a web developer who also specializes in web usability and SEO. He was able to bring a client up from >100 to the 3rd and 6th result for two keyword campaigns.
  • John Gao is an eCommerce SEO who has many years of international sales experience.

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May 15

Posted by Fluxx

SEOmoz isn’t perfect.  We, like a lot of other websites, do occasionally experience down time.  It’s part of the the uglier side of running a server.  A lot of your time is spent maintaining things that break, keeping tabs on tool scripts that can get rowdy and knock over furniture and handling the sudden influx of traffic that happens with a Digging.  The "is the site up?" question can fly around a lot.  Yet thankfully, there is a simple web service that makes your life (and ours) a lot easier.

Pingdom is an internet service that will try to ping your server every so often (you can configure it to look between every five and sixty minutes) and see if it responds.  It’s very customizable.  Aside from HTTP checks, it can do all sorts of network (TCP Port, Ping, DNS, UDP) and email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) checks.

You can also customize how you want to be notified.  You can be notified via SMS and/or email, as well as how many notifications you’d like to receive at a time.  The result is you get something like this in your inbox.  This particular notification is due to our twice-daily database backups happening at 4PM and locking the site for 3-5 minutes while they export.

The other really cool part of Pingdom is their quite extensive reporting system.  You can receive day by day reports of your uptime, as well as summary data or data for custom date ranges.  Again, the ~10 minutes of down time a day is due to our database backups locking the site.

There is also graphing built in so you can see in a visual form how well your site is doing with its uptime.

Pingdom also tracks your server’s response time, letting you see detailed information about how long certain Pingdom mirrors took to reach your site.  You can also subscribe to daily, weekly, and/or monthly reports to be delivered to your email box.  And if you’re so inclined, you can also make some of your reporting public to let others know how well you fare with uptime.

The bottom line in all of this is that if Pingdom watches your site, you’ll know that your site is down before anyone else.  You’re better able to get ahead of potential issues before they become big problems.  And with the detailed reporting you can monitor your up time and help diagnose potential issues affecting your crawling and SEO performance.  While it is $9.95 a month for the basic account, trust me when I say that it’s well worth it.  We tried other similar services like Montastic and Pingdom is, by far, the best and most accurate.  It’s become invaluable.

Give it a shot and try the 30 day free trial.  You’ll be very impressed.

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May 15

Posted by rebecca

Lately I’ve been thinking about newsletters because I have no life and this job occupies my time 24/7. Just kidding…kind of. Actually, SEOmoz has been sending out monthly newsletters to PRO members for a few months now, and it’s made me start to look differently at the newsletters I receive. What do I pay attention to, and what do I instantly delete, and why? I thought I’d share some newsletters that I’ve scrounged up from my inbox from the past year and analyze their successes and failures.

1. Make sure you can actually read the newsletter. Monsoon is a Vietnamese fusion-type restaurant that I live near, and they send me a newsletter every so often. This is what it looks like:

Yeeeeeah…black text on a maroon background isn’t exactly readable.

Here’s another example. This is a Marriott newsletter I received:

I personally have a problem with the rows of teeny tiny city listings. They’re a bit hard to read very clearly because they’re so small and they’re clumped together. Also, each one of them is a link, and when they’re so closely listed it can be hard to click on the deal you’re interested in.

2. Don’t make your newsletters excruciatingly long.

Landmark Theatres is a movie theater chain that has a lot of locations in Seattle. They regularly send me their newsletters.

I love the information they display: current releases on the left-hand side, movies opening this week, etc. However, their newsletters are extremely long and require a lot of scrolling. My interest wanes the more I scroll, to the point where I just look at the information at the top and delete the newsletter, missing any vital information that may appear at the bottom.

Try and keep your newsletters to a reasonable length–do you really need all of that information you’re displaying? Maybe you need to up it to a twice-monthly newsletter if there’s too much information for a once monthly email; or, maybe you’re not thinking about the actual, essential, interesting information that your readers will want to hear about.

3. Don’t inundate your readers with nothing but text.

Kayak sends me their newsletter, and this is what they typically look like:

Not only is their newsletter long, it’s tedious and full of text blocks. They essentially list a city and write a big blurb about it, then lather, rinse, repeat. It’s pretty boring. Why not just focus on a select number of cities and include an enticing image? I wouldn’t mind seeing a lovely pic of Aruba beach. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

4. Make your newsletters appear clean and properly formatted.

The SMX newsletter looks a bit cluttered and text-jumbly to me:

The numbered list looks especially crammed. I think spacing the list out more would have made it look better.

5. Make sure your outbound links work properly before sending your newsletter.

This last example, unfortunately, is from our own newsletter. This week we sent out a newsletter that included a link to my email address, but we accidentally misspelled my name:

It may be hard to read, but the "RSVP with Rebecca" link pointed at "mailto:rbecca@seomoz.org." I received quite a few emails from our members notifying me of the typo and the delivery failure status they received when they tried to email me with the wrong address.

Okay, I’ve shared some examples of newsletters that need a bit of tweaking. Now I’ll show you some newsletters I do enjoy:

1. IndieFlix

IndieFlix is an independent film site based in Seattle. I signed up for their newsletter one year at the Seattle International Film Festival. (I attend the festival every year–one time I saw 11 movies in one weekend. But I digress.)

IndieFlix’s newsletter is a lot like the Landmark Theatres newsletter I shared earlier on in this post. The reason I like this newsletter better is that it offers the same compelling, interesting information (new releases, movie synopses) but in a much more concise manner. Two thumbs up!

2. Active.com

I participated in some race a year or two back (it was either a half or full marathon, I can’t exactly remember), and got automatically signed up for the Active.com newsletter. I’ve not canceled because their newsletter is one of my favorites:



(Sorry this one’s so big–I accidentally saved the screenshot without resizing it, and now when I try to size it down it becomes too hard to read.) Active’s newsletter does well what Marriott’s newsletter does poorly–shares a list of links. Active’s links are easy to read and click on. I also love the information shared in each newsletter–it’s interesting and valuable to hear about local race events that I may want to participate in or sign up for.

3. SEMpdx

If SMX’s newsletter were as cleanly formatted as SEMpdx’s, I’d have no problem reading and absorbing the information they send me:

Clean titles, good spacing, blog post snippets that link to the complete piece–I love it!

4. Barack Obama

I’ll leave the politics at the door and focus purely on the newsletter. The Obama newsletters rarely get sent out with images, yet they don’t feel bogged down with text.

It’s a relatively short message, is cleanly formatted, and breaks up the chunks of text with links, bolded sentences, and quotes. I also especially like the titles of their newsletters–I saw "Watch this video" and it immediately caught my eye. If it were titled something like "Barack Obama Campaign Update for May," my interest wouldn’t be as piqued and I’d be less inclined to open the newsletter right away.

Speaking of catchy titles, I’m going to talk about my favorite newsletter…

5. Yelp

I love Yelp’s newsletters. First of all, their titles are cleverly written and very eye-catching:

A well written title or email subject means more people are enticed to open the email and read more information.

Secondly, the newsletter does everything right–incorporates images, links out to more information, bolds the perfect amount of sentences and phrases for proper emphasis, and formats their text for easy reading. Here’s a newsletter I received about bbq restaurants in Seattle:

That, my friends, is a gorgeous newsletter. Also, notice the "Send to a Friend" button in the upper-right corner. Yelp’s newsletters are so great that Jeff actually sent one to me:

When people actually want to share your newsletter with others, that’s a good sign that you’re doing something right. (And yes, my boyfriend and I love mac and cheese. Send recipes to rebecca<at>seomoz.org.)

To summarize, I’ll share what I’ve picked up to be newsletter best practices:

  1. Check your outbound links to make sure they’re working properly.
  2. Break up monotonous blocks of text with images, links, quotes, and bolded phrases to make the content more easily readable.
  3. Format your newsletters so they have a professional layout.
  4. Make sure your newsletter design is easy on the eyes–use highly contrasting colors to avoid having the colors blur together.
  5. Keep your newsletters relatively concise. If they’re too long, trim out superfluous information or consider sending more frequent, shorter newsletters.
  6. Proofread your copy before sending it out to the masses. Typos and grammatical errors look unprofessional and sloppy.
  7. Play around with catchy email titles/subject lines for a higher open rate. Try to support your compelling title with compelling, interesting content in the body of your email.
  8. Um, I like macaroni and cheese. And independent films. And running. (Geez, come to think of it, you all have learned quite a bit about me based solely on the newsletters I receive. Hmmm…)

I hope that some of my examples were valuable. I’m not claiming to be an all-knowing newsletter expert (after all, our own newsletter fell under the "Guilty" list)–I just shared some of my personal opinions. If you have any other tips on how to create a compelling newsletter, I’d love to hear them.

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May 14

Posted by Jane Copland

I don’t often get indignant about websites. Even bad ones. Sometimes I complain about what passes for Web 2.0 genius, but I have a problem with one particular site I’ve come across lately. I find Spock.com vaguely appalling.

Spock  is a social networking / people search site which allows anyone to edit anybody else’s information. If you find that you’ve been added to the site, you can claim your profile and change your information. However, there is no guarantee that you’ll notice you’ve been added to the site. I only realised I’d been listed there when I received an email, alerting me to the fact that I had a profile there.

I discovered a page about myself that looked a lot like most other social networking profiles. It also looked like the individual in question - me - had created it. I found such information as my photograph, the breed of dog I own and which high school I’d attended in New Zealand.

Luckily, I could "claim" the profile by logging in with my LinkedIn credentials. I thought I had successfully deleted all the information the person had added about me, only to revisit the site today and find that none of it was really gone. It was just included as "news" about me. If someone isn’t alerted to their presence at the site, they might not come across the listing until it shows up in a search engine result.

The web is not designed to let individuals have complete control over what appears in search engine results for their names. Reputation management services exist because we don’t have control over search results. However, something strikes me as wrong about this service. The thing that really bothers me is that when a profile is claimed, one still has very little control over its contents. I can’t really get rid of any information and I have to request that the page be removed.

Spock’s Help page explains how users can flag content as inappropriate. However, if you don’t know you’ve been added to their database, there is no way to control the information. Secondly, claiming your profile isn’t necessarily instantaneous. If you don’t have an email address or social networking account, you have to request access to your profile via the site’s "quality assurance team." That’s the problem with allowing a social network to act as a wiki: anyone can edit it so they need a quality assurance team in place to protect you from claiming to be you when you are actually someone else.

Spock has a setting to make one’s profile private and stop strangers from changing its information. However, it appears to be broken. This is what happened when I tried to privatise my page. I certainly had not attempted to change its settings more than once in seven days.
.

What do you think? Is this just part of the Internet and something we have to get used to? Or is it overstepping the mark to allow strangers to edit personal information about people, and then not really give those people a quick way to remove the information that they don’t appreciate? I believe that people search will become more of an issue in the future, as it becomes more easy to track people’s actions online. Most of us who have an online presence are aware of what we put out there, and many of us are aware of what can be indexed. people search needn’t necessitate a gross compromise in privacy, but sites like Spock need to make it easier for individuals to control what appears attached to their names.

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May 13

Posted by randfish

Yes, whiny title writer, you most certainly do. Check out this piece from the AP on PapaJohns.com:

The nation’s third-largest pizza delivery chain trumpeted the $1 billion milestone Wednesday, noting that its U.S. online sales have been growing at an average clip of more than 50 percent per year. In 2001, the chain’s online sales totaled $20.4 million. Last year, its online sales approached $400 million.

Papa John’s said more than 20 percent of its sales come from online or through text messaging, an option it introduced last year. The company said text sales are meeting expectations, but it didn’t provide specifics.

Freitas said online business is driving higher overall sales at his more than 50 Washington-area stores. Online orders account for about half of overall sales at a couple of his restaurants, he said.

"I knew it would be a big part of our business, but this has blown my expectations away, and I think it’s even going to go higher," Freitas said.

While the demographics of pizza-delivery-addicts may skew slightly to the younger, online-obsessed population, this is a fairly good signal that even the most mainstream parts of the American consumer market are finding value in using the web. Why? In this particular instance, my answer would be "usability."

Let’s walk through the standard, offline, phone-based process of ordering pizza:

  1. Make decisions about:
    • Which restaurants can deliver to your location
    • Pricing
    • Quality
    • Reliability and Timing
  2. Find a menu for the pizza place you want to order from OR call the pizza place and ask for a list of menu options and prices
  3. Put pizza restaurant on hold while you evaluate the choices and confer with the group placing the order
  4. Place the pizza order
  5. Provide credit card information for payment or choose cash at the door
  6. Hang up and wait for pizza

We’ve all done this for years, and to be honest, it’s not a hard process. In fact, it’s actually possible that the expression "as easy as ordering pizza" could exist.

But, just to be fair, let’s take a tour of that same process on the web (using visual examples from Papa John’s site):

Papa Johns Homepage

The homepage is there to sell me on stuff, but it’s nice that they have a link to a whole page with all their specials - that’s always a struggle to understand properly over the phone and you sometimes wonder if you’re getting the best deal available.

Papa Johns Menu 1

Admittedly, it’s a nuisance to put in your address before you see the menu, but on the plus side, you can find out what menu is available (and whether delivery is available) in your area. I’m guessing they change the pricing a bit depending on region, but you’re not really losing anything over the old pick-up-the-phone method, so it’s forgivable.

Papa Johns Menu

Having the menu online is actually remarkably more convenient. Not only can Papa John’s upsell you on some of their specialty pizzas, you can actually peruse the entire menu at your leisure, along with prices and descriptions (and even photos) - something that would be nearly impossible offline.

Papa Johns Create Your Own Pizza

This is where the online system really shines - the create-your-own-pizza form. This is the part that never gets done right over the phone, but with the web system, you can craft it exactly right and be sure that the pizza maker is seeing the order the way you want it. There’s still the possibility for human error, but it’s gone way, way down. Plus, it’s great to have your web order available so if you do get the wrong pizza, you can reject it, pay less, or get it for free.

Papa John's Checkout

Confirmation and checkout are pretty much exactly what you’d expect - the nice part is that you can review your choices, make changes, and get things right where you want them before sending in the order. This part of the phone conversation happens fast in the normal ordering process, and crafting selection to your exact budget and party size can be challenging.

Now I can hear you say - yeah, Rand, we get it. Ordering pizza online has a lot of benefits over calling up and ordering over the phone. And yes, lots of people are using this service. But what the heck does it have to do with SEO?

The short answer is that this is one of the clearest illustrations I’ve seen of a completely normal, easy offline process becoming even easier and better with help from the web. It’s also a phenomenal success story for the company that pioneered it. The big takeaway here is that no matter the offline process - from restaurant menus to contract approvals to renting office space or hiring a plumber - the web’s ability to create better usability makes for opportunity for businesses.

So, do you really need to build web access to your business processes? No. Only if you want to get more customers and make your existing ones happier. And hey, if pizza delivery chains can do it, you can too.

p.s. An adroit reader asked me, anonymously, last week for some ammunition in helping convince the brass that using the web for typically offline processes could have ROI - happy to oblige!

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May 13

Posted by Danny Dover

About two weeks ago Rand and Scott posted a Whiteboard Friday explaining how to get an SEO job. I think it is a great resource for SEOs who already have a lot of experience, but what about those who don’t? How are the inexperienced supposed to get their first job at an internet technology company? The following is how I did it.

The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Your Foot in the Door


Please Note: I use my job hunting materials as an example throughout this post. I do this merely as a example for people to work with. I do not have any need to distribute my resume, cover letter or applicable e-mails for the traditional reasons, as I am currently employed at a company I love. Please don’t take this as an attempt to unfairly sell myself. I am honestly just doing this for educational purposes.

Research Yourself

The first step to getting your foot in the door at an exciting tech company is to take control of your online identity. It should come as no surprise that potential employers are going to Google, Myspace, Facebook, and Linkedin you. (Holy misuse of the English language, Batman!) Make sure you control what they are going to see.

Put yourself in their shoes - Pretend you have an ultra conservative grandmother. If you would feel embarrassed if she saw a specific image or read a specific fact about you online, politely ask the poster to remove it. Keep this mindset while checking the following websites:

  • Facebook - Do NOT just untag photos. I did this a year ago while job hunting and now I don’t know where all the worst images of me are posted. Furthermore, do not assume that your friends’ privacy setting will protect you. They won’t.
  • Linkedin - If you don’t have one, get one. If you do have one, update it.
  • Myspace - ummm delete it? Kidding, but try to clean it up as much as possible.
  • Flickr - It’s going to be rough, but you need to look pessimistically at each photo and each comment and decide how they reflect on you.
  • All other websites you participate in - Are you applying to IBM but have dugg a bunch of anti-Microsoft posts?  Remember, companies have many loyalties. (I have a friend who was applying for an internship at IBM and the interviewer jokingly mentioned how much Microsoft sucks. It was a trick to see my friend’s reaction because many IBM departments currently work closely with Microsoft.) Don’t be so easily fooled.

Own your Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

  • Create a personal website with your name as the domain - When someone searches for you, the search engines will give a matching domain name more weight than an average page that simply mentions you.

Danny Dover Google SERP
My Google SERP includes DannyDover.com (#3) and the social profiles I listed on its contact page (#4 & #6)

  • Include links to all of your online profiles with your name as the anchor text - Include your typical usage of the site so the page has original content and is not just a list of links. This shows people you are plugged in and pushes your social profiles up on your SERP.
  • Highlight your best work - Create a collection of your work, with the best ones highlighted (block via robots.txt to avoid duplicate content if the work was originally posted elsewhere).

Find Your Dream Company

  • Contact companies that you know and respect - I recommend sending a short and/or really convincing e-mail to the appropriate people with a noteworthy and short subject line. Remember, these people receive hundreds of e-mails a day. Make your e-mail stand out without asking for a ransom.

    Below is the e-mail that got me this job. Feel free to personalize it for your own use. Looking back on this, I recommend you make it shorter. I got lucky.

Subject: Quick Inquiry

Dear Ms. Muessig,

Thank you for taking the time to read this. My name is Danny Dover and I have done a lot of research on your company and I am very interested in getting involved.

I see you and your company as the leading resource for SEO and Internet education. I am writing you this letter because I want to know how I can help change the face of the Internet with you and your colleagues. How can I become involved with SEOmoz? Any opportunity you could grant me including an internship, mentorship or even a discussion over coffee would be intensely appreciated and beneficial to my continued education.

Similar to your co-founder Mr. Fishkin once was, I am a student at the University of Washington and I am an avid web developer and entrepreneur.

Although I am very happy to be at the UW, I have reached an academic wall. I have taken all of the university’s Internet related and web development classes. Unfortunately, the UW has chosen to dedicate most of its resources to computer science and has failed to grasp the increasing importance of the Internet.

I have met with advisers, professors and department heads and they all agree that the UW is dangerously lacking focus on the Internet but say that the knowledge required to teach classes is not available.

I believe you and your company have the required knowledge. I would love the opportunity to try to benefit your company and add to my education. I appreciate you taking the time to read and consider this.

Thank You,
Danny Dover

Resume and referrals available upon request.

Note: Rand said contact him later. It was Gillian who said yes and eventually gave me this job ;-p

  • Talk to people you know - Most people get their first jobs by utilizing their connections. Track down and talk to your friends about possible job openings. They are your greatest resource.
  • Search Craigslist - Many companies (especially startups) ignore the traditional recruitment websites and post job openings online for free on Craigslist.
  • Search Monster and Jobster - Other more traditional companies use these standard professional websites. Don’t ignore them.

  • Search the SEO marketplace - There are currently over 500 companies offering more than 200 jobs looking for people like you. It should come as no surprise that many people have already gotten jobs from using this marketplace.

Research the Company

  • First and foremost, figure out the culture of the company - Is this a company that you will really want to work at? Does it sound to good to be true? Is your potential boss an idiot? Try to figure these things out before you apply.
  • Read and comment on the company’s blog - This helps to understand the culture of the company. Don’t comment if you don’t have anything valuable to say (advertisements for yourself are not valuable in blog comments).
  • Search their site for anything related to hiring - If you are lucky, you might find a gold mine of information. 
  • Stalk important employees online - I am only half kidding here because it is likely potential employers will do this (at least to a small extent) to you. If the company is small, you should know at least the basic facts about the key employees (titles, roles, and big achievements). This will further help you understand the culture and operations of the company. All of this will be very useful at the interview. (Truth be told, I actually recognized everyone at SEOmoz before I actually shook their hands for the first time. I also think that knowing Rand attended the University of Washington without graduating helped me write an e-mail that was able to get his and Gillian’s attention.)

Resume

Many people put a huge emphasis on the intricacies of creating a resume. I have heard of people who obsess over things like paperweight, finding the correct shade of white and whether or not to add perfume to the paper (The answer is no). In my experience, it is always the words on the resume that have gotten me a job, not fancy tricks or paper.

The important resume factors are:

  • Write a specialized resume - I always write a resume tailored specifically for the job in which I am applying. Of course, I do have a general resume. I use it as a template and rearrange it based on my research into a particular company.
  • Write a creative cover letter - Make something that stands out without confusing people. For example, see the cover letter that got me this job and Rand’s favorite applicant of all time. Note: both of these worked because the creators researched the company culture before making them.
  • Use a legitimate resume layout - Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). List your most important traits first and keep everything organized. Never, I repeat NEVER, use the default Microsoft Word resume template. On the same note, never make your resume two pages (see below to download the template I use).
  • Content - This is paramount. Choose your words carefully and always present yourself in the best light. Don’t lie, but do feel free to show off your skills.
  • Spelling and Grammar - Have as many people as you can read over your resume. If you are a student, show it to appropriate teachers/professors. If you are not, show it to your smart friends. Failure to have perfect spelling and excellent grammar on a resume is a great way to get eliminated.

Feel free to use my resume as an example

Feel free to use my resume as a example on how to sell yourself and as an aid for good word choice. Here is the PDF with my example information.

This template was exclusive (until now) to my family and was originally given to my brother, Josh, when he went to graduate school. Feel free to download the template file below:

DOC   ODT   PAGES

Portfolio

For any job in the SEO industry, a resume is not enough.

  • Do a case study - This should be specific to your skills and demonstrate quantitative results. Include the status of the case before, what you did to improve it, and what the results were afterwards. Although the case study write up that I did is in a different format, it is still a good example.
  • Help people - Not sure what to do for your case study? Contact a local charity and ask if you can help them in someway. If you want to be a web developer, offer to work on their website. If you want to be a SEO, see if you can make them rank for some tough keywords. Be sure to bring up this experience at interviews. (Thanks TigerAdvertising)
  • Always speak their language - Nobody likes talking to someone they can’t understand. However, people do like to be impressed by people who are more knowledgeable. Use the knowledge you gained from researching the company to determine how to express yourself.
  • Numbers - Make a one page summary of your results of your case study. Include graphs and tables where necessary.   

Interview

This is your big chance. Act like a Boy Scout and be prepared.

  • Bring your resume - Bring several hard copies and keep them in a manila envelope to keep them safe. Additionally, bring your resume in PDF format on a thumb drive in case someone wants more copies. Lastly, keep a copy of your updated resume on your website. You never know what the interviewer might expect.
  • Dress up - I am an adamant believer that it always helps to dress up at a professional interview. Men, wear khakis, a dress shirt, a tie, dress shoes, and black socks. Women, your clothing is beyond my expertise. However, as a rule of thumb, always dress conservatively and avoid looking fake. If you dress seriously, people will take you seriously.
  • Believe in yourself - You should know as much as you can by this point. Don’t stress, and if you don’t know the answer to an interviewer’s question, be honest. Interviewers spend all day listening to BS. It is refreshing to talk to an actual human being.
  • Follow Up - Send a short and simple thank you after your interview. It is easy to do and makes a great impression.

Convince Them That They Need You

(The extent of this will differ depending on how much the job is needed and whether or not it is an internship, apprenticeship, part time, or full time job. My situation was extreme because my formal education was not getting me where I wanted to go.)

  • Make them an offer they can’t refuse - When I applied here, I offered my (limited) services at no charge and promised to provide all of my own resources (computer, software, etc). As an intern I realized that money was not the immediate goal. I had found a company that promised to provide me with valuable experience and I was ready to take a short term loss (in money and energy) in return for big rewards later. Employers will generally keep an intern as long as the intern is bringing more value to the company than they are taking away from it. As an intern, expect to take on a lot of tedious tasks (I read and categorized every blog post ever written on this website), but be sure you are at a place you love.

A Little Bit of Something Else

  • Be yourself! - They will either like you or not, and there is nothing permanently you can do to change that.
  • Luck - Sometimes there is nothing you can do. At some point while job hunting you will fail. I have failed several times and I fully expect to fail many more times in the future. I have been able to learn from my mistakes and have constantly improved myself. Through this constant process of improvement I have guaranteed that I will be successful at something. The catch is it most likely won’t be what I expect.

Stop Reading and Start Doing!

  • Start Now - I have read a million blog posts containing excellent advice. The reality is these didn’t help me at all until I started putting what I had learned into practice. Right now, you should print this out and start doing everything on it. Go get yourself a job!

I look forward to hearing from the more experienced SEOs in the comments. Please let me know how I can improve this guide. If any of you (experienced or inexperienced) decide it would be preferable to contact me privately, please feel free to e-mail or private message me using the information available in my profile. Thanks!

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May 13

Posted by Eric Enge

Intro from Rebecca: Eric Enge is a guest blogger for SEOmoz. His posts primarily focus on link building, but he has tackled other topics as well. He has previously written about the role of outbound links, various ways to pursue links, the role of directories in link building, Google’s Ajax APIs, and how he doesn’t buy links. Today he’ll be shifting gears a bit and will be talking about duplicate content. Enjoy!

Conventional wisdom among experienced SEOs is that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. In general principle, this notion is true, but there are exceptions to this rule. In other words, duplicate content penalties do exist for certain scenarios, and that is what we are going to discuss in this post.


The Conventional Wisdom

Once again, the conventional wisdom is almost always right. Here it is:

  1. Duplicate content can occur within a site, or across different sites.
  2. A page can be considered duplicate without being identical.
  3. The search engine wants to publish one version of a particular piece of content in their index. This is fundamentally because if a user gets a set of search results, goes to an article, and decides that is not what they want and returns to the search engine to check out other results, giving them another copy of the same article does not help them.

So fundamentally, what search engines implement is a filter. So far so good. Now let’s talk about the consequences:

  1. Search engine bots come to a site with a crawl budget, which is counted in the number of pages they plan to crawl in each particular session. Each time it crawls a page that is a dupe (which is simply going to be filtered out of search results), you have let the bot waste some of its crawl budget. That means fewer of your "good" pages will get crawled.
  2. Links to duplicate content pages represent a waste of link juice. Duplicated pages can gain PageRank, or link juice, and since it does not help them rank, that link juice is misspent.
  3. Lastly, no search engine has offered a clear algorithm for how a search engine picks which version of a page is does show. In other words, if it discovers 3 copies of the same content, which 2 does it filter out? Which one does it still show? Does it vary based on the search query? The bottom line is that the search engine might not do what you want it to do.

While some SEOs may debate some of the specifics above, I think that the general structure will meet with agreement across most SEOs. So, now let’s talk about a couple of problems around the edge of this model.


Problem Numero Uno

It’s that last bullet in the list of consequences. For example, on your site you may have a bunch of product pages, and also offer print versions of those pages. The search engine might just pick the print page as the one to show in its results. This does happen at times, and it can happen even if the print page has lower link juice and will rank less well then the main product page.

I saw this with a recent client. The fix was to nofollow links to the print pages and no noindex those pages as well. Once this was implemented, everything improved significantly for them.

Strictly speaking, no penalty was in fact assessed. However, picking a lower ranking version of the page to show sure felt like a penalty.

A second version of this can occur when you syndicate content to 3rd parties. The problem is that the search engine may boot your copy of the article out of the results in favor of the version in use by the person re-publishing your article. This also does happen. The best fix I know for this, other than noindexing the copy of the article that your partner is using, is to have them implement a link back to the original source page on your site. Search engines nearly always interpret this correctly, and emphasize your version of the content when you do that.

Once again, perhaps no penalty was assessed, but it still sure feels like one.

An Actual Penalty Situation

The above examples are not actual penalties, but for all practical purposes have the same impact as a penalty - lower rankings for your pages. But there are scenarios where an actual penalty can occur.

I worked on one site that was aggregating content from many sources (from thousands of sites). More than 60% of the pages on the site contained content that could be found on those other sites. The value add of the site was in the unique categorization and organization of the content, and in the value-added information about each of the sources.

The site did very, very well for many years. But then the bottom fell out of the whole thing. Traffic dove to less than 20% of its highest levels. The great majority of pages were in the supplementals (back when these were still visible) and even ranked below pages on sites that had duplicated the content from them. The business was fundamentally in ruins.

We were able to rehabilitate the site and get it to about half its original traffic levels. The only thing we did was significantly reduce the amount of duplicate content. By getting it to these lower levels, we apparently got it below a threshold that made Google like the site again.

Summary

We do have scenarios where the way that the search engines select which version of a particular article to show is, for all intents and purposes, a penalty. While the search engine people I have spoken to would not call that a penalty, to a publisher it is. Regardless of what you call it, these are scenarios you need to avoid because they hurt your site.

In addition, real duplicate content penalties do exist. The scenario may need to be extreme, but it can, and does, happen.

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