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How Apple Won Our Mini Enterprise Contract

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Until recently, Apple had no good inexpensive computer in its lineup. There was the Mac Mini but the graphics were crappy built-in on-board Intel adapters. As an ex Macbook owner, I knew how weak that chip is.

On the other hand, the Mac Mini with the 9400GF is a real computer. A Core2Duo processor at 2 GHz can handle anything except gaming and high end video editing.

I hope to hell my staff are not gaming and I know we aren't doing high end video editing these days. If we decide to start, I'll get a more powerful computer.

I know that when we do go to video editing, there are no audio and video sync issues on Macs (sync issues are the historic bugaboo of video editing on Windows computers).

We've just bought a total of six Mac Minis and Macbooks to switch Foliovision over to being primarily an Apple company. Here's why.

How Apple Won Our Mini Enterprise Contract

• What is great about the Mini is that it is small and silent and powerful. We spend a huge amount of time finding and configuring custom power supplies and fans to make our Windows computers silent. Minis are silent out of the box (the power supply is on the floor). Silence is goal number one for our computers. That Macs used to be loud (even the G5 towers, I had one) was one good reason they didn’t have our business earlier.
• We can move the OS around from computer to computer without going through a complicated and painful . I.e. we will build a standard setup for our Minis with all the software and extras onboard that we want and just clone it from one machine to another.
• All hardware is compatible (limited choice but what exists works)
• I know all the software so whatever software anyone needs I can tell them off the top of my head which one to install
• We are all licensed software. Which means we are paying for our work tools anyway. As we are paying for our tools, we’d like nice ones. We’ve tried Linux but it is too widely configurable (i.e. too much choices so you end up spending time fiddling) and suffers from the same issues as Windows (driver and hardware compatibility issues).
• Maintenance is minimal and I don’t have to dedicate a staff member to working just on the computers (adding 5 more Windows boxes means that the IT guy would be almost unavailable for anything except computer maintenance).
• I want my programmers to write simpler, more attractive software which means they shouldn’t be on Windows or Linux as Windows is ugly and complicated and Linux is just too complicated. We aren’t writing for other programmers but for real estate agents and best selling authors. Simple and attractive are Steve Job’s watchwords and ours too.

How Apple Almost Lost Our Business

• Minis are very difficult to get into. We almost didn’t buy them at all as it is so difficult to change RAM and hard drives. I figured we are buying enough of them that we will get good at opening up the little devils.
• The warranty period is inadequate. All computer makers in Europe are offering two years. Apple is trying to offer one, along with a paid upgrade to three years. Yes for a laptop, no for a desktop. By the time you buy the extended Apple-Care on a desktop, it’s no longer a cost effective solution.
• There is no reasonable step up. iMacs are lovely computers but it’s next to impossible to change the hard drive. Guess what? We just won’t buy a computer in which we can’t change the hard drive ourselves. Crashed hard drives are the number one hardware issue and we expect to be able to deal with it without lugging a heavy iMac around town. Moreover the top of the line new quad iMac was issued without an external SATA port. For no good reason Apple has limited us to FireWire 800. Even FW 800 raid with 80 MB/sec throughput is not fast enough for HD video and just adequate for heavy duty photo processing.
• Custom video ports. We have to buy five mini-DVI adapters and five miniDisplay adapters for our dual head setups. Fortunately there are third party solutions now which come in at €8 to €15 per adapter instead of Apples €25 to €29. Tell me again why Apple are not using DVI and displayport instead?

Conclusion

The computers are arriving this week. We'll be setting them up over the holidays. I'll be back with some tips on how to set up Macs for enterprise use straight out of the box.

Microsoft had our business until they lost it with complicated licensing.

IT | 4 comments

Windows 7 Licensing or How Microsoft Lost Our Business

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

We are moving half the office to Mac computers this month.

Originally I was in the market for a couple of quads with Microsoft Windows. But to be able to buy those two computers, I had to figure out all the troublesome licensing of Microsoft. Originally we just wanted to say with XP, as that's what we know and like. On the way, here's what I discovered about Microsoft Licensing:

• licenses are extremely confusing (8 license levels? come on)
• licenses are not portable
• licenses are restricted to a single language
• licenses have to be activated
• hardware changes require reactivation
• you need antivirus software for every Microsoft computer (we've actually bought it for all ours from Avast)

We were relatively happy Microsoft Windows XP users with five XP licenses and four Windows 2000 licenses. We planned to stay that way, but it's difficult and expensive to buy XP licenses these days and they don't point forward.

Microsoft does offer Windows Professional 7 licenses with the option for downgrade.

When we called Microsoft's telephone numbers for volume licenses, they were very coy about telling us what we could expect to pay. I'm sorry I don't like hidden prices, which can only be revealed after review of your contract. If you have to hide your prices, there's a scam in there somewhere. Moeover, we were also told that volume licenses would not allow us to do XP downgrades.

Apparently with Windows XP, a license is good regardless of what language you choose to install in the end. In Windows 7, unless you choose ultimate version, you have to keep the computer in the language for which you bought the license.

Which brings up the issue of versions. There are over 8 license versions. Guys, make it a lot easier, please. I.e. Ultimate shouldn't exists. Starter shouldn't exist either. Home and professional cover the two usage scenarios. If I buy a license, I should have the right to move it to another computer if I take it off the first computer.

In contrast, with Macs you just install the software. Of course you need the computer, but once you have that you can just copy a working OS from one computer to another.

We spent ten man hours just clarifying what Windows 7 licenses were available and which would work for us.* That's a good start on explaining why we just don't want anything more to do with Microsoft.

Go back to selling software, guys in Redmond. Complicated licensing to confuse and shaft customers is no way to do business. You've just lost ours.

---

* Once you are done with the licenses, you still have to configure and troubleshoot your own custom computers, downloading and debugging drives. There are hours to be spent here as well. Enough.

IT | 11 comments

New Foliopress WYSIWYG version with Dropdown Customization

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

We received a lot of requests to add some buttons to the toolbar of our own Wordpress WYSIWYG editor called Foliopress WYSIWYG. That's why we added a brand new drop down menu which can be easily customized - you can add any kind of styling you can imagine to it.
 

Foliopress WYSIWYG Formating Dropdown

The usage is simple and straightforward for more advanced and experienced Wordpress users, but in case you need help you will find everything about it in:

• Our updated installation guide - Foliopress WYSIWYG Installation. It contains all you need to know about its customization and much more.
• User guide  - Foliopress WYSIWYG End User Guide. Shows how to use it properly, same for all the other features.

And of course - you are welcome to ask questions in the comments bellow our articles.

The version number is 0.9.7. Download it from our main Foliopress WYSIWYG page or Wordpress plugins.

WordPress | No comments

New Foliopress WYSIWYG version released

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

As we announced a couple of days ago, the new version or our WYSIWYG editor for Wordpress is done. The main improvements are:

• Multiple image posting
  The Image Management window stays opened after to send an image to the post. This allows you to insert multiple images with ease. If you like the window to be closed every time you insert the image into the post, you can disable multiple image posting in the options.
• No need to edit any configuration files
  Everything important is in the options screen now!
  
  

  
  New Foliopress WYSIWYG options screen

• Available thumbnail sizes are limited by the size of the picture
  Each time you are going to insert a thumbnail for an image into the post, only the sizes which are lower than the horizontal size of the image are shown. This won't let you insert a 500px thumbnail for a 320x240px image.
• Better security
  Since the Image Management window may stay opened after you insert an image, we implemented a technique which disables the usage of that window after you log out from your Wordpress admin panel.
• Automatic wpautop can be turned off
  If the post you are about to edit with Foliopress WYSIWYG was created with the default Wordpress editor (TinyMCE), Foliopress WYSIWYG runs wpautop on it prior to editing. TinyMCE is storing posts without any HTML markup for the paragraphs, so it's necessary to run this core Wordpress function in order to work with the posts correctly in our editor. You may want to disable this function if some of your special posts are destroyed after opening with Foliopress WYSIWYG.
  

Download the plugin from our Foliopress WYSIWYG page or from the Wordpress plugin page.

If you are going to do the auto-upgrade, you should use this simple guide to preserve your current settings.

WordPress | No comments

Foliopress WYSIWYG autoupdate to be launched soon

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

If you use our WYSIWYG editor for Wordpress called Foliopress WYSIWYG, then you will be probably happy to hear the exciting news:

You will be able to upgrade to the next version (which will be released in next couple of days) using the Wordpress built-in automatic plugin updater.

However if you ever made any changes to the custom configuration file, these changes will be lost, as we have no control over the Wordpress update process and all the files will be overwritten. This is a list of your configuration changes which we can't keep after the update is done:

• configuration of BodyId and BodyClass for the editor
• custom Toolbar configurations
• custom plugins for the built-in FCK editor

What you need to do is to write down these settings before the upgrade and then put them into the new options screen which the new version of our plugin will feature (in case you used any extra plugins inside the editor, you need to save all the plugin files and update the same custom config file manually).

Here's an article about how to change the custom config file in all the old Foliopress WYSIWYG versions which will help you to pull these settings out of it: Foliopress WYSIWYG setup and edit.

If you are not using our editor yet, we hope this feature will help it compete with the others.

WordPress | No comments

Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz opens day two of SEO Pro Training in London

Head to Head: Keyword Strategy – Will Critchlow (Director, Distilled)

Will Critchlow beat Rand Fishkin shirt

• keyword strategy depends on how many writers you have.
  • if you have a lot of writers, long tail is great
  • if you have fewer, you will have to focus on a smaller set of keywords
• conversions by keyphrase length (excluding branded search) useful statistic
  • 2.7% on three word phrases
  • 1 word on .8%
  • two word 1.2%
• what does that mean:
  • for ecommerce: more deeper product pages. Three word keyword phrases convert like crazy.
• set up your site hiearchies: attribute/location
  1. start with full keyword list ordered by volume
  2. then divide it by category.
     • for camping, keyword phrases divide up like this:
       • in
       • or
       • with
       • friendly
     • use excel array to pull them out
       • campsites
       • caravan parks
       • holiday parks
• getting at the hidden data in your PPC data.
  1. define your report
  2. add&limit=50000 to your URL
  3. export as CSV (excel export doesn’t work)
• use the conversion data to uncover gems:
  • found four or five 3 keyword phrases which were converting like crazy for which we didn’t have pages.
• split test open rate:
  • “download the call” or “download the video” and “donload the video” won.
  • “training” vs “conference call” and “conference call” won
• based on history, anticipate event spikes for searches and get ahead in organic, i.e. world cup 2010.
• run xenu on your competitor, look at internal links, look at site structure. Find his weaknesses.
  • category pages: great category page for leather sofas but he doesn’t have 3 seater leather sofas.
  • add 3 seater leather sofa category page and watch the traffic roll in

Head to Head: Keyword Strategy – Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Rand Fishkin - Keyword Strategy

• Online Marketplace
  • Google has been growing in last five years, other search engines, barely.
  • 80% of clicks from organics, 80% of SEM budget to PPC. numbers are backwards.
  • 160 billion dollars of revenue online.
    ecommerce referral: 31% organics seo, paid search 9%, social media 7%.
    wife getting the bird
  • Market is growing madly. Bought wife laptop: my zappos viewing machine has arrived.
  • Brands should pay attention to online. Offline purchases are influenced by online research.
• Search results analysis
  • 31% click blended search
  • 68% of search engine users click data on first pages.
  • does high organic ranking higher make people think you’re a better brand?
    39% agree 42% neutral 19% disagree.
  • Keyword phrase length over time: grew then contracted. Search engines got better.
    conversion rate by kw phrase length:

The charts backing Rand’s presentation are located at http://seomoz.org/dp/free-charts.

News site SEO – Rob Ousbey (Search Marketer, Distilled)

Rob Ousbey - News site SEO

Rob started his presentation by quoting Richard Murdoch:

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph

News sites’ USP are dependent on the following factors:

• brand & age
• variety
• contentcreators

What’s special about new sites?

• regular new content
• old expiring content (go to archives or deleted)
• varied conversions

Some big stories can be planned: Obama inaugration.
Other big stories are unplanned: Michael Jackson’s death.

In news, one of the best ways to get ahead is to get other SEO’s to do your job by linking to your stories. You have to let people link.

Some things to be careful about:

• print version pages. Make sure that your print pages contain enough navigation to the main site.
• duplicate content: try to keep your content single URL
  • Example not to follow The New York Times.
    • times.com
    • www.times.com
    • nytimes.com
    • www.nytimes.com
• news sitemap
• If you are running a new site or even a site which publishes occasional news, you want to get into Google news. The technical requirements include about 15 items.
• When trolling for new topics, use the suggest feature on google news: updates quickly to see what people are looking for.
• Tag your images right: 10% of organic traffic and image visitors are some of the best.
  • new visitors
  • more page per views per visit
  • lower bounce rate

You want to be among the early links on Google. Read Brent Payne’s personal weblog, he’s director of seo for Chicago Tribune.

Some more tips:

• new URLs for hot topics
• find volcanic topics
• create relevant content
• published optimised page at new URL: double visit from Google for news page and comes back a second time to pick up corrections: speed is of the essence come back and correct it.
• be sure to link from related pages and home page. Build it into your CMS
• 301 related but outdated content (immediate link juice)
  rotate linking pages through front pages
• Old URLs for repurposed content

Rob spent some time breaking down the technique of repurposing old URLs using the example of Michele Obama’s dress.

• find term
• change title & description
• link to from homepage
• when story returns
• keep title, h1, h2, description, the same (otherwise loses weight)
• replace content with updated story
• link from similar content, 301 old content

Who should do all this SEO? It’s too much for a single SEO to handle.

• journalists: make them make it happen.
  • journalists will do the day to day SEO for you
  • not “jacko snuffed it” but “michael jackson died today”: you can have different header than page title. Best of both worlds. Page title: “Michael Jackson died today”; header: “Jacko snuffed it with drug overdose”.
  • how to motivate journalists?
  • two trainings not one: expect only 25% success at first training; six months down the line, 75% will do something about it
    • congratulations go a long way: copy their boss
    • analytics, dashboards, reports
    • exposing their personality: in the newspaper you can’t really add much, but online you can create special section, bio, photo

What is the difference between blog vs news?

• does it matter?
• news is reporting and blog is editorial sections.
• does the site look like a news site?

How a smaller organisation can compete…

• you cannot compete on quantity, but you can compete on editorial quality, especially if you are focusing on paid subscribers.
• the pay wall: ft.com up 10% for online and up 22% for the overall group.

How to use the pay wall and not get excluded from organic search…

• the Google News solution: first click free.
  • First click free doesn’t fix the linking problem.
• solution for external links:
  • become a premium news website
  • extend first click free to all referred traffic so your referrers can send you traffic.
  • how do the first wave of media find you: give them free content, get referrals

News Pricing

• studies show 13% of visitors are willing to pay 6-10p per article
• focus on these high value visitors for mini payments
• Rob’s suggestion: use a micropayment system Oyster with the following scheme:
  • 20p for first article
  • 20p for second article
  • cap it at 50p per day for the rest of the paper

His argument is that 50p/day is still cheaper than buying a newspaper.

How do you get people to want to pay you?

• making your content exceptional
  • turn great content into purchase
  • turn great content into links
• calls to action that match your conversion

If you are a news source, Rob points out that Wikipedia loves newspapers. go get a bunch of links to your news site.

The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled)

Tom Critchlow - Getting Links

 

Tom got started by talking about the role of your USP in both content generation and in brining in links. Your USP will change what content you post and what links that content brings.

For Tom, modern link building is not separated from strategy. In traditional SEO link building, link building could be done separately via:

• manual directory submission
• manual article submission
• social bookmark submission
• creating web 2.0 properties

His top advice is to leave those old-fasioned methods behind, let’s get away from it.

Case Studies

HamiltonBilliards – A Niche supplier of high end billiard tables

How can hamiltonbilliards beat topofthecue?

• special relationship with all of the huge national castles? get a link back!
• warwick university pool club. give them free cues, sponsor organisation, sponsor a tournament.

Hippobox

• ontracks delivery doesn’t fit into postbox, now links to hippobox
• howonearth delivery doesn’t fit into postbox, now links to hippobox

Competitor analysis

• how can you understand your USP without understanding your niche?
• basic links in each niche. get them all.
• reverse engineer each competitor’s strategies.
• identify successful strategies and repeat them (including sophisticated ones like those of Hamilton Billiards and HippoBox
  • using linkscape
  • order linkscape data by DmT (Domain moz-Trust) for quick categorisation (not so easily spoofed).

Who are your competitors? They aren’t just competing suppliers. Competitors are people who rank in your targeted SERPs.

• look for people who list other sites in directories
  • investigate the links to sites already listed in niche directories
• gingerlily.co.uk, ranked for “silk duvets”. Link from allergy.co.uk: go get links from all allergy sites.
• accountingpage.com service $50 for submission. Directory networks can be effective in the right niche.

Some people are ranking:

• for massive link buy
• for massive directory submission
• for great content and wide bookmarking

Understand why you’re building each link. There are three things links can bring you:

• authority – from top sites
• trust – from trusted sites in an area
• anchor text – from any site

Diversity of links is very important. Never rely on a single strategy or even two strategies.

Different link need scenarios:

• you might have anchor text, need trust
• you might have trust, but need anchor text strength.

Embed seo in your business processes. Example: in each thank you note for business purchases include a link request: “if you have a website, please consider placing a link”.

Make sure your PR agency is using specific pages on your website and using links in their releases.

Pay for high quality directory links. Quality paid directories are curated and somewhat exclusive so the links do have value. Example: JoeAnt speed pass.

Generic directories:

• joeant
• aviva directory

Directory Tips:

• More useful are stronger links from niche directory.
• For a crafts site, links in a craft or housetohomedirectory.
• Before paying for a link check that that directory passes link strength.

Email

If content is king, email is the pupper master pulling the strings.

A common truism: just write content and the rest will take care of itself. Perhaps but if you want to accelerate growth, you have to do some legwork for your content.

• Email some people and ask them to link. How do you motivate them?
• Don’t forget about international social media sites. Nice traffic, nice links.
• perform competitor analysis on who published competitors linkbaits or area linkbait.

Duplicate Content

• Duplicate content does not cause sitewide penalties. Back in the day, perhaps no more.
• Duplicate content does not hurt you at all if you outrank everyone who publishes your post.
• Syndicate your content for links.

Product Giveaways

• product givaways for links. get them something to do with your products.
• send product but give them something to do with it. paints=painting contest.
• for high value items, use disount codes/exclusive offers. 15% off orlebar brown swimwear. people have to link to you to write about it.

Widgets – Custom Programming

• widgets tip. syndicate exclusively to major publishers with custom branding built-in.

Paid Links

Paid links – step outside paying for them in the traditional way:

• association membership
• conference sponsorship
• charity donation

TIP: Use adwords content network to discover sites in your area who are open to publishing paid links and are in your niche. Then approach them directly for permanent advertising.

API and open data.

Often with a popular API you can get links into your site.

Affiliate Links

SEO friendly affiliate links are like paid links, but free.

• allows you to get links from sites you’d otherwise have had to pay
• pay people to put affiliate links on their website

Keep in mind that Google is trying to shut down link juice from affiliate sites so this may be a six month strategy.

Local communities

• this is bath.co.uk
• thebathweb.co.uk
• bathfm
• thebathchronicle

Expired sites

1. find expired sites in your niche
2. get a list of all the pages linking to the expired page
3. contact those site owners and suggest that they link to your replacement page instead. Most site owners would like to replace any broken or expired pages to which they link.
   • TIP: if the expired page links are affiliate, make sure to offer an affiliate replacement program.

Profit:

• long run business strategy which wins is trust
• people who win are those who build quality links. Build awesome links. Awesome links start with great content.
• people are more important than links: high ROI on engagement.
• link-savvy PR is better than traditional SEO.
• build links for traffic not for SEO.

Finding Modern Linkbuilders

Best linkbuilders Tom has seen:

• business development managers
• community managers
• developers

In long term people with business and community or special tools skillset will build you the links you want, the links which count.

SEO is Nothing Without Content – Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Rand Fishkin - SEO is nothing without Content

Building the Content: Your Own and UGC (user generated content)

• copyblogger: 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work
• SEO is part of how you show your content
  • same content in focused way and it attracts people
  • wrap it with a bunch of ads and crap, it doesn’t succeed. Example: SEOmoz is non-commercial format. SEOmoz is .org: strategic.
• Nick Denton’s publishing model: Pay your writers on page views and on incoming links.
  • for every domain which links in you will pay more.
• use Amazon’s ranking system for reviewers: involve users in your site.
  • send people a badge to put on their website
  • give registered users ownership of their profile.
  • example: linkedin’s profile completeness. 5 x as much content contributed. you’re not done yet.
• give a website a vibrant community before you invite general users in
  • check answers.startups.com
    • build a community before you launch, don’t be empty
  • don’t turn weblog comments on until you have a community already. 0 comments looks terrible.
  • give them a profile worth sharing
• how to maximize UGC (user generated content)
  • seed with high quality members: why are comments good, depends on seed members
• focus on a niche, then build wide
• reward/recognize contributors: check stackoverflow for an example.
• provide analytics for users: show them page views, comments
• make it a competition

How to get people to link to your site

• Fun widgets: boozedeathcalculator from bar shot
  • post your results to your weblog, twitter, facebook, myspace: simple, simple sharing
• reward links with trackbacks
• designing content which will gain links
• use old domains and URLs.
• ranking #5 for “social media”
• measure incoming links to each page, quality: do it to your competitors
• citation will get an incoming link
• anticipation in a teaser kind of way
• humour: really hard to do right
• controversy: not a fan, but draws in a lot of links.
• how to turn a tweet into a link
  • make an embeddable link
  • close discussion on own site
  • create an expervience vs read & forget
  • don’t discount the value of a tweet: Google is seeing tweets as fresh content

Google Local Search – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled)

Tom Critchlow - Google local search

• a lot of factors for Google ranking
  • verified listing
    • bulk upload: white listing for many locations
      • separate bulk upload files, one for each country, country selection drop-down, country selection drop down to change country each time
      • data formatting avoid: capitalisation, odd phone number formatting, URLs in the description field
    • worst thing to do: not on whitelist, not claiming your own listing, unverified edits
  • number of reviews
    • number more important than the rating
  • citations: like links only different
    • mike blumenthal (blumenthals.com) david mihm
    • citations: mentions of your brand, sometimes a link
    • phone number mention is usually a citation
    • address listed
    • how to find them? look at competitors.
  • distance to center
    • google says it doesn’t matter: it does. can’t do anything about it.
  • categories
    • can add up to five
    • use keywords
    • analyse competitors

Case Study – SEOmoz

SEOmoz doesn’t rank in google local search for “seo company seattle”

• there are four sites verified and provided by business owner.
• both addresses are also verified and provided by business owner.
• reviews of the old address
• category fail: only one there make sure you are using all five

Job number one: getting rid of the old listings and consolidating on a single listing. Job two: getting in some reviews.

Universal Search – Patrick Altoft (Director of Search, Branded3)

Patrick Altoft - Universal Search

• Google’s main results page now clogged up with all kinds of results:
  • local
  • video
  • image
• you want to try to get into those alternate results as well
• video results: up to eight results.
• put up a video sitemap: if you are a trusted site
  • get some people to give some good ratings
• google is now indexing flash as content
• imagine if you have your logo on google’s image search
• rather than buy links from weblogs, put an image on website but with logo on top.
• google images cares about the text nearby
• google news citations:
  • rectangular
  • size 250×150px
  • interesting image
  • alt text! and have it next to image
  • images will get more clicks than the headling
    • interesting image

The limits of automation – Dave Naylor (Founder, Bronco)

Dave Naylor - Limitations of Automation in SEO

Tools to Analyse

• Best single tool for tracking SERPs: Advanced Web Ranking
  • never search for your brand terms (don’t get a penalty)
  • remove them
• Google webmasters tools
• MajesticSEO
  • good backlink set
• Google wave (get everybody in)
  • can have one wave per client
  • people can get you automatically
• SEOmoz tools
• raven tools
  • best of internet into one management suite
    • post content to blogs
    • manage social profiles
    • integrates with Google analytics
• Bronco tools
  • free tools, not working don’t care
  • Geo targeting
  • like excel spreadsheet but brings it all together for you and makes it pretty
  • link recording tool
    • keep track of links
    • future links to come back and get
  • common link finding tool
• fresh tools
  • 80 legs: on demand web crawler
    • .25 per 100,000 URLs
  • backlink planner
    • automatically analyses competition for a keyword: you need 300 directory links, 50 blog comments, 100 site widgets
  • backlink analyser
    • some links are actually bringing you down
    • analyses link and shows how risky they are: some links can bring you down
    • sponsored links: you can buy a link
    • decreasing toxic links give a boost
    • not passing equity: stop paying for it
• microsoft has an SEO tool.
  • shows you the violation
  • like xenu on speed
  • check with a malware checker
  • vista and above
  • free download
• davidnaylor.co.uk special tool
  • let’s you see what’s going on
  • about to clean up toxicity and see if it makes any difference

Tools to Build: Bioware

• Picasso about computers: “they can only give you answers.”
  • human must make a decision over whether to place a link or not. must do approach not machine driven.
  • go after very high value links in a personalised way

The right strategy for your organisation – Will Critchlow (Director, Distilled)

Will Critchlow of Distilled fields QA Questions on Strategy

Possible strategies

• startup
• established
• household name

How do you differentiate yourself? Do it even as a small company.

• ranking factors
  • what you control
    • where usp helps
    • building a custom page into your sales process

Where to your links come from?

• rolex: sponsorship: 15% of links come from sponsorship
• rackspace: testimonials: 25% of links come from sponsorship
• amazon: affiliates: 25% of links come from affiliates

Desirability

• rarity (“uniqueness”)
• you can even get links for a screwup

Richard Brannson’s Virgin brand is USP

• something different from everyone else
• get links from points of difference
• everyone’s quick but you are quicker.
• as small business, pushing 2 ton flywheel. doesn’t appear to move until it does.

International Companies: How to handle multiple countries/languages – Duncan Morris (Director, Distilled)

Duncan Morris - SEO Strategies: How to handle multiple languages/countries

• Should a company develop a separate website for each country?
  • local TLD domain helps? yes.
  • difficulty of getting TLD domains
  • local TLD vs generic TLD
  • single language vs multiple language

Much easier to have a local version when you have your own domain for each one.

Bmw has a site for every country. That’s the right model.

Question and Answer Day Two SEO Expert Training

Distilled SEO Expert Training QA Panel Day 2

Danny Dover SEOmoz reading the questions submitted online

How to burn someone’s site to the ground?

• Dave Naylor: Buy him $500 of TLA links per month for a year, gradually increasing spend. Make it look like you are building a bad neighbourhood.

Distilled SEO Expert Training Question

Should video be stored on YouTube or on your own site?

• Rand Fishkin: Two versions of video. On youtube funny title, on your own site very seo’d straight title. Differentiate.
• Dave Naylor: Put main video on your own site and offer an easy embed tool directly from your own site. Get lots of extra links that way.

Dave Naylor and Rand Fishkin answer questions about YouTube videos

Pub night hosted by London SEO

London SEO pub night

• tab was still running at 10pm. Good job, London SEO.
• music wasn’t too loud to talk.

Some English SEO’s I’d met the night before were murmuring about Distilled’s comments about paid links being unequivocally bad.

I wandered over to the Distilled table and asked some pointed questions about paid links. It turns out Distilled are not as absolutist white hat as they suggested throughout the training (paid links unqualifiedly bad) but they feel the future of SEO is more in community driven links.

So why teach people a bad practice which should be playing second fiddle to good practice.

I think that’s a fair approach.

London Bus on the walk home

Hotel Russell London - a place to rest after two wonderful but long days

SEO | 3 comments

Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day One

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Will Critchlow Rand Fishkin welcome the world to London for SEO Expert Training

Introduction

As an owner of both SEOmoz Basic SEO Training DVD and the SEOmoz Advanced Training DVD, I knew that the speakers knew their stuff and they looked like a fun crowd to boot. So I decided to attend the SEO Expert Training live conference in London on October 19 and 20.

Was the trip to London worthwhile?

Definitely yes, but…

Let’s start with the program which Distilled and SEOmoz organised for us. In a word, superb. The program included dedicated sessions on:

• link building
• site structure
• social campaigns
• SEO tools
• content strategy
• conversion techniques
• SEO team management
• Google penalties and penalty filters
• Google analytics

For the most part this partial list of topics is a dreamlist of issues which I’d like to hear about in depth.

Amazing View from the Imagination Gallery

The “but” has to do with the internal structure of the conference. The conference was co-sponsored by SEOmoz and Distilled. Unfortunately for a two day conference, Distilled is just too young and small a company provide authorative speakers for all subjects.

When someone delivered a good speech on day one, there’s a good chance, he or she would follow up with a much weaker overview of another subject. Some of the speakers were too inexperienced to speak to this audience, both as an expert and as a public speaker (I’m thinking particularly of Lucy Langdon’s “ROI in Social Media”). I’m sure Lucy will get better with time, but she wasn’t quite ready yet. A number of the sessions were cribbed from well-known sources, rather than reflecting original thought. I’m thinking specifically of site structure (Jakob Nielsen) and branding strategy (USP standard advertising 101 at this point).

Distilled’s youth on the other hand yielded a big reward on another front: enthusiasm. Both the presenters and the audience were full of excitement and enthusiasm for what we do. As a group we are people who want to make the web a better place, full of stronger and more interesting sites.

For most of us, search is not just a job but a passion.

This was not an IT conference full of introverted programming types who never leave their computers and aren’t getting any exercise. While the gender ration skewed in favour of men by at least four to one, my girlfriend noted with a slight tone of surprise that those who were there are quite attractive.

SEO Expert Training audience paying close attention

Another big issue which Distilled got right was venue. We were right next to Goodge Street on the top of the Imagination gallery enclosed in glass with all of London’s Bloomsbury district just out the window. We were bathed in natural light all day long. The location was inspiring. We were just blocks away from Saatchi & Saatchi's main offices on Charlotte Street in the heart of media London. Small details like attractive platform and graphics from Distilled graphic artist Leonie Wharton made a big difference for a design type like myself.

Some complained about the five story hike up and down by foot to get a cup of coffee. To my mind, that trot up and down stairs improved the conference five fold as neither audience nor speakers ever hit that somnulent too-many-hours-in-a-chair-without-exercise drift. Drowsiness is highly contagious so by keeping everyone awake the quality of attention in the room went up, benefiting both audience and speakers.

Imagination Gallery - the view down

When we organise a conference, I’ll have some trouble finding a location with three or more flights of stairs and no lift. Perhaps we’ll have to bribe someone to take the elevator out of commission.

Advanced analytics – Will Critchlow (Director at Distilled)

Will Critchlow with Duncan Morris

 

Will told us how important it is to know your data and gave some great hints on how to use Excel and pivot tables to master data. This presentation seemed incredibly short to me. Perhaps I was just slow getting off the block after all the travel to get here.

Getting SEO done against the organisational odds – Richard Baxter (SEOgadget)

Richard Baxter - How to Build an SEO Team

On the other hand, Richard Baxter’s presentation was right in my area of deep interest. Building and developing an SEO team.

• a good senior SEO needs to be a good manager
  • management consultancy to directors
  • data to business modelling
  • recruiting/training
  • helping team
• Good campaign objectives are:
  • visibility
  • conversion
  • revenue (measured monthly)
  • traffic
• Segment distinctions in traffic:
  • generic = “broadband”
  • research = “best broadband”
  • purchase = “broadband deals”
• Take each segment to a different page/part of your site.
• When making estimates, tend conservative: you can only win when you exceed your targets.
• How to Structure an SEO team?
  • all requests for SEO support should go through manager
    • you protect the team from silly requests
    • you make sure workload remains balanced across the team
    • you maintain the authority within the team to shape it
    • you know what management is asking for so you can build more of it into the team
• Training a team
  • make them give presentations to you every week
  • presentation help them clarify their thoughts
• Four Segments of SEO in a team environment
  • Technical
  • Content
  • Links
  • Metric/Analysis
• Ideally you will have at least one person in each area.
  • Compartementalize! Focus.
• Recruiting SEO’s for your team
  • sell the role! you want good applicants.
  • do group interviews: Richard’s current practice:
    • bring eight candidates in
    • divide to four pairs
    • making the pairs each sell you the other one
    • hire the one who analyses and sells best
  • advertise in the right places
    • SEOmoz has a good jobs board
    • SEOgadget has a good jobs board
• Reporting to management
  • monthly reports
  • sell your services monthly with the reports
    • maintains engagement and executive support
    • keeps SEO team on their toes
• Controlling Staff
  • regular meetings
    • set questions at these meetings: if someone doesn’t have his/her figures send that person out of the meeting until they can bring them
  • team accountable for specific figures/traffic
  • set deadlines
  • set specific link acquisition targets, ie. 25 mR 4 links or 4 mR 5 links in a month (mR = mozRank)
• Toolset
  • Excel for analysis
  • Advanced Web Ranking for ranking reports (flexible, sophisticated)
  • Dafizilla Table2Clipboard for getting data out of web table and into Excel

“ROI from social media” – Lucy Langdon (Search Marketer, Distilled)

Lucy Langdon - ROI in Social Media: A bit more how to win at it next time please

• start by reading avinash’s post how to measure branding online: [this post is a bit much for a naked recommendation: I think what Lucy was trying to say is measure everything]
• social media can’t fix a broken site
  • improve your product first
• for longtail ranking you need authority links
• in social media: think BIG.
  • brainstorm properly (go to the pub)
  • use your whole team
  • steal ideas from your competitors
• Before you start a campaign, make sure you have
  • sign off
  • fixed budget
  • a strong conviction it will work [not sure about this one: social media is pretty hit and miss even for the experts: good golfers shoot lots of birdies but few holes in one]
• what posts have potential to take off:
  • data visualisation works:
  • resource lists work.
  • big images work.
  • big pictures from curent events.
  • lists work well.
• “Social media is a fickle mistress.”
• How to Track Success
  • leading indicators
    • visits
    • twitter mentions
    • visits from a specific network
    • bookmarks
    • other web mentions
• Getting It Done
  1. just write/draw//sing something
  2. now make it better
  3. get feedback
  4. make it better
  5. publishy
  6. promotion (have it all ready in advance!)
     • all outgoing emails are prepared in advance
  7. make it shareable in a practical way: buttons to click on
     • use social media buttons sparingly: just the ones which you are targeting or which will work
  8. have some free time to deal with anything that comes up on the day
  9. set your Google alerts, technorati mentions
  10. follow up bad links, bad mentions. Get negative publicity fixed within 24 hours.
  11. tracking: what did you get
      • use leading indicators to get additional support to promote further.
      • if it doesn’t work, then try to figure out what went wrong.

“Diagnosing and fixing penalties, understanding guidelines” – Jane Copland (Ayima Search Consultant, ex-SEOmozzer)

Jane Copland - Diagnosing and Fixing Penalties: Yes Virginia, there is a filter clause.

 

• Diagnosing and Fixing Penalties
  • Penalties are like unicorns. Rarer than you think.
  • What you are seeming most of the time are filters, not penalties.
    • Caveat: always keep in mind your site might just not be strong enough.
    • First thing to do is reanalyse your SERPs as if it was a new project.
  • Sample Penalty: overoptimisation of anchor text
    • Solution: Stop getting links which say “cheap car loans”.
    • Solution: use press releases (uses domain) to add some good links with alternative anchor text.
  • Duplicate content: rarely a penalty. But fix it so you don’t send pages to supplemental.
  • Vince update favour brands. Google got better at association.
• Avoiding penalties:
  • monitor the hell out of SERP activity: every day.
  • Watch out for any of the following.
    • bouncing SERPs
    • inability to rank higher than a certain number.
    • If you find alternate pages from your domain ranking instead: focus on alternate page instead of root page. Sometimes we’ve exhausted everything that we could to make home page rank.
• Penalty causes:
  • majority of real penalites are brought about because of undesirable linking practices.
    • TIP: removing terrible links can improve rankings!!!
  • gross on-page spam (hidden content, cloaking)
• Getting out of jail once you are in:
  • Start with: take. this. shit. seriously.
  • Humans are on the other end. Human review! Site reviewer is not excited about your problem, could care less. S/he has a long list of sites to review. Looking for a reason to deny your request.
  • Hiding content for good reason. display: none; remove all these easy fails before you file for reinclusion.
  • Human reviewer has got every tool available to google. How many phd’s do they have working at Google? Are you stupid enough to think you can outsmart them?
  • Get rid of the grey hat.
    • Sample: filthy little secrets – domain.com/links.html
    • Solution dump link exchange. At the very least remove all your dodgy links.
  • TIP: don’t use your SEO email account for link reinclusion request. Attracts unnecessary attention/scepticisim. Use client’s own domain. Play dumb: externally hired.
  • Be patient. Requests can take a month. Don’t resubmit over and over again, especially if your site still has hidden issues.
  • If you are denied, go and look and find out what is the problem. diversify something.

Scalable site architecture – Duncan Morris (Director at Distilled)

Duncan Morris - Scaleable Site Architecture

• Searchers are like animals: optimal foraging theory
  • suboptimal foraging behaviour results in starvation and therefore fewer offspring to follow
  • humans are basically lazy.
  • animals rely on scent. scent in the area. better going somewhere else.
  • Make sure you don’t ask for email to get the right answer. Searcher will go elsewhere [I disagree with this and so does a lot of marketing practice: you will lose some part of your audience by forcing an opt-in but with an email address you are well on the way to a sale, whereas a driveby without an opt-in is extremely hard to retain and convert.]
  • Maximise energy return: small thing or big thing. Make sure the searcher can get information quicker by continuing on that site than by moving to another site.
  • Keep a clear path to the information at all times.
• Tree taxonomy is ideal.
  • As you go deeper into the site you get more information: all cars are vehicles but not all vehicles are cars.
  • Only one copy of the major information piece.
  • Sample: Dewey decimal system. 10 classes, 10 divisions, 10 sections. 1000 sections. All books classified.
  • A book can only be in one place.
    • passing mention of Rand’s upcoming book, with covershot: The Art of SEO
• How many ways do you search for a location:
  • post code
  • landmarks
  • street names
  • tube/rail station
• Ways to identify your hierarchies.
  • user focus groups
  • keyword research gets you part of it
  • gut feel
  • intuition
  • copying from others (figure out how you can do better)
• Merge hierchies into all possible pages
• lots of possible pages
• look for nodes at the bottom of that trip
• never make a category where there is no information
  • faceted classification: chinese restaurants, soho restaurants
• folksonomy (tag clouds) must be built organically (limit it to existing information)
• relatively few nodes per category
  • pagination tends to be a bad thing
• balanced tree structure
• few levels
• pages as close to the homepage as possible
• VALIDATING SITE ARCHITECTURE
  • paper mockups checked by expert
  • breadcrumbs (do they make sense)
  • matches target keywords
• QUICK TIPS
  • lots of deep links
    • recently added
    • most popular
  • cross link between nodes
    • restaurants near here
    • people who like this also liked
  • breadcrumbs
    • gets anchor text in there
• COMMON ARCHITECTURE ISSUES
  • pages not getting indexed
    • no links in
    • too many similar pages
    • not enough link juice
  • duplicate content/keyword cannibalisation
  • lack of unique content on category pages
  • high bounce rate: poor user pages
  • category pages with no nodes: get rid of them
  • googlebot encountered an extremely high number of similar pages.
  • link building to category pages very difficult
• TOOLS TO HELP
  • meta no-index
  • sitemaps
  • canonical tag: shouldn’t need it. maybe for print pages. only used for absolute duplicates. not a rule just a hint.
  • parameter handling tool: shouldn’t be needing it. developers should have fixed it.
• In an ideal situation you don’t need to use all the crutches of no-index and canonical tags. Your site architecture should be planned right from the beginning.

Ranking Models – Ben Hendrickson (Programmer Linkscape, SEOmoz)

Ben Hendrickson - Ranking Models: Just the stats, on the rocks please.

• Placement of keyword: How does it affect rank?
  • average number of inbound links does not correspond to rank: followed links
    mean index by number of links better but still not flat: there are other things which matter
  • mozrank and external followed links have almost the same bell curve!
    • different than unique domains linking
  • keyword tag does not match rank
  • title tag matching does work but less than body or out anchors
  • putting keyword phrase in path and filename matches have a negative factor!
  • keyword in domain helps
  • h2 seem to be less useful than h1
  • problem with subdomains and paths is that a lot of sites are spammy which are doing it
• Different qualifications for different SERP position:
  • high quality links are important at the top
  • down on the second page, more links seems to help
  • alt text matching the keyword really seems to help, more than bold. sites which have alt tags have been heavily seo’d.

Live linkbuilding – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled) & Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Tom

Tom Critchlow and Rand Fishkin - Live Linkbuilding

• Example site: sixt.org
  • lowhanging fruit
    • get some links on wikitravel.org
      • none of the official wiki sites pass link juice, but wikitravel does
    • research.microsoft.com – links to avis but not six
    • enjoyengland.com – sixt is not on the page
    • edinburgh.org – sixt is not on the page
    • query on the board not shown long enough to write down: [instanbul car hire -intitle:hire
  • NICHE APPEAL STRATEGY
    • “ski car hire”
      • create niche content
  • Google local
• Example site: ARENAFLOWERS.com
  • low hanging fruit: top competitor interflora
    • visa europe
    • weddingdaze.co.uk
  • anyone linking to an expired page can link to you instead: coming from tesco.com/flowers
  • special asset: ethical supplier
    • fairflowerflairplants
  • not doing much with the weblog
  • badges – what flower are you
  • hidden meaning in types of flowers
  • data visualisaton, the colour of flowers over the year
  • flower photos, high res
  • animals that look like flowers
  • wedding directionrs: a gazillion of them

Rand

Tom Critchlow Rand Fishkin - Live Linkbuilding

• Example site: avg.com
  • #1 on google.com but #3 on google.co.uk
  • get onto news results with one of team weblogs
  • 43 million places to have a link: look for key term minus company name, i.e. “antivirus -avg” or “free software list -avg”
• Example site: brickhunter.com
  • use keyword match tool [exact!] to find the keyphrases you need
  • ehow only has five links to page: ranking on domain authority only
  • few anchor texts from high quality domain (dozen or two dozen links rather than lots of spammy index)
  • the more of a pain in the ass, the better the link
  • competitive link finder finds links in a hurry
  • do a diy weblog could help
• How to do live analysis?
  1. do a google search
  2. use Moz toolbar analyze page against number one and your own page: delta between yourself and competitor for backlinks and trust factors.
• Example site: portugese yellow pages: http://www.pai.pt
  • badges that they are listed in this directory (try this for sitereviewer.net)
  • contact your local government people to link to from lisbon tourist boards
  • use rebranding as an excuse to contact them again
    • mechanical turk (not for comment spam nor for link building): but use it to find web addresses or all the cities that you need – $40 for contact list which would take a week to build.
    • virtualpa or for mechanical turk you can use if you put in a US address
  • backlink tool: index is a month behind
  • don’t use robots.txt and meta no index (do one or the other), as you can end up knocking your site out of Google
  • when you build a site with search, take people straight to the category page: never show them the search page but take them to the category page
• Example site: Wealth management – http://www.aag.co.uk/
  • How to fix your site
    • which.co.uk good targets
    • build a manual list of financial news sites and submit to them
    • create javascript charts included in people’s pages (people will embed this kind of content)
  • outranked by aag.org (American geographers) for own name: lots of trusted links from the government
  • visualizing linkscape data
  • radar chart view of strength
  • long way to go before you eclipse collinstewartwealth.com
  • copying grey hat looks good but often ends in tears: competitor gets dropped and then so do you.
  • seo friendly pr links
    • in your pr, getting awards asking for links
  • press releases with photos with bill gates
  • brand for your name and your keyword: ie. “aag wealth management” rather than just company name.

Conversion rate optimisation – Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks (Directors, Conversion Rate Experts

Ben Jesson - Conversion Rate Experts: the squirrel passed out from heat exhaustion but Ben kept on ticking

• if you want to dominate your market, don’t start with the best seo start with best product.
• work hard, implement, be bold.
• google optimizer: great way to test. which part of the page to test.
  • 101 ways to use google optimiser: link bait going mental
    • loads of links, lots of inquiries
    • Tom Leung: Google itself contacted us: said no to Google
  • website optimizer consultant
• seomoz, seobook all clients: same process on all clients
• weight loss 67% increase
• at end of day optimisation is not about the tools: it’s about what to test.
• 50 tests on landing pages but never tested thank you pages.
• understanding why your visitors are not converting
• which changes can genuinely double your conversion rates?
• creating your experimental strategy
• objection: counter objection.
  • if they don’t trust your company, you have to build trust elements
  • if they don’t believe your product, then show advantages
  • if they don’t understand, improve comprehension
  • if you aren’t making enough offers, make more offers
• What your visitors want, and why they are abandoning.
  • tools: live chat – check livechat transcripts
  • tell a friend
  • google analytics: what page is abandoned
  • kampyle: tells you why visitors abandon website
  • perceptions: did you find what you are looking for
• seomoz customers
  • surveyed: paying members, non-paying members, cancelling members
  • learning from face-to-face selling
  • method marketing: we became the customer – get into the customer’s mindset. the best fishermen think like the fish, not like the other fishermen.
  • usability tests: used twitter to find testers
  • split tests: omniture test & target
  • tricks to get honest feedback: Not “How do you like my new website?” but “I’ve just paid a guy 20 grand to redesign my websites and I don’t like it much.”
• things to find out
  • what keeps customers awake at night
  • going through your website with salespeople
  • listening to customer calls
  • get reports on the FAQs
  • learn from face to face selling
• weight loss
  • method marketing
  • which companies had great long term rates
  • carl joined weight watchers: slimmer of the week, second of the week – able to write much better copy
  • doing bingo: played bingo. spent time with the players.
• What visitors want and what companies want
  • selling fishing boats: what the visitor wants looks at boats and maybe buy one
  • company just wants to sell one
  • but instead become trusted advisor: offer valuable free reports, offer useful selection tool, have a forum
  • give them a reason to give you their email address.
  • sell them a boat later but first become trusted advisor:
    • first give them a reason to give you their email address:
      1. free reports
      2. selection tool
      3. forum

Ben Jesson - Conversion Rate Experts

• Sales page length
  • sales pages need to be very long: even longer than face to face sale. you have to hit every objection as a single objection will blow the sale.
  • perception consumers don’t like long sales pages.
  • Amazon uses long pages and nobody even notices.
  • TIP: make your advert valuable as people will want to read on. don’t sell, add value.
• Personality
  • use video to make the sale, as rand is a very likeable type.
  • johnson box with table of contents
• Credibility
  • use references from big clients.
  • use media mentions: get credibility before starting to make the sale.
    secret weapon with brand names.
• Benefits: what do you get?
  • use tools on any website on demand
  • find out why your competitors are ranking above you and then beat them
  • learn what it takes to become an advanced seo (prestige)
  • Q & A feature on sales page
• Testimonials: essential elements
  • highlighted phrase
  • full text
  • picture
  • credentials
• You can never have too many testimonials, especially good ones.
• Call For Action:
  • reason for urgency: lock in price now.
  • improve your rankings now: call to action. surprising results with minimum amount of change, call to action.
• add a guarantee, include in call to action.
  • no minimum term – cancel any time.
• Potential upsell, variations of yes: Three options.
  • TIP: don’t add .00 unless you want the number to seem big
    • do add .00 to free report value.
    • numbers that end in nine outperform numbers that end in zero.
    • Results: 52% more customers.
• then driving more traffic at that page.
• $1 offer campaign
  • *only to existing subscribers
• How to write emails to convert:
  • write first draft in your own email client
  • write to a particular person
  • benefits
  • no waffle
  • avoid “used car salesmanship
• very personable not like a marketer
• write like a real person to a real person.
• gather objections: over 100 emails as to why they didn’t want the offer.
• post sale email campaign: 10 steps to competitive advantage: teach people to use the tools which they are trying.
• 10 times as many new clients: with trust with customer base you care about.
• doubled the number of paying subscriptions. Most people stayed. In part thanks to post-sale follow-up.
• More conversion tips at: 108 conversion tips, 14 free conversion tools

Dr Karl Blanks - Conversion Rate Experts

Some of the Q&A

SEO Expert Day One Q A

What do you look for in a junior seo?

• Richard: Attitude and aptitude: problem solving abilities, their own interests. Not experience on day one. Interactive ability with other people, outgoing communicative. They have online presence.
• Will: people who are good at searching. Know how to use google and the web. Either stats or creativity.

When you rank highly on organic side should you cut back PPC?

• Will: Not much interesting stuff written about PPC. Measuring and testing.
• Alec: Brand lift and conversion lift with both ppc and organics.
• Rand: Cannibalisation balances itself out.

How dangerous is it to have resource sections?

• Jane: Good sites link to good sites. Spammy sites, link to spammy sites.
  Only link to quality sites, it does reflect well on you.
• Ben: don’t link to bad stuff.

How should I use Facebook to build a social media campaign?

• Lucy: are you sure you want to run a facebook campaign? Develop your own stuff first. Pimp your facebook page. Blog already up and running on Facebook. Quizzes on facebook. Facebook app. TIP!: On some facebook pages you can get a live link!!!
• Jane: make sure ad only shows to target audience. women between 18–27, not men in new zealand.
• Will: Treat facebook like email.
• Denny: facebook ads are really cheap. dig down in demographics. test in facebook.
• Will: get to 100 fans, get custom url. trademark. You can only change URL once.
• Tom Critchlow: Work with trusted users in social media. Somebody with genuine friends and followers. Much more likely to do something about it. Get linkerati or facebookerati.

Ben Hendrickson - Jane Copland - Rand Fishkin

Project management tools for SEO?

• Rand: project management for seo: Raven SEO. SEO task management. Large networks.
• Jane Copland: built our own. built something yourselves.
• Will: check out buzzstream.
• Richard: don’t invest much in tools. Tab for link acquisition in Firefox utility.
• Tom Critchlow: regular project management, use any tool. seo projects wildly different from one another. Project management tools for seo set up in specific way. Not exactly your workflow. Don’t go too far down that root. Use common sense.
• Jane: All project management in Basecamp and Excel.

How big are your SEO teams?

• Jane: We are about four or five seos out of office of 15.
• Ben: We have five at seomoz. I use omnifocus.

How can you tell if a social media campaign will not work?

• Lucy: If there isn’t a community which already exists, it will make it a really hard work. tried to do a campaign for Flashpoint TV show. No online community so quizz wouldn’t work. Make sure there are people who are interested in what you are talking about.
• Jane: I wrote a post called 27 observations of a recent expat. Didn’t push it as social media. Four months later stumbleupon catches on. 2000 people per day. Less easy to manipulate than seo. Comes through after the fact.
• Danny: Can be frustrating. Last minute stuff works and huge intense projects don’t work.

End of Day One

That's the end of day one. I've been travelling and catching up today. Day two will have to wait for tomorrow.

SEO | 6 comments

Foliopress WYSIWYG glitch in Safari fixed

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

We are very happy to announce that one of the most burning issues with our own WYSIWYG editor called Foliopress WYSIWYG has been fixed. I'm talking about the bad size of editor window in Safari and some other Webkit based browsers, like Google Chrome.

 

This is the problem most of Safari users experienced with our editor

You can see that the actual editor window is not stretched to the whole desired size of the editing window. The workaround was to switch to the Source mode and then back to WYSIWYG. The editor window had the right size then.

The fix for this issue appeared just a couple of weeks ago in FCKeditor's trac bugtracking system here (FCKeditor is one of the biggest parts of Foliopress WYSIWYG).

You can download the new version (0.9.5) from the main Foliopress WYSIWYG page.

WordPress | No comments

Paying to pitch to VC’s or Angel Investors

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

One of our clients was recently lured into paying to pitch to a group of investors.

Their product is a good one. I can't say much, but it's in the financial servies industry. Instead of spending their time and money to get the product really into action, they decided to go the angel route.

Madness. The finished product langours instead of making them the money they should be paying. They asked me if they should pay to pitch. I said no, make your company pay each day.

It turns out that the venture capital shark pool is even worse than I expected. There are dozens of these organizations out there looking to suck the blood of the innocent or hapless entrepreneur. These bastards are out for as much US$25K of your money to pitch to disinterested middle-level brokers and junior bankers.

Jason Calcanis catalogues the various groups of which he's heard. Even better than his VC manifesto (a bit rabid) is his second post with insider information about the the actual organisations themselves.

The Keiretsu forum has already threatened to sue Jason Calcanis with a $2000 legal letter sent out to him. Here's how the Keretsu's fabled screening process works:

The goal, in any given month, was to have five entrepreneurs pitch, yet it was a rare month where we could dig up that many who were willing to pay Keiretsu's fees ($7,500 to pitch at all four regional locations). So, in reality, we were essentially accepting anyone who was willing to pay. Most months, we ended up letting in multiple entrepreneurs at discounted rates, just to keep the investors happy. Keiretsu has a screening process, but at least in the region where I was employed, it was a formality. Once again, anyone who was willing to pay the full price made it through essentially by default. My memory's far from perfect, so take that for what it's worth, but I don't remember a paying applicant ever being turned down.

Oldest trick in the book. I hear it from the internet marketing gurus all the time, as a great sales strategy. "We screen all applicants and only the most qualified will be allowed into the program." Primary qualification being a fool and his money.

I usually disagree with Jason Fried - most particularly on attitude toward customers - but on funding yourself, he's right on the money. 37signals got to where they are through hard work and innovation. They paid for their own development via their very good usability redesigns. Trust me, when you are paying your own bills you don't waste time when it comes to application development.

Mark Cuban puts a sharp point on seeking funding:

Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.

Foliovision has also done everything on our own resources. It keeps you focused.

We are now at the point where we can develop full applications on our own nickel. We have products and services which keep the wheels turning while some part of the team focus on application development.

I usually disagree with Patricio Robles over at Econsultancy but here is one time we agree: raising money is a huge resource burner.

At some point, trying to raise money is likely to take up most of your time and effort. That means that you'll be spending less time building your business, which is what you ought to be doing. In other words, pitching investors can easily become a harmful distraction.

Save your strength to get profitable. Wayne McVicker's medical supplies company Neoforma went the VC route and a billion dollar IPO. End result: he owned nothing of the company and almost killed himself and his marriage working five years flat out. The VC's made money and he got to write a book: Starting Something: An Entrepreneur's Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture.

It's a great book, but that's a hell of a way to lose five years of your life. The sad thing is Neoforma was profitable a couple of times on its way to expanding itself out of business.

But even McVicker didn't have to pay the sharks up front.

The sad truth is that if the banks or your friends won't give you any money and you can't make the business pay on its own, you're probably better off not doing it. Businesses are built one brick at a time. For every YouTube success, there are thousands of failures. Among other issues, is management experience. If you haven't managed a five person company, how can you expect to be able to manage a twenty person company. And if how do you expect to be able to manage a twenty person company how can you manage a 200 person company.

People who have already built successful companies can and often do get VC funding to accelerate the process on round two. The VC's are eager to meet them and will fly at their own expense to sink their fangs into another success story. If you already know what you are doing and VC are eager to meet you, then you might be ready to go into shark-infested waters.

Paying to meet VC's is stupid. Just don't do it

---

Amazon is the one notable counter-indicator. Amazon lost money for nearly a decade before turning a profit. That would be a lot of venture capital. But Amazon were on venture capital for only the first three years and were a public company from 1997 on.

Business | No comments

Code is poetry: Researching HTML Code and Pre Tags at the W3

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

We are working on some major upgrades to our Foliopress WYSIWYG this month. Our wonderful client Richard Nikoley kicks the pants out of his Macbook Pro and he does the same thing to Foliopress WYSIWYG. He's given us a laundry list of small issues to fix, most of which have to do with minor misbehaviour in the Safari browser.

Given that Safari is webkit and Google Chrome is based on Safari, getting webkit browsers right is a priority for us.

We've fixed the text issues (no need to click the source button and back for proper display) but still have to do our SEO Images upgrade to take us from KFM 1.2.1 to 1.4.3 which will give us full Safari support for image upload and insertion.

While we were at it, Martin and I had a discussion about whether to be using code or pre tags for code extracts.

I advocated both, wrapping slapping an unescaped code tag inside the pre tags. It turns out that wreaks havoc in Foliopress WYSIWYG, stripping the line breaks. So our recommendation for Foliopress WYSIWYG users is just use escaped code inside pre tags.

While I was tracking this down though, I decided to chase down the W3 recommendations for the use of code and pre in the HTML 4.01 specification.

Imagine my surprise to find out that poetry their code example:

The following example shows a preformatted verse from Shelly's poem To a Skylark:

<PRE>
       Higher still and higher
         From the earth thou springest
       Like a cloud of fire;
         The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
</PRE>

Here is how this is typically rendered:

Higher still and higher
         From the earth thou springest
       Like a cloud of fire;
         The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest

I hadn't read Shelley for years, since I wrote a couple of long papers on wife Mary's Frankenstein. It was a joy to find something so exquisite and uplifting in an otherwise long and dry technical document.

Unknown anonymous specification writer, thank you for bringing this fragment of poetry into this coder's day.

Code is poetry and as the deconstructionists would say poetry is code.

But what does the W3 specification reveal about the code and pre mystery?

It turns out that code is a phrase element and pre is a visual presentation element.

In the end, code is a bit of redundant information unless you are searching a document for code fragments (which honestly could be just as easily done and more certainly with some nice rules looking for certain patterns). Your search could just as easily use pre to bring up most of the fragments for which you are looking.

Visually both code and pre by default render in a fixed-width font, with code tending to get a typewriter style typeface like courrier and pre tending to get a sansserif fixed width font like Monaco. I think I prefer seeing my code in courrier but there is nothing preventing me from adding a typeface for pre to my stylesheet.

For the sake of simplicity, our recommendation is to just use pre for your larger code blocks. We won't be doing further debugging of the double nested pre and code tags as just getting pre not to add unnecessary angled brackets was a formidable task. One of the downsides of WYSIWYG editors is limited capability in handling code samples in text.

Unlike basic written text, in code formatting even a single changed space can render the code useless or even destructive.

When writing a major article about programming, we'd recommend turning WYSIWYG off completely which is also a per post option with Foliopress WYSIWYG. There's nothing more depressing than seeing a carefully built article filled with elaborate code examples crumple and scatter into visual dust. Code samples are tough to rebuild.

For basic use on html or CSS code samples though, pre alone with escaped brackets will take you or us as far as we need to go.

Is there a use for the code tag then?

We do recommend using the code tag for single code elements as in this article.

IT, WordPress | No comments

Why Wordpress won’t validate

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

We recently checked our site in W3C Markup Validation Service and find out that some of our inline javascript in the posts is not properly enclosed in CDATA tags. Read about the details of the issue, reason for it and a bit of hope in future Wordpress releases.

Everything inside a CDATA section is ignored by the XML parser and all the inline javascript should be in it. This is how you do it:
 

<script>
<![CDATA[ function anything(a,b)
{ }
]]>
</script>

So we fixed all of our plugins which are putting any javascript into the posts and there was another error coming out of the Validation Service saying that the CDATA section is not properly closed.

The generated source code of the page was looking like this:
 

<script>
<![CDATA[
function anything(a,b)
{ }
]]&gt;
</script>

The greater than symbol in CDATA closing tag was replaced by the HTML entity.

We disable both wpautop (this is a function which is automatically inserting paragraphs and newlines into the post - that's why we hate the default Wordpress editor which can't live without it and use Foliopress WYSIWYG instead) and wptexturize (another nice Wordpress function, which used to mess up all of our HTML comments) all the time, so we were very unhappy that there is some other plugin destroying our posts.

After a while I discovered that it's the Wordpress core who is doing this. Let's take a peek at the structure of the responsible Wordpress template tag code:
 

function the_content() {
    1. Get the post content;
    2. Apply all the filters on it;
    3. Replace ]]> with ]]>
    4. Display it;
}

So there's an extra line of code just to mess the CDATA tags. No php comments around it to explain why it's there. Nothing in the Wordpress Codex about it, no sensible answers in support forums.

I had to search the Wordpress bug tracking system for an hour to find more about the problem: That single line of code is there for RSS. CDATA closing tag would just break the feeds. That's is.

Seems like the Wordpress guys are aware of this as the issue is planed to be solved for Wordpress 2.9 - https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3670. That means the tag will be converted only in the feeds. Until then our pages are not 100% valid.

However the ticket is 5 years old now with last change 5 weeks ago. I can't believe Wordpress community is fighting this nearly from the beginnings of Wordpress.

• Read more about CDATA on w3schools or Wikipedia.
• Read about problems people have with this Wordpress issue.
• Take a look at the fix.

WordPress | No comments

What’s wrong with Wordpress All-in-One-SEO Plugin

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

It's no secret we are seriously into Wordpress SEO. After the otherwise brilliant John Godley's Headspace killed a few too many websites on us, we decided not to use any extra Wordpress SEO plugin but just use appropriate core Wordpress functions for our SEO.

What we did was use the excerpt field for descriptions and tags for keywords.

KISS Wordpress SEO: now retired since version 2.7

Our KISS Wordpress SEO was great until Wordpress 2.7 when suddenly the excerpt field no longer existed in the page editing interface. Thanks Automattic! Our perfect workaround was now a pain in the butt.

We gave the UrbanGiraffe Headspace 2 another look, but alas it was still taking our sites down. I know Headspace 2 can work but it just didn't seem to like our core plugin install.

So we moved to the old school SemperFi's All-in-One-SEO plugin. All-in-One-SEO plugin has been around forever. It's always seemed a bit ugly and a bit clunky. But give SemperFi credit: they've been banging away on it forever and All-in-One-SEO is pretty much bugfree at this point.

What we really dislike about All-in-One-SEO is the keywords field. First, as any longtime SEO will tell you, keywords are just not that important. And as any longtime Wordpress master knows, the built-in tags pretty much have keywords covered. You just needed to add a couple of lines of code to your template and their they were.

So we don't need another interface to access keywords. We do need long titles (we used to use Joost's SEO titles plugin) and we do need descriptions. But we don't need a keyword interface.

And adding a keyword interface just confuses our clients when what we want is for them to add tags.

There is no way to turn off keywords in All-in-One-SEO and there isn't even a class on the row so there was no easy way to remove it.

We're also not crazy about automatically generated metadescription tags. We think metadescriptions should be written only by hand, as they are used to sell your post. Automatically generated metadescriptions are not really any better than letting Google and Yahoo generate them for you. For mass metadescription editing (you can see what posts and pages are missing metadescriptions and add the missing ones quickly) we use our own FV Descriptions plugin.

We thought about forking All-in-One-SEO, but due to automatic update and accidentally having our version overwritten, we didn't want to that either.

Anyway our next step was to try to contact SemperFi via their contact form and ask them to put a checkbox in their admin interface to turn off the keywords feature. I told Martin I'd give them $50 to add this feature.

Hello,

can you please put an option into new version of your great plugin which would remove the keywords field from the AI1S editing box? We believe using tags is better and the tags are used in keywords meta field anyway. The keywords field is just confusing people.

Another nice thing would be the option to disable automatic meta description generation from the Wordpress excerpt. The post either has a AI1S description entered and there is a meta description for the post or the meta description field should remain empty.

We are sending you $50 if you do these changes now. We are constantly modifying your plugin in order to make these changes (when installing, after updates), so we know it's not hard to do, we just want to make sure our changes aren't removed when updating.

Thanks, M.

We got this email back:

Please refer to http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/ for plugin support.  We will now only address plugin issues on our new forums so that everyone can benefit.  You may sign up for an account and post any issues you have about WordPress, plugins, themes, etc. 

If you need personal service, we can provide professional consultancy on a per hour fee basis at our standard hourly rate.

We tried calling them too. SemperFi doesn't pick up the phone either. Unfortunately, you can't contact these jokers anymore, except via the forums. Which we did.

In their forums, SemperFi were kind enough to offer at some point to add ID's to the fields of All-in-One-SEO. But what we want is a simple checkbox to remove the keywords section altogether from the post/page interface.

What we've done here is exactly that, plus we've killed the automatic updates from SemperFi. If you use our FV All-in-One-SEO plugin, you won't accidentally overwrite your copy.

If like us you have clients using Wordpress, enjoy simple SEO with FV All-in-One-SEO. No auto-generated metadescription, no inteference with tags. If SemperFi ever get their act together to add the checkbox to the admin interface to disable keywords and an option to turn off automatic metadescription creation, we will merge back our FV version into the original All-in-One-SEO.

---

PS. If you are into Wordpress SEO and like your metadescriptions you should might like our FV Descriptions plugin which is a mass description field editor compatible with excerpts, Thesis, both older and newer versions of All-in-One-SEO.

Download the plugins here:

FV All in One SEO Pack - an advanced plugin for your daily SEO optimization of your Wordpress site

FV Descriptions - a handy description editor good for use with FV All in One SEO Pack

SEO, WordPress | 5 comments

Wordpress Forms for Relenta CRM

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Relenta is a great CRM-lite which beats any mailing software I know for ease of use and speed. Highly recommended.

As you may be aware, we run almost entirely Wordpress sites, although many are almost custom apps with additional functionality for real estate, insurance or political discussion. We needed a way to wed our Wordpress sites to Relenta. Relenta does not have contact forms of its own but instead an email API for adding new contacts.

Fortunately John Godley's Filled In for Wordpress handles forms admirably and has a mailing function built-in. Filled In to handle the forms and Relenta to handle the lists is the best of both worlds.

But like anything technical, there are a few issues to look out for. Without further ado, here is our detailed guide to using Relenta with Wordpress.

In order, these are the steps to create a form in Wordpress with help of Filled In and send the information to Relenta CRM for parsing.

1. Build an HTML form compatible with Filled In and stick it into a page or post. This means that the form has to have an unique id and action should be empty string. Example:

   <form id="relenta-contact" action="" method="post">
   <input type="text" name="email" value="" />
   <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
   </form>

2. Go to the Wordpress management, into Filled In page. Create new form and as name use the id "relenta-contact".

3. Before editing options for this form, go to "Email Templates" tab. Here create a new template (name it however you want). Click on the template name to edit it. Write some subject and click on the "plain text" hyperlink located right after "HTML content:". Now there is an "Text content" area where you need to stick the e-mail template Relenta uses to create new contact. Example:

   ### BEGIN CREATE CONTACT ###
   API_KEY: ********************************
   EMAIL: $email$
   FULL_NAME: $fname$
   JOB_TITLE:
   COMPANY:
   CONTACT_COMMENTS:
   PHONE(LABEL):
   WEBSITE(LABEL):
   MESSENGER(LABEL):
   FAX(LABEL):
   ADDRESS(LABEL):#START#
   #END#
   TEXT(LABEL):#START#
   #END#
   BLOCK NAME|PHONE(LABEL):
   GROUPS: ********
   OPTIONS: overwrite
   MATCH_BY:
   REMOVE_THIS_BLOCK: not
   ### END CREATE CONTACT ###

   Here's how you find the API and Group IDs:
   The API_KEY can be found under My account > API tab.
   The Group IDs can be found in Contacts > Categories and groups > Edit category > Show group IDs.

4. Now go to form options (click on the form name you created in step 2). Here set 2 "Filters" (is Required for fname and email for email), 1 "Post Processors" (Send as email for Relenta) and 1"Result Processor" (Display a 'thank-you' message).
5. Setup "is Required" (by clicking on it) "Field" to 'fname' and write something nice to "Error message". Setup "email" "Field" to 'email' and again write something to "Error Message".
6. Now setup "Send as email" "To" to your relenta e-mail (yourname@relenta.net) and "Template" to the name of the e-mail template you created in step 3.
7. Setting up "Display a 'thank-you' message" shouldn't be a problem anymore.
8. You can of-course setup any other things you want (if you know what you are doing), but this basic form will work for you. There are a few more details on the Relenta email API itself in the Relenta manual. There are more details about setting up Filled In on the UrbanGiraffe plugin page.

Very Important Relenta/Filled In Compatibility Note

The last thing is that Filled In uses Swift PHP libraries for sending which do not work properly with Relenta's email API (Swift PHP inserts some bad characters in the line breaks). Here is Filled In which uses PHPMailer which works with Relenta just well. SMTP and attachments are not fully tested on this version so be sure to test thoroughly before use.

In general, any form the page of which you touch or edit in any way should always be retested after saving. Forms are one of the most fragile and yet essential parts of the a website and should be managed with great care.

Enjoy Wordpress and Relenta together now, a capuccino for your website.

WordPress | 2 comments

37Signals, Basecamp URL change and not giving a damn about your customers

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Basecamp URL change to basecamphq

Today 37signals dropped our domain http://webwork.clientsection.com. Instead they have replaced it with http://webwork.basecamphq.com.

There is a thread on their forums covering the issue. As one customer writes:

BasecampHQ is a stupid domain for one. What is its relevance to my clients? I am paying for a professional service – not for branding that sounds like a paint ball website.

I totally agree. Apparently this change is coming with additional footer branding and additional branding in the emails.

This is a case of breaking the contract with the original customer: us. We are the ones who bought into their white label extranet solution with attractive anonymous core domains like:

• grouphub.com
• clientsection.com
• projectpath.com
• seework.com
• updatelog.com

We pay a handsome yearly fee for the use of the software and the domain. Until recently, it's been $600/year. Now, it's $1200/year. For that fee, we expected 37signals to honour their part of the deal which was to allow us to continue to use the software and environment which we helped them get off the ground.

We actually upgraded our Basecamp account recently and consolidated our operations on the system. I was happy to do it, but now have deep regrets.

37signals at this point has gone Microsoft. They are not working for us anymore. I'm not sure they are working for them. They are working for the corporation and have become that corporation.

What is particularly disheartening is the supercilious tone and dissembling of Jason Fried has not abated. His excuse for sandbagging us on our domain name: 

In fact, it reminds us a lot of our transition away from IE 6 a few years ago. That transition was also met with similar dissatisfaction by some of our customers.

Fried was immediately called on his absurd analogy by Andrew Myers:

There is no reason for this move from any perspective other than that of marketing for your products. What will this bring to us the customer (Who are paying your bills) that we simply can not live without?

I also do not like the fact that branding for Basecamp is now on all pages and in emails generated by the software. Why? 37signals, you’re dropping the ball on this one. How about spending more development time improving Basecamp, your core product, instead of wasting so much time on stuff that doesn’t really matter to your customers.

and Dougal:

it’s filled with pretzel logic. By the third sentence you’re talking about IE6 as a comparison – with the only correlation being that people didn’t like that either? And third, you never address the crux of the matter – that you sold it for years as white label and now you are branding it and linking from our extranet pages to your selling pages.

I also suggest you take a look at your About page and see if you still Believe in those things… especially the one about your customers being your investors.

Dougal hit the nail on the head.

We aren't that important anymore, the core customers. 37signals want to be the Microsoft of project management and online collaboration. They don't need or want us any more.

ep agrees and highlights another issue well known to alert 37signals customers. You can't get your data out:

You can not leave with your data period. 37s is abusing this situation which has lasted for years now. When you have been using Basecamp for years, you depend on it, your customers depend on it and you’re tied because you can not leave with your data, just a stupid xml file or a ridiculous set of html files.

37signals used to be a small company like lots of us are (or not?). When you are a small company your customers are human beings; when you have passed a certain point of growth (and greed), the same customers become numbers.

I’m afraid we have become numbers.

The only way out is via the API which is a bit shaky. Somebody should write a migration tool. In fact someone already has done so. The problem is that it doesn't work (I tried it).

We are currently working on a serious enhancement to Basecamp, which we are beta-testing internally. Now that we have over 50 live projects, Basecamp is creaking at the seams and so we've decided to enhance it.

Once this enhancement is out the door, we will be working on a self-hosted open source version of Basecamp. Our code base will be Wordpress (check out our Foliopress WYSIWYG and Thoughtful Comments to see what we are up to on the Wordpress). We've built insurance apps, real estate apps, SEO apps, all on the Wordpress codebase, so we know this can be done.

The first extra tool will be an import tool from Basecamp. The API work for our Basecamp based tool will come in very handy.

Anyone who is interested in updates on our enhancement to Basecamp and in being able to host a Basecamp-like solution on their own domain and on their own server should sign up below. People form this list will be first in line to beta-test.

Name:

E-mail:

If I have any strong thoughts about Basecamp alternatives in the meantime, I will share them with this list as well.

Once we get the very first iteration done, we will be seeking collaborators. If you'd like to participate in development and have great Wordpress, PHP or server-admin skills, we want to hear from you. Please sign up here:

Name:

E-mail:

What this won't be is a slow product like ActiveCollab (server crippling loads) with a lot of features. We build fast and lean. The first iterations will actually have less features than Basecamp but the ones which we really need. We believe in the GPL and we believe in free software and won't pull a license change either. Don't believe us?

Our codebase is Wordpress: we couldn't leave the GPL even if we wanted to.

WordPress | 12 comments

Review: SEOmoz Video Training Series DVD

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

If you are already an SEO insider, you sure know SEOmoz. And if your steps are heading into the SEO world just right now, you will hear about SEOmoz many times more. These guys are among the leaders in the world of search engine optimization. Within the last decade they have created hundreds of articles, tools, guides, studies and held many conferences and seminars.

Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

Rand Fishkin: Thinking like a search engineer

One of these seminars became the core of The SEOmoz Video Training Series. Since this DVD is quite expensive for a blind purchase, we have written short review for you. What can you expect for your investment of several hundred dollars?

Since the subtitle is SEO Basics (there is also Advanced version offered), it’s supposed you are a rookie. Maybe web designer, who finally recognized the importance of SE optimization, small online business owner, who doesn’t want to spent fortune on professionals; or CEO of a large company, who doesn’t understand why site promotion department asks for funds whoever you are, this training will lead you step by step into the world of SEO.

DVD box contains two discs, with playtime slightly over 5h 40min (official website mysteriously claims 7h...) and is divided into 8 segments (3+5). Every segment contains short introduction and then the record from seminar. The speaker is the "Wizard of Moz" personally - Rand Fishkin, one of the SEO pioneers and most recognizable experts.

Let’s introduce the segments shortly:

1. Introduction to SEO marketing
   Since you are thinking of buying this DVD, you probably understand the importance of good SE rankings. Rand is going to back your understanding with a bunch of well describing statistics. Do you know where the eye lens of tested subjects were aiming, when reviewing Google search results? Yes, you guess right, it wasn’t the 23rd position!
2. Search Engine algorithms
   No real professional will claim to have cracked Google’s (or any other search engine's) algorithm. But at least he or she can reverse engineer part of it. After a historical excursion to the old times, when sites simply packed with hundreds of keywords dominated rankings, a current top 10 list of important factors (based on opinions of the best experts) is presented. Meta tags, trust ranking, relation, popularity, keywords and many other factors are analyzed, some myths are unveiled. By the end even the audience starts to take part. I suppose this 83" long chapter is going to be the most exciting part for most of you.
   

   

   Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

   
   Learn by watching the Google Query log

3. SE friendly design
   SE spiders are not humans: you have to take that into consideration at all times when designing your site. That’s the main message of the third segment. Keyword incorporation, information architecture, spiders’ access restrictions, robot.txt and the always "hot" duplicate content topic are discussed. #3 is the most technical segment.
4. Keyword research and targeting
   Any discussion of keywords inevitably involves many myths from the days when their discovery was a revelation. Now any SEO worth his salt can discover all the core keywords for a domain in a few hours and in order of importance. Keywords remain one of the core factors in SEO. What are your keywords and how to target them; seasonality; keywords in title, tags, meta tags, keyword density...
5. Content creation strategies
   Here we go! White hat SEO is about having the right content on the right place in the right time. No seminar or DVD can teach you how to write the right content, but at least there can be some rules set. You should remember the basic rule - you can’t take into consideration your customers only. Your content has to be loved by linkerati too!
6. Social media marketing
   Web 2.0 develops faster than you would even dare to think. But this is the living heart of SEO. You can have a really great content, but what’s the point if nobody sees it? Social media are close to traditional offline marketing. The more innovative you can be the better. As an example is used the AVVO project (a law website), which attracted the attention of the WEB 2.0 audience simply by being sued deliberately!
   

   

   Would you like to replay the video or share the link to it with your friends?

   
   Social Media is a whole new exciting game
   for Rand Fishkin

7. Blogging & the blogosphere
   Perhaps even your grandmother has a weblog by now (and if not she reads some for sure), so naturally your business needs one too. How to optimize your blog, how to find niche topics, how to market it. The extremely popular SEOmoz blog can serve as inspiration. After the second segment of the DVD on search engine algorithms this is the best part of the DVD.
8. Analytics and metrics
   "What can be measured can be improved too." There are much more options than Google Analytics. Different types of tracking, how to use it and how to understand the results. Trying new strategies doesn’t have big value for you, unless you are able to track the outcome.

Finally, after the last segment there was broad discussion for half hour related with various topics (unfortunately sometimes too specific).

The overall technical quality of discs was standard, with good picture; sound was great, while Rand was speaking. However, the questions from audience were often hardly recognizable.

But my biggest complaint is related with the slideshow projection. There were tons of great charts, graphs and illustrations but for an extremely short time! Of course, you can pause the DVD and stare at the pictures for hours, but what’s the point, when you can’t watch while the speaker is explaining them. Some SEO ladies may be happy with Rand’s presence on the screen (but beware, he is married!), the rest of viewers would be happier with more and longer slides instead of constantly watching the lecturer.

The background music in menu is run of the mill muzak (you know that repetitive "so irritating, that it’s almost obsessive" kind of music).

This DVD will present you the world of SEO in highly professional manner, well structured from alpha to omega, but don’t expect too much! You need a good content and you need a good promotion of that content, then your site will rank well. If you understand this basic truth, maybe you can invest your time into exploring more specific fields. These discs will show you the basic rules and reliable information (that’s very important in the world of SEO full of myths and legends), but YOU have to do the work!

If you don’t know how to start SEO on your site, then check out the SEOmoz SEO Basics DVD. If you do know, stop watching and start working.

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