Conferences are always a great way to get out and meet the SEOmoz community. Luckily we have SMX West coming up next week and quite a few Mozzers will be attending, speaking, live blogging and tweeting. We want to get a chance to meet as many of you as possible so I forced everyone to decide on a schedule so you’ll know where to find us!

Before I get into talking about where we’ll be, it’s probably best to first introduce the Mozzers so you know who to look for.

Keri Morgret - @KeriMorgret

You all learned a bit about Keri a few weeks ago when we spilled the beans about the Community Team. In addition to all her great community work, she's also a freelance marketer and helps clients with both SEO and PPC. You will find her speaking on Wednesday at 3:30 pm on the Beyond the Google Adwords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics panel. She'll be talking about negative keywords and some ingenius ways to make sure you're not spending money on unnecessary keyword targeting. 

You'll also find her live blogging for http://www.seroundtable.com/. Catch her live blogging schedule below.

Michael King - @iPullRank

As an Associate for SEOmoz, Mike focuses on answering questions in Q&A and writing for the blog (you may have seen his epic post yesterday). He's also done a Whiteboard Friday (or two) and is a great contributor to the SEOmoz Community.

You'll find him all over SMX West this year! He'll be speaking on two panels: What Search Data Reveals About Customer Needs & Desires – And How To Use It,  and he'll be on the Link Building Clinic. Two panels you'll surely not want to miss!

One thing you may already know abut Mike is that he loves to get to know people, so if you see him walking by, say hi! I promise, he doesn't bite.

Everett Sizemore - @balibones

Another grand Associate, Everett helps out by answering Q&A and now and then I twist his arm to write for the blog. He’ll be speaking on the panel Driving Ecommerce & Retail Sales Through Search, Thursday at 1pm. If you saw his post about building deep links into e-commerce sites, then you know a bit how his mind works.

If you're working on an e-commerce or even just a really large site, I'd highly recommend not just going to this panel but also seeking Everett out in person. He's a ridiculous wealth of knowledge and we shouldn't let him keep all that inside. :)

Charlene Inoncillo - @charcillo

As our Marketing Admin, Charlene pretty much knows everything going on at all times on the marketing team. She’s new to the industry, so reach out and say hello! (ok, not literally).

She'll be attending all of the SMX Bootcamp sessions on the first day and in general learning all about search marketing. Be sure to stop her to say hello and show her how amazing this industry is!

Justin Vanning - @JustinVanning

Justin does Paid Search Marketing for Moz so you’ll probably see him spending much of his time in the PPC & Retargeting sessions. He'll be looking for ways to help out the SEOmoz Marketing team in addition to meeting our community.

Want to know more about our retargeting efforts, or how we do Facebook advertising? Justin's your man. Give him a holler and ask him about his Twitter strategy. ;)

Jen Sable Lopez - @jennita

*waves hello* If you haven't met me yet, I'm the Community Manager here at SEOmoz. I’ll be live-tweeting the heck out of SMX so be sure to watch out for my tweets from @jennita.

I'm hitting up a lot of the SEO and social media panels. I love to sit in the front row and make faces at the speakers, so beware! If you're not able to make to SMX follow my tweet stream and I'll attempt to keep you up-to-date.

If you're at the conference, please say hello! I love meeting our community members and really try to make it my goal to meet as many of you as possible.

Now that you know who you should be looking for, let’s see where all you can find us! Remember some of us are speaking, others are live blogging (or tweeting) and some of us are just attending. Also, we reserve the right to change our minds and attend different sessions as necessary. :D

Monday, February 27 – 6:00pm to 7:30pm

SMX Meet & Greet

Most of us will be attending the networking event on Monday night, so find us and say hello! We’re also planning on going for drinks after so let us know if you’d like to join us. :)

Tuesday, February 28

9:00am-10:15am
SMX Boot Camp: Keyword Research & Copywriting For Search Success - Charlene
Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections – Jen (live tweet) + Keri (live blog)
Maximizing Paid Search Campaigns With Google’s AdWords Extensions - Justin

10:45am-12pm
SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals - Charlene
Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography - Jen (live tweet)

1:30pm-2:45pm
SMX Boot Camp: Paid Search Fundamentals - Charlene
Solving Problems & Seeing Success In Google Places – Jen (live tweet)
Power Tools For The Paid Search Pro - Justin

3:30pm-4:45pm
SMX Boot Camp: Search Engine Friendly Web Design - Charlene
Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Surviving SEO Changes – Jen (live tweet) + Keri (live blog)
Retargeting & Remarketing: The New Behavioral Ads - Justin

Wednesday, February 29

10:45am-12pm
SEO For Google+ & Google Search – Charlene + Jen (live tweet)
Search Ads: Taking Your Ads From Good To Great! – Justin
Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems – Mike (Q&A Moderating)

1:30pm-2:45pm
Building Buzz On Twitter: Getting Followed & Retweeted – Charlene + Jen (live tweet)
Best Practices For Paid Search Testing – Case Study Panel – Justin
Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging Best Practices – Keri (live blog)

3:30pm-4:45pm
Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked & Shared – Charlene + Jen (live tweet)
Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics – Justin, Keri (speaking)

5:00pm-6:15pm
Creative Facebook Ad Tactics - all of us will be there!

9pm-11pm: SMX After Dark @ Motif

Thursday, March 1

9am-10:15am
The "New" Killer Content - Charlene
Justifying The Investment: Analytics For Social Media  - Jen (live tweet)
Maximizing Enterprise PPC ROI - Justin

10:45am-12pm
Enterprise SEO – Challenges & Solutions - Charlene
What Search Data Reveals About Customer Needs & Desires – And How To Use It – Jen (live tweet) + Justin + Keri (live blog) + Mike (speaking)

1pm-2:15pm
Driving Ecommerce & Retail Sales Through Search – Everett (speaking)
Link Building Clinic – Mike (speaking)

Say Hello!

I'm serious here. If I find out that you were at SMX and didn't say hello, I'm going to be sad. Just think if you find us, you may even get a lovely picture with some of us... like this:

See you at SMX!

PS. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, use the code smx10seomoz to get a discount when you register for SMX.

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I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the social graph eventually subsuming the "natural" results with those biased to what our friends and connections share/+1. Fine. I get it. Link buying isn't going away, no matter how much we wish it would.

Even if link buying is working in the short-term and webspam's being less aggressive, I still think it's a waste of money for three reasons:

1. Rankings are tactical: Earning your way to the top rankings is awesome, because it brings with it the branding, familiarity, trust, social sharing and dozens of other positive marketing signals that "earned" links carry. Spam and paid links just give you some more traffic (and not even as much as a trusted brand could earn in the same position). Conversion rates are lower than your peers, and the secondary traffic benefits from other sources, word-of-mouth, etc. never come into play.
2. It's Overpriced: My wife's travel site gets offers for several hundred dollars to put in a few links on a single post, and that's not even an efficient market like those created by professional link sellers and link platforms. Playing the link buying game in the big leagues takes thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each month 
3. There's Always Risk: You're already familiar with the horrific pain of Google's Kafka-esque penalties, but maybe you're banking on not getting hit, given their relative ineffectiveness over the past couple years. Problem is, Google+ has created two new kinds of risk for link spammers. The first is that social search results, which have virtually no ties to the link graph, will overwhelm "natural" results and make those purchased links largely useless. The second is that Google+ gains enough momentum and data to leverage for webspam analysis. If you've been pointing lots of links at sites and pages that earn no social traction, get ready to feel some pain. Maybe you're risk-tolerant enough to scoff off both of these, but I don't think Google+ is going anywhere, and I give them even-odds to have a social content/sharing graph big enough to pull off both within 24 months.

"Blah, blah, blah, I've heard your white hat evangelism before, Rand" Yeah, you have. Fair enough. So how about instead of just warning about what not to do, I give you somewhere to spend all those earmarked-for-spam dollars.

Here's some rough calculations on link purchasing in a moderately competitive vertical:

• Ranking goal: single keyword phrase plus some slight modified phrases
• Required: minimum of 50 unique root domains
  • 35 will be one-time payments, but are relatively low quality, $100 is the average price (like I said, low quality)
  • 15 will require ongoing payments to maintain the link, $100/month (on average) will probably do it
• Total cost over 12 months: ($100*35)+($100*12*15) = $21,500

So, for $21,500, you can probably buy your way into the top 3 rankings for a moderately competitive phrase in a vertical like niche travel, low-volume e-commerce products, etc. Many black hats I know would argue they can get it cheaper, and they can, but that's usually because they own networks and properties or have relationships for which they wouldn't pay directly. A marketing guy working in-house at a brand has none of the connections, no networks of spamfarms, nothing except dollars and a business model that can turn $21.5K in spammy links into $100K in CLTV at 50% margins for a net of $28.5K.

Now let's try an alternative: Buying a blog.

Say you're LastWear Clothing (a site one of my favorite Moz engineers, Marty, particularly likes). They could buy some links to key pages (in spite of all the many good reasons not to) and try to get rankings for queries like men's hakama or womens underbust corset. There's a small amount of existing search query demand, and they're one of the only sources on the web selling those precise garments, so there's a good chance that would turn into sales.

But, let's try another thought experiment. I'll head over to Google Reader and run a search for "steampunk" (the aesthetic of LastWear's clothing):

The second site that pops up has a blog with 6,647 subscribers... And it's talking about the fashion of steampunk! I think we're on to something.

The Steampunk Workshop blog has thousands of subscribers, and they're already clear proponents of LastWear (I know, at this point you're thinking I planned all this from the start, but I swear, it just fell into place as I was searching/writing). That Workshop site is also running ads on the sidebar and between posts, which suggests an attempt at monetization. While not every site like this is a potential option, many are likely to be interested in an acquisition.

Here's one way I might structure it:

• Steampunk Workshop moves their blog to LastWear.com/blog
• They continue blogging about all the things they normally would - no editorial interference or direction needed
• LastWear helps with a more professional design, subscription buttons, some marketing polish, etc. to help the blog earn more traffic, visibility and fans
• In exchange for the move, LastWear offers a monthly stipend to the blogger(s) and a lump sum payment at the end of 3 years. After those 3 years, they own the blog and the content therein, and both parties can decide how they'd like to proceed with the relationship.

If LastWear went down this road, I can promise two things; #1) they'll get far greater short and long term ROI than buying links and #2) it will be less expensive in the long run.

To my mind, this is a no-brainer. When you buy a blog or any form of online community, you're not simply acquiring links, you're getting:

• An engine for brand building and indirect customer acquisition
• An ongoing methodology to pull in links, tweets, shares, +1s, likes, etc.
• Brand evangelists who will help expand your reach and credibility
• A PR opportunity like few others, even in fields where PR is hard to come by (acquisitions are talked-about, blogged-about, and make the news, even those of relatively small blogs)
• Content that's already been proven to attract an audience
• All the organic signals that search engines love to see - from links to social to usage to content to branding

I honestly don't understand why this problem exists:

It makes you want to yell, "Why don't you just go get married already?!"

Here's five questions I'd ask brands considering online marketing to answer before choosing link purchasing tactics over a blog investment strategy:

1. Which is more likely to be scalable in the long term?
2. Which is more likely to work across multiple channels (content, social, SEO, referring links, etc)?
3. Which carries a greater risk->reward ratio?
4. Which is more likely to increase conversion rate and customer lifetime value?
5. Which is more likely to earn you accolades from your community and which is more likely to earn you a rankings penalty one morning when you really need to hit your quarterly traffic numbers? 

To be fair, there's plenty of challenges and hoops to jump through in these types of transactions and some won't work out. But, I see a huge disconnect between those who are naturally earning all the signals engines say they want (blogs and online communities) vs. those need them (commercial sites) and no reason the two can't co-mingle. If you're a marketer looking to invest dollars into earning a presence in the search, social and web world, you can either build it yourself or you can buy it. I hope to see lots of dollars flowing to the content pioneers who've already proven themselves effective earners of inbound marketing signals -- the bloggers.

p.s. In the future, I hope to cover this topic in more depth and detail and provide tools and methodologies to structure discovery, transactions, value-creation, etc. but for now, I hope this post offers at least a little inspiration and an alternative use for capitol that can do far more good in the hands of bloggers than fly-by-night spam operations.

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The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of influence required to drive change. As it stands, SEO looks to disrupt the symphony (or cacophony) that is a brand’s marketing mix. Let’s discuss a new process that allows SEO to improve the effectiveness of all digital marketing channels – not just inbound.

Disclaimer: Kanye West is awesome, but you understand how he is perfect to illustrate these points.

Problems with the Old Process

I’ve heard SEO called a lot of ugly things in the past few years. My favorite one lately was delivered to me by the wonderful Brittan Bright after someone passionately declared to her that SEO is the “Calculus of Marketing.” I love it simply because it fits. Just like Calculus, if you’re not looking at the aggregate value of what you’re working on you may do a lot of work for a result that doesn’t seem big in the grand scheme. Just like Calculus, SEO is quite specific and esoteric to those that haven’t studied it. Just like Calculus, you can be completely successful without it altogether. And finally SEO and Calculus both set a barrier of entry that excludes more than it includes.

With all that said, here is the typical SEO process as it has been defined over the years.

Although we often treat it like one, SEO has never been an initiative that existed within a vacuum. It has always required changes be made across a complete digital ecosystem in which there are numerous stakeholders. However, this existing process always asked for change without justification with regard to the purpose of goals of these touchpoints. For example, if my recommendation is to change a title tag there has been no justification as to how that affects the CTR of a page shared on Facebook. Perhaps the social media team has discovered that the target audience clicks through less when a page title doesn’t feature a brand name. That’s a hypothetical situation but let’s go into a little more detail as to why SEO will not continue to work this way.

No Regard for Market Research

Just as the diagram above suggests, most SEOs jump right into keywords, analytics and competitive analysis of those keywords. Wrong move; search is about fulfilling needs. Before looking at a single keyword there needs to be a deep understanding of business objectives and the market. Standard kickoff questions often look like this:

• What analytics package do you use?
• Are there any other domains or sites that you own?
• What SEO efforts have been done in the past?
• List your top 3 competitors.
• Do you have social media accounts?
• What keywords are you looking to rank for?

The biggest problem with this is we often take these inputs at face value. That is to say, very often the brands that the client believes they are competing with offline are not the sites they are competing with for keyword coverage in the SERPs. Also the keywords a client may think they should rank for are not the keywords that are going to help them meet their actual goals.

To simplify it, many SEO teams send clients kickoff questions to get a sense of the keywords they should target and then hop right into the keyword tool. Pages are optimized. Keywords are allocated to pages. Links are built. Content is pushed into social. Performance is measured to identify subsequent opportunities. Obviously it oftentimes goes far more in-depth for many, but this is basically the widely accepted process.

One of my biggest issues as a consumer of Search that understands SEO is if the results I click appear to be overly optimized I become quite leery of the content. This is simply because in my experience many copywriters (SEO or otherwise) often don’t know what they are talking about. Recalling dusty memories of early in my own SEO career when I wrote copy, in most cases I was just a human article spinner. I definitely read a few wiki articles and the top results for a given keyword and just reworded what other people said. I shared all that to say: Becoming an expert in the niche that you are optimizing for is an extremely underrated step in the SEO process. For this reason, if I were to hire an agency, I would prefer one with extensive prior experience or specialty in my vertical.  All my in-house SEOs – make some noise!

Little Regard for the Audience

Truthfully, the real differentiation between clients happens in a latter set of questions. Unfortunately, the following doesn’t get asked enough in the standard SEO kick-off:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• What are you trying to get users to do once they arrive?
• Who is your target audience?

These are typically questions that Conversion Rate Optimization teams focus on rather than SEO teams. For shame SEOs, for shame!

We all want traffic and we all want to rank #1 for juicy head terms, but these things are not goals. By themselves these are not KPIs that make clients successful. Simply put, if you rank highly for keywords but aren’t fulfilling the needs of people searching for them, you just put a ton of effort into exactly the wrong thing. It’s not about the keywords; it’s about the people searching for them.

Consider this offline example of Target using data on customers to identify when they’ve become pregnant to learn when to ramp up efforts to turn mothers-to-be into long-term big spenders at the wholesale department store. You can do this far more effectively with Search if you’re mindful of your audience and their needs. This measurement of intent plus interests plus demographics plus network is the Holy Grail of Marketing. With that in mind it becomes quite clear what Google’s ulterior motives are with Plus and the consolidation of privacy policies.

Recently, I had a short conversation with AJ Kohn via Twitter about personas and how client research can prove useless. I agree somewhat because clients that have done audience research beforehand may have only looked at offline factors. To that point, it is important that we validate or disprove those insights with our own research rather than taking what the client says at face value. Our goal is to optimize, not paint by numbers.

SEO Disrupts Most Digital Strategies

As much as I hate to say it, the reality of SEO is that it disrupts much of digital planning even when it’s included from the onset.

Most other digital capabilities start from the target audience before they do anything. User Experience has user stories, personas and user flows. Strategy teams build personas and need states by examining demographics and psychographics in efforts to really try and understand what does and will influence and fulfill the target audience. 

Whichever of these teams develops these audience insights then feeds them to other teams so that efforts are glued together by the target consumer. Paid channels such as Facebook Ads, Display Advertising and Paid Search benefit from this significantly in their ability to target demographically. Media teams examine the available audience by vendor and allocate dollars based on where the delivery will be most effective.

Traditionally, Organic Search ignores this step entirely and declares “HEY! I’M HERE NOW WE’RE DOING THIS MY WAY!” This is partially why SEO gets shunned by brands when they are determining where to distribute their efforts within the marketing mix. SEO is certainly effective, but it has always been a maverick that didn’t want to play by the rules. There is little meritocracy because if channels were chosen only by ROI – Display Advertising would have died 10 years ago. Evidently, they are not chosen this way so for SEO to get buy-in it needs to be team player.

Many Link Building Initiatives Exist in a Vacuum

Regardless of the hundreds of strategies, tactics and tools that are being born for link building daily, every successful link building campaign boils down to making news and/or making friends. As SEOs, we try to strong arm how and where brands will do this. Making news and building relationships are functions of many different groups and initiatives within a business from top to bottom. How is it that we as SEOs believe our best initiatives can exist outside of the things the brand itself contributes to? 

Brands launch PR campaigns, social media efforts, events, so on and a variety of other social strategies to facilitate the awareness of the news they create. How is link building any different? The fact of the matter is, it isn’t. Therefore it should be attacked from, and included with, the same standpoint as the rest of a brand’s social strategies for both scale and effectiveness. Simply put, link building is better when the entire muscle of a brand is leveraged.

To do effective SEO now, at the very least, you have to be a digital strategist, social media marketer, a content strategist, conversion rate optimizer, and a PR specialist. I’m skipping anything coding related because although I believe you should be able to build a website you don’t necessarily have to. SEOs are already inherently each of these things, however in most businesses these are all different capabilities that sit in different groups, or offices or cities. Who are we to upset an entire digital ecosystem and undermine so many people?

Well I work with some awesome digital strategists, content strategists, creatives, etc. and while they tend to have impressive grasps of web trends, audiences and their specific capabilities they typically don’t know how to leverage cross-channel campaigns as specifically as SEOs or Inbound Marketers.  It is now the role of Inbound Marketers to drive strategies that looks far more like this (sorry guys, Kanye had to go – busy schedule):

I wish very much that I could be there for your “aha!” moment right now as no doubt you recognize many of these steps and can guess where other tasks will fall. Now let’s break it down completely – forgive me for anything that is obvious.

• Opportunity Discovery – Opportunity Discovery is a cyclical process of understanding brand opportunity with regard to business goals, target audience, industry specifications and past performance. It’s cyclical in that insights from one step often refine insights from another step in the process.
   
• Business Objectives – Everything must be done within the context of the goals of the brand. This requires a deep understanding of where the brand has been and where it’s going. In many cases businesses large and small may not understand how to translate their goals and therefore it is the job of the Inbound Marketer to do so.
   
• Market Research – The reason why SEO gets such a bad rap for polluting the web is that so many people simply do not build content that is worthwhile or has utility for the market. At this point, the entire team must take a deep dive into the industry and be able to have more than cursory conversations on the subject matter. For those that believe this to be a largely arduous task I suggest specializing in verticals of interest.
   
• Audience Research –The Facebook Ads tool is the Adwords Keyword Tool of personas. The Doubleclick Ad Planner is also good for understanding the demographics of existing sites. If available, Facebook Insights gives demographic data on the existing users visiting the site as well. The output of this is a set of user segments and stories or – personas.
   
• Analytics Mining – As always, you should mine existing analytics data to understand who is visiting. Take deep dives into keyword performance, especially in concert with any internal Search data, to identify opportunities. All in all, this is no different than normal unless the client has already been tracking their audience at which point you can see if who they are trying to attract is actually coming or not.
   
• Social Listening – Using a core set of keywords, collect data on the conversation around those keywords. Keep track of patterns and identify user segments, demographics and need states of the people partaking in that social conversation. You’ll also want to keep track of how these users are using the keywords as this will allow you to eliminate ambiguity in keyword decisions and help to create messaging that resonates with the audience during the customer decision journey.
   
• Quantitative Analysis – Services such as ComScore, Quantcast, Forrester Research, etc. track a multitude of data points on users in various verticals by demographic. Leveraging these reports gives you deeper insight into what types of users visit your competitors and exist within the market.
   
• Keyword Research – Keyword Research must be completed with regard to the audience not just a determination of whether the keyword is viable from a search volume standpoint, but whether the keyword intent matches the business goals. Keywords should then be correlated with target personas and need states to help drive the build of content that is optimized for people first and search engines second. 
   
• Site Audit – Under the New SEO Process the Site Audit becomes decidedly more comprehensive, as it covers UX issues that would normally fall into a CRO Audit. Specifically, the audit talks about things impeding the conversions due to incongruence with the target audience in addition to the standard SEO technical issues that it covers.
   
• Asset Inventory – A standard practice SEOs are already doing wherein there is an understanding of what a brand controls and is willing to leverage to the benefit of the campaign.
   
• Content Audit – What content inside our outside of the site can be leveraged?
   
• Brand Relationships – What other companies, businesses, groups and events are the brand involved with?
   
• Offline Assets – What tools, venues, prizes, etc. are at the brands disposal?
   
• Competitive Analysis – As always, competitive analysis is a collection of high-level audits of competitors across the vertical. The difference is that since site audits are completed with regard to the audience, the competitive analysis must also include a determination of how other brands are capturing that audience.
   
• Measurement Planning –A standard practice amongst analytics teams the Measurement Plan is the Statement of Intent and determination of Key Performance Indicators with regard to the business goals and audience. Avinash Kaushik covers measurement planning in his Digital Marketing and Measurement Model post. (Hat tip: @scotttdodge)
   
• Content Strategy & Development – Content Strategy and Development are big picture initiatives with a variety of stakeholders, so it often carries with it the most pushback. Creative teams just want to take big swings for big ideas and brand managers just want to advertise. To be effective we have to show how our content ideas will connect with the brand’s target audience and make sure content is designed to our specification.
   
• Content Ideation –With all this social data we have collected and correlated to keywords we can now come with ideas for content with portions of the target audience built-in. Do so.
   
• Wireframes – are an early deliverable in the design phase of a website wherein we can annotate considerations for SEO and CRO to ensure that Creative teams design with both in mind. Be very involved in this phase.
   
• Content Build – Once all your points are baked in, it’s time to let the Creatives do what they do. If they come back with creative is not congruent with what is agreed upon in an earlier phase, then you now have data to back up your position with the client.
   
• Technical Development –Technical SEO is the price of admission and cannot be ignored, so this where we make sure that the structure of the house is sound.
   
• Technical Build –At this point, we’ve done all we can do now we just wait to see what the tech teams come back with. We’ve specified everything in wireframes and hopefully have had some say in the build of the CMS, but the tech team is going to do what they know. We’re just going to have to wait to see what they come back with unless they are open to our input during the actual build. 
   
• Implementation Audit – We’ll always have to double-check the work of a technical team and this is the spreadsheet in which we do it. An implementation audit briefly recounts the issues outlined in the site audit and wireframes and says whether or not they were successfully implemented. This is the easiest way to show that the bottlenecks are not so much with the SEO team but the tech team – as they oftentimes are.
   
• Social Strategy – Typically link building is an initiative that exists by itself, in the new SEO process link building is an initiative that must be completed as part of a broader scope. While it is clear that low quality tactics like blog commenting continue to work, even those are far more effective coupled with a social push across PR and social media. Leveraged strategically, you are launching a piece of content with a cross-channel marketing push and therefore the link velocity will appear more natural to search engines and the return on the social strategy is likely to be higher. While link building has always been about casting the widest net, social strategy is about casting the rightest net the widest. I just made up a word. Kanye approves.
   
• Link Strategy – Link building for most businesses, particularly small businesses, is not an “if you build it, they will come” situation. Therefore it is not enough to just launch content and hope for the best, we must continue to supplement content launches with smaller complementary content launches, outreach and manual submission link building. This is where this strategy is defined with its own measurement plan. Yes, I’m saying we should report both our prospects and the links we close. If you’re proud of your work that shouldn’t be a problem. Link Building is just like a PR campaign in that there is no guarantee of placements and should be explained as such.
   
• PR – News is better than advertising, so a key part of social strategy is doing things that make news. Users spend a large part of their day reading, sharing and linking to news so make it a large part of the social strategy to make sure that content is newsworthy and get it to the news outlets that your audience frequents. 
   
• Contests – Contests are an excellent way to get a one-to-many return on incentives. Rather than performing outreach and directly offering them a free sample or (gasp) money request that they enter a contest wherein their entry is a blog post about the brand’s topic that contains a link. Also add a layer of gameplay to the contest by determining the winner through the number of times their post is shared in social media. Unbounce had a similar blogging contest in 2011 but link building wasn’t the goal of the campaign so they had all the posts on their own site.
   
• Events – Throwing a party, conference or trade show is another one-to-many return for link building. Simply host an event and invite influencers in the brand’s audience where the stipulation for attendance is that people must blog about it and link back to you.
   
• Social Media – is a two way street. Not only is it a place for discovery but also a place for conversation. Use that conversation to find the influencers in the space with regard to the target audience and business goals. Build social media profiles to be authoritative and engaging to easily get your content shared and also convert sharers into linkers. Regardless of where Google is headed, the social graph will never completely replace the link graph.
   
• Social Implementation – is the phase when you let it all rip for the best synergy.
   
• Measurement – is not just about whether or not we hit the goals. It’s the insights into why that makes measurement the most valuable step in Online Marketing. Measuring with regard to the audience helps with understanding the why even further than speaking in concrete abstracts such as bounce rate of a keyword. After all the ability to tangibly measure is why digital marketing is far more effective than traditional.
   
• Reporting – is tailored specifically to the goals of the client. There’s no one-size-fit-all report. For example, a client business goal may be to get user segment A to watch a video and therefore, the primary metrics reported should be the Time On Site and persona type versus traffic and keyword. Rankings are only important with regard to how they’ve affected traffic. Everything should be focused on who (persona A) and why (because the message is unclear) rather than what (“blue widgets for sale ranked #5”). 
   
• Link Reporting – Under the umbrella of social strategy there is a lot to be said about what has been done to increase visibility. Aggregate rankings should be reported with regard to link building efforts to show the direct correlation between the two. Furthermore, link prospects and closes should also be reported with close rates to show clients what is being done on their behalf. This is obviously a subject of contention within the community, but if the links you build are so suspect that you are afraid to show them to the people you’re building them for – you need a different approach.
   
• Optimization – I had an art teacher once that always used to say “No work of art is ever finished, we just give up.” The art and science of SEO is never complete and there is always an opportunity to do more.
   
• Conversion Rate Optimization – While CRO is far more baked into this strategy it still likely to take its own seat at the table. That is to say that while SEOs may also be CROs they may be too close to the project to properly optimize. This is much the same way that the mixing engineer of a song is not supposed to also be the mastering engineer. At this point, a separate CRO Team should run A/B Tests, Usability Tests and so on and report back.
   
• Continued SEO – Do it all over again!

A Better Web

Not to go all “land of milk and honey” on you guys, but the consumer is the biggest winner here. Naturally businesses benefit immensely as well, but the more we optimize with people in mind the more likely their needs will be fulfilled and consequently, the more likely we are to get those people to convert. Including people throughout the process and making the core goal to encourage them to do something ultimately makes the web a better place because everything we create will have a distinct purpose for the user and never solely for search engines. This is not to say we are circumventing the technical tenets of SEO as they are the price of admission.

Brand Buy-In

SEO has always been an industry that explains itself using empirical data. Starting from the audience, a place that businesses can understand, it is far easier to get buy-in for SEO initiatives. So when we make recommendations and explain the impact of our efforts on a target audience that has been determined as a focus of all initiatives, it’s easier to obtain brand buy-in than when we’re just talking about keywords and traffic.

Compare the following statement:

“We want to build links targeting websites with a PageRank of 3 or higher. We’ll reach out to a variety of prospects and target anchor text for keyword opportunities identified by our extensive keyword research in order to gain rankings for your brand.”

with:

“We’d like to launch a contest targeting Influential Moms with over 5000 followers on Twitter. To enter they’d write blog posts that link back to our properties in order to drive traffic for our target Listener Moms that are using Search to buy more healthy cereal.”

Both ideas would potentially accomplish the same goals however the former will require far more explanation for the client and ultimately more effort on the part of the SEO team. Whereas the latter explains a link building campaign in terms of the brand’s target audience and business goals then further lays out a campaign wherein the brand commits cross-channel resources that the SEO team can leverage. Understanding the business objectives and the audience make it easier to develop and deliver strategies that client can easily get behind.

Scalability

Getting on the same page with the other capabilities allows SEO efforts to be scaled considerably for brands large and small. This is how we regularly achieve those otherwise rare instances of synergy between capabilities when the PR team is facilitating Link Building, the Content Strategy teams and Creative teams are creating link bait and SEO is both driving and supplementing those efforts. That is the perfect storm where we spend far more time chiseling our perfect sculptures rather than polishing poop and our efforts have far more impact with less effort. 

Cross-Channel Optimization

Learnings and wins in SEO can influence other channels. Imagine we discover through social listening, keyword research and/or measurement are a large number of the client’s target audience is looking for “red kanye west t-shirts” but the client only sells every color but red. We now have a tight business case as to why that client should start manufacturing the t-shirt in red. Conversely, what if we find out that people love the shirt but bounce from the landing page because they hate the user experience of the site? There is any number of scenarios that when explained purely from the context of search brands are far less likely to make a move. However when you explain these insights through the context of personas and market research you have a tighter case that can affect change across all channels and capabilities.

[not provided]…so what?

Google has positioned itself to take away all of our organic keyword referral data and let’s be honest they ultimately will take it all. Plus, and the consolidation of privacy policies to allow cross-product data access, is Google’s way of positioning itself to attain the Holy Grail of Marketing. However, measuring through our audience essentially allows us a new way to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. We know the keywords we are targeting for a given page and we can see rankings and analytics of a given landing page by channel to determine whether or not Search is driving traffic. The true measure of success was never the rankings, nor the traffic but how well the page a given page converted for our visitors. If we track conversions based on audience that is the only metric that is truly worth optimizing against. The holistic performance of a channel is what brands are concerned with, not necessarily the performance of a given keyword.

The following are a list of posts, pages, tools and presentations to help get a deeper understanding of personas and need states and how to apply them to various Inbound Marketing efforts.

Personas

• 10 Steps to Personas [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Develop Personas
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
• Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO [SLIDESHARE]
• Understanding Your Audience Using Social Media [MOZINAR]

Need States

• AIDA: Attention-Interest-Design-Action
• Landing Pages and the Decision Making Process
• McKinsey Customer Decision Journey [VIDEO]
• Customers Go On a Journey, Escaping the Funnel

Useful Social Tools

• SocialMention
• Amplicate
• Topsy
• Trendistic
• MentionMapp
• Twtrland
• FollowerWonk
• Listorious
• KnowEm.com
• Radian6 - PAID
• Lithium - PAID

Quantitative Analysis Providers (PAID)

• ComScore
• QuantCast
• Compete
• Hitwise
• Forrester Research

During the #seochat I did on the SEO Process there were some questions of whether this applies to small businesses or not, citing that small businesses only care about the #1 spot and they “just want rank.” Yes, understanding what makes an audience tick applies to all businesses. Again, the ability to quantify the interests and intent of your audience and track a brand’s ability to persuade is the advantage of digital marketing of any kind. As I said on Twitter, #1 is not a goal, but a means to an end. #1 gets users to the door; it doesn’t keep them in the house.

Finally, the new SEO process is a call for us to speak the language of other capabilities and deliver strategies that can plug and play with what brands truly understand. The new SEO process is not about chasing the algorithm; it’s about fulfilling the needs of the people the algorithm serves. It’s about creating and discovering the content that resonates with the people that a business is trying to reach and then also covering the technical bases required to get results. It’s about understanding the connections between keywords in the mind of your target audience in order to optimize for them effectively. And most importantly, it’s about having SEO become the driver of the marketing mix rather than the outcast. No doubt SEO will remain the esoteric “Calculus of Marketing” but it’s time to prove that we can actually do the math so to speak.

So fellow marketers—what’s it gonna be? Keep it classy or keep it Kanye? 

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The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of influence required to drive change. As it stands, SEO looks to disrupt the symphony (or cacophony) that is a brand’s marketing mix. Let’s discuss a new process that allows SEO to improve the effectiveness of all digital marketing channels – not just inbound.

Disclaimer: Kanye West is awesome, but you understand how he is perfect to illustrate these points.

Problems with the Old Process

I’ve heard SEO called a lot of ugly things in the past few years. My favorite one lately was delivered to me by the wonderful Brittan Bright after someone passionately declared to her that SEO is the “Calculus of Marketing.” I love it simply because it fits. Just like Calculus, if you’re not looking at the aggregate value of what you’re working on you may do a lot of work for a result that doesn’t seem big in the grand scheme. Just like Calculus, SEO is quite specific and esoteric to those that haven’t studied it. Just like Calculus, you can be completely successful without it altogether. And finally SEO and Calculus both set a barrier of entry that excludes more than it includes.

With all that said, here is the typical SEO process as it has been defined over the years.

Although we often treat it like one, SEO has never been an initiative that existed within a vacuum. It has always required changes be made across a complete digital ecosystem in which there are numerous stakeholders. However, this existing process always asked for change without justification with regard to the purpose of goals of these touchpoints. For example, if my recommendation is to change a title tag there has been no justification as to how that affects the CTR of a page shared on Facebook. Perhaps the social media team has discovered that the target audience clicks through less when a page title doesn’t feature a brand name. That’s a hypothetical situation but let’s go into a little more detail as to why SEO will not continue to work this way.

No Regard for Market Research

Just as the diagram above suggests, most SEOs jump right into keywords, analytics and competitive analysis of those keywords. Wrong move; search is about fulfilling needs. Before looking at a single keyword there needs to be a deep understanding of business objectives and the market. Standard kickoff questions often look like this:

• What analytics package do you use?
• Are there any other domains or sites that you own?
• What SEO efforts have been done in the past?
• List your top 3 competitors.
• Do you have social media accounts?
• What keywords are you looking to rank for?

The biggest problem with this is we often take these inputs at face value. That is to say, very often the brands that the client believes they are competing with offline are not the sites they are competing with for keyword coverage in the SERPs. Also the keywords a client may think they should rank for are not the keywords that are going to help them meet their actual goals.

To simplify it, many SEO teams send clients kickoff questions to get a sense of the keywords they should target and then hop right into the keyword tool. Pages are optimized. Keywords are allocated to pages. Links are built. Content is pushed into social. Performance is measured to identify subsequent opportunities. Obviously it oftentimes goes far more in-depth for many, but this is basically the widely accepted process.

One of my biggest issues as a consumer of Search that understands SEO is if the results I click appear to be overly optimized I become quite leery of the content. This is simply because in my experience many copywriters (SEO or otherwise) often don’t know what they are talking about. Recalling dusty memories of early in my own SEO career when I wrote copy, in most cases I was just a human article spinner. I definitely read a few wiki articles and the top results for a given keyword and just reworded what other people said. I shared all that to say: Becoming an expert in the niche that you are optimizing for is an extremely underrated step in the SEO process. For this reason, if I were to hire an agency, I would prefer one with extensive prior experience or specialty in my vertical.  All my in-house SEOs – make some noise!

Little Regard for the Audience

Truthfully, the real differentiation between clients happens in a latter set of questions. Unfortunately, the following doesn’t get asked enough in the standard SEO kick-off:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• What are you trying to get users to do once they arrive?
• Who is your target audience?

These are typically questions that Conversion Rate Optimization teams focus on rather than SEO teams. For shame SEOs, for shame!

We all want traffic and we all want to rank #1 for juicy head terms, but these things are not goals. By themselves these are not KPIs that make clients successful. Simply put, if you rank highly for keywords but aren’t fulfilling the needs of people searching for them, you just put a ton of effort into exactly the wrong thing. It’s not about the keywords; it’s about the people searching for them.

Consider this offline example of Target using data on customers to identify when they’ve become pregnant to learn when to ramp up efforts to turn mothers-to-be into long-term big spenders at the wholesale department store. You can do this far more effectively with Search if you’re mindful of your audience and their needs. This measurement of intent plus interests plus demographics plus network is the Holy Grail of Marketing. With that in mind it becomes quite clear what Google’s ulterior motives are with Plus and the consolidation of privacy policies.

Recently, I had a short conversation with AJ Kohn via Twitter about personas and how client research can prove useless. I agree somewhat because clients that have done audience research beforehand may have only looked at offline factors. To that point, it is important that we validate or disprove those insights with our own research rather than taking what the client says at face value. Our goal is to optimize, not paint by numbers.

SEO Disrupts Most Digital Strategies

As much as I hate to say it, the reality of SEO is that it disrupts much of digital planning even when it’s included from the onset.

Most other digital capabilities start from the target audience before they do anything. User Experience has user stories, personas and user flows. Strategy teams build personas and need states by examining demographics and psychographics in efforts to really try and understand what does and will influence and fulfill the target audience. 

Whichever of these teams develops these audience insights then feeds them to other teams so that efforts are glued together by the target consumer. Paid channels such as Facebook Ads, Display Advertising and Paid Search benefit from this significantly in their ability to target demographically. Media teams examine the available audience by vendor and allocate dollars based on where the delivery will be most effective.

Traditionally, Organic Search ignores this step entirely and declares “HEY! I’M HERE NOW WE’RE DOING THIS MY WAY!” This is partially why SEO gets shunned by brands when they are determining where to distribute their efforts within the marketing mix. SEO is certainly effective, but it has always been a maverick that didn’t want to play by the rules. There is little meritocracy because if channels were chosen only by ROI – Display Advertising would have died 10 years ago. Evidently, they are not chosen this way so for SEO to get buy-in it needs to be team player.

Many Link Building Initiatives Exist in a Vacuum

Regardless of the hundreds of strategies, tactics and tools that are being born for link building daily, every successful link building campaign boils down to making news and/or making friends. As SEOs, we try to strong arm how and where brands will do this. Making news and building relationships are functions of many different groups and initiatives within a business from top to bottom. How is it that we as SEOs believe our best initiatives can exist outside of the things the brand itself contributes to? 

Brands launch PR campaigns, social media efforts, events, so on and a variety of other social strategies to facilitate the awareness of the news they create. How is link building any different? The fact of the matter is, it isn’t. Therefore it should be attacked from, and included with, the same standpoint as the rest of a brand’s social strategies for both scale and effectiveness. Simply put, link building is better when the entire muscle of a brand is leveraged.

To do effective SEO now, at the very least, you have to be a digital strategist, social media marketer, a content strategist, conversion rate optimizer, and a PR specialist. I’m skipping anything coding related because although I believe you should be able to build a website you don’t necessarily have to. SEOs are already inherently each of these things, however in most businesses these are all different capabilities that sit in different groups, or offices or cities. Who are we to upset an entire digital ecosystem and undermine so many people?

Well I work with some awesome digital strategists, content strategists, creatives, etc. and while they tend to have impressive grasps of web trends, audiences and their specific capabilities they typically don’t know how to leverage cross-channel campaigns as specifically as SEOs or Inbound Marketers.  It is now the role of Inbound Marketers to drive strategies that looks far more like this (sorry guys, Kanye had to go – busy schedule):

I wish very much that I could be there for your “aha!” moment right now as no doubt you recognize many of these steps and can guess where other tasks will fall. Now let’s break it down completely – forgive me for anything that is obvious.

• Opportunity Discovery – Opportunity Discovery is a cyclical process of understanding brand opportunity with regard to business goals, target audience, industry specifications and past performance. It’s cyclical in that insights from one step often refine insights from another step in the process.
   
• Business Objectives – Everything must be done within the context of the goals of the brand. This requires a deep understanding of where the brand has been and where it’s going. In many cases businesses large and small may not understand how to translate their goals and therefore it is the job of the Inbound Marketer to do so.
   
• Market Research – The reason why SEO gets such a bad rap for polluting the web is that so many people simply do not build content that is worthwhile or has utility for the market. At this point, the entire team must take a deep dive into the industry and be able to have more than cursory conversations on the subject matter. For those that believe this to be a largely arduous task I suggest specializing in verticals of interest.
   
• Audience Research –The Facebook Ads tool is the Adwords Keyword Tool of personas. The Doubleclick Ad Planner is also good for understanding the demographics of existing sites. If available, Facebook Insights gives demographic data on the existing users visiting the site as well. The output of this is a set of user segments and stories or – personas.
   
• Analytics Mining – As always, you should mine existing analytics data to understand who is visiting. Take deep dives into keyword performance, especially in concert with any internal Search data, to identify opportunities. All in all, this is no different than normal unless the client has already been tracking their audience at which point you can see if who they are trying to attract is actually coming or not.
   
• Social Listening – Using a core set of keywords, collect data on the conversation around those keywords. Keep track of patterns and identify user segments, demographics and need states of the people partaking in that social conversation. You’ll also want to keep track of how these users are using the keywords as this will allow you to eliminate ambiguity in keyword decisions and help to create messaging that resonates with the audience during the customer decision journey.
   
• Quantitative Analysis – Services such as ComScore, Quantcast, Forrester Research, etc. track a multitude of data points on users in various verticals by demographic. Leveraging these reports gives you deeper insight into what types of users visit your competitors and exist within the market.
   
• Keyword Research – Keyword Research must be completed with regard to the audience not just a determination of whether the keyword is viable from a search volume standpoint, but whether the keyword intent matches the business goals. Keywords should then be correlated with target personas and need states to help drive the build of content that is optimized for people first and search engines second. 
   
• Site Audit – Under the New SEO Process the Site Audit becomes decidedly more comprehensive, as it covers UX issues that would normally fall into a CRO Audit. Specifically, the audit talks about things impeding the conversions due to incongruence with the target audience in addition to the standard SEO technical issues that it covers.
   
• Asset Inventory – A standard practice SEOs are already doing wherein there is an understanding of what a brand controls and is willing to leverage to the benefit of the campaign.
   
• Content Audit – What content inside our outside of the site can be leveraged?
   
• Brand Relationships – What other companies, businesses, groups and events are the brand involved with?
   
• Offline Assets – What tools, venues, prizes, etc. are at the brands disposal?
   
• Competitive Analysis – As always, competitive analysis is a collection of high-level audits of competitors across the vertical. The difference is that since site audits are completed with regard to the audience, the competitive analysis must also include a determination of how other brands are capturing that audience.
   
• Measurement Planning –A standard practice amongst analytics teams the Measurement Plan is the Statement of Intent and determination of Key Performance Indicators with regard to the business goals and audience. Avinash Kaushik covers measurement planning in his Digital Marketing and Measurement Model post. (Hat tip: @scotttdodge)
   
• Content Strategy & Development – Content Strategy and Development are big picture initiatives with a variety of stakeholders, so it often carries with it the most pushback. Creative teams just want to take big swings for big ideas and brand managers just want to advertise. To be effective we have to show how our content ideas will connect with the brand’s target audience and make sure content is designed to our specification.
   
• Content Ideation –With all this social data we have collected and correlated to keywords we can now come with ideas for content with portions of the target audience built-in. Do so.
   
• Wireframes – are an early deliverable in the design phase of a website wherein we can annotate considerations for SEO and CRO to ensure that Creative teams design with both in mind. Be very involved in this phase.
   
• Content Build – Once all your points are baked in, it’s time to let the Creatives do what they do. If they come back with creative is not congruent with what is agreed upon in an earlier phase, then you now have data to back up your position with the client.
   
• Technical Development –Technical SEO is the price of admission and cannot be ignored, so this where we make sure that the structure of the house is sound.
   
• Technical Build –At this point, we’ve done all we can do now we just wait to see what the tech teams come back with. We’ve specified everything in wireframes and hopefully have had some say in the build of the CMS, but the tech team is going to do what they know. We’re just going to have to wait to see what they come back with unless they are open to our input during the actual build. 
   
• Implementation Audit – We’ll always have to double-check the work of a technical team and this is the spreadsheet in which we do it. An implementation audit briefly recounts the issues outlined in the site audit and wireframes and says whether or not they were successfully implemented. This is the easiest way to show that the bottlenecks are not so much with the SEO team but the tech team – as they oftentimes are.
   
• Social Strategy – Typically link building is an initiative that exists by itself, in the new SEO process link building is an initiative that must be completed as part of a broader scope. While it is clear that low quality tactics like blog commenting continue to work, even those are far more effective coupled with a social push across PR and social media. Leveraged strategically, you are launching a piece of content with a cross-channel marketing push and therefore the link velocity will appear more natural to search engines and the return on the social strategy is likely to be higher. While link building has always been about casting the widest net, social strategy is about casting the rightest net the widest. I just made up a word. Kanye approves.
   
• Link Strategy – Link building for most businesses, particularly small businesses, is not an “if you build it, they will come” situation. Therefore it is not enough to just launch content and hope for the best, we must continue to supplement content launches with smaller complementary content launches, outreach and manual submission link building. This is where this strategy is defined with its own measurement plan. Yes, I’m saying we should report both our prospects and the links we close. If you’re proud of your work that shouldn’t be a problem. Link Building is just like a PR campaign in that there is no guarantee of placements and should be explained as such.
   
• PR – News is better than advertising, so a key part of social strategy is doing things that make news. Users spend a large part of their day reading, sharing and linking to news so make it a large part of the social strategy to make sure that content is newsworthy and get it to the news outlets that your audience frequents. 
   
• Contests – Contests are an excellent way to get a one-to-many return on incentives. Rather than performing outreach and directly offering them a free sample or (gasp) money request that they enter a contest wherein their entry is a blog post about the brand’s topic that contains a link. Also add a layer of gameplay to the contest by determining the winner through the number of times their post is shared in social media. Unbounce had a similar blogging contest in 2011 but link building wasn’t the goal of the campaign so they had all the posts on their own site.
   
• Events – Throwing a party, conference or trade show is another one-to-many return for link building. Simply host an event and invite influencers in the brand’s audience where the stipulation for attendance is that people must blog about it and link back to you.
   
• Social Media – is a two way street. Not only is it a place for discovery but also a place for conversation. Use that conversation to find the influencers in the space with regard to the target audience and business goals. Build social media profiles to be authoritative and engaging to easily get your content shared and also convert sharers into linkers. Regardless of where Google is headed, the social graph will never completely replace the link graph.
   
• Social Implementation – is the phase when you let it all rip for the best synergy.
   
• Measurement – is not just about whether or not we hit the goals. It’s the insights into why that makes measurement the most valuable step in Online Marketing. Measuring with regard to the audience helps with understanding the why even further than speaking in concrete abstracts such as bounce rate of a keyword. After all the ability to tangibly measure is why digital marketing is far more effective than traditional.
   
• Reporting – is tailored specifically to the goals of the client. There’s no one-size-fit-all report. For example, a client business goal may be to get user segment A to watch a video and therefore, the primary metrics reported should be the Time On Site and persona type versus traffic and keyword. Rankings are only important with regard to how they’ve affected traffic. Everything should be focused on who (persona A) and why (because the message is unclear) rather than what (“blue widgets for sale ranked #5”). 
   
• Link Reporting – Under the umbrella of social strategy there is a lot to be said about what has been done to increase visibility. Aggregate rankings should be reported with regard to link building efforts to show the direct correlation between the two. Furthermore, link prospects and closes should also be reported with close rates to show clients what is being done on their behalf. This is obviously a subject of contention within the community, but if the links you build are so suspect that you are afraid to show them to the people you’re building them for – you need a different approach.
   
• Optimization – I had an art teacher once that always used to say “No work of art is ever finished, we just give up.” The art and science of SEO is never complete and there is always an opportunity to do more.
   
• Conversion Rate Optimization – While CRO is far more baked into this strategy it still likely to take its own seat at the table. That is to say that while SEOs may also be CROs they may be too close to the project to properly optimize. This is much the same way that the mixing engineer of a song is not supposed to also be the mastering engineer. At this point, a separate CRO Team should run A/B Tests, Usability Tests and so on and report back.
   
• Continued SEO – Do it all over again!

A Better Web

Not to go all “land of milk and honey” on you guys, but the consumer is the biggest winner here. Naturally businesses benefit immensely as well, but the more we optimize with people in mind the more likely their needs will be fulfilled and consequently, the more likely we are to get those people to convert. Including people throughout the process and making the core goal to encourage them to do something ultimately makes the web a better place because everything we create will have a distinct purpose for the user and never solely for search engines. This is not to say we are circumventing the technical tenets of SEO as they are the price of admission.

Brand Buy-In

SEO has always been an industry that explains itself using empirical data. Starting from the audience, a place that businesses can understand, it is far easier to get buy-in for SEO initiatives. So when we make recommendations and explain the impact of our efforts on a target audience that has been determined as a focus of all initiatives, it’s easier to obtain brand buy-in than when we’re just talking about keywords and traffic.

Compare the following statement:

“We want to build links targeting websites with a PageRank of 3 or higher. We’ll reach out to a variety of prospects and target anchor text for keyword opportunities identified by our extensive keyword research in order to gain rankings for your brand.”

with:

“We’d like to launch a contest targeting Influential Moms with over 5000 followers on Twitter. To enter they’d write blog posts that link back to our properties in order to drive traffic for our target Listener Moms that are using Search to buy more healthy cereal.”

Both ideas would potentially accomplish the same goals however the former will require far more explanation for the client and ultimately more effort on the part of the SEO team. Whereas the latter explains a link building campaign in terms of the brand’s target audience and business goals then further lays out a campaign wherein the brand commits cross-channel resources that the SEO team can leverage. Understanding the business objectives and the audience make it easier to develop and deliver strategies that client can easily get behind.

Scalability

Getting on the same page with the other capabilities allows SEO efforts to be scaled considerably for brands large and small. This is how we regularly achieve those otherwise rare instances of synergy between capabilities when the PR team is facilitating Link Building, the Content Strategy teams and Creative teams are creating link bait and SEO is both driving and supplementing those efforts. That is the perfect storm where we spend far more time chiseling our perfect sculptures rather than polishing poop and our efforts have far more impact with less effort. 

Cross-Channel Optimization

Learnings and wins in SEO can influence other channels. Imagine we discover through social listening, keyword research and/or measurement are a large number of the client’s target audience is looking for “red kanye west t-shirts” but the client only sells every color but red. We now have a tight business case as to why that client should start manufacturing the t-shirt in red. Conversely, what if we find out that people love the shirt but bounce from the landing page because they hate the user experience of the site? There is any number of scenarios that when explained purely from the context of search brands are far less likely to make a move. However when you explain these insights through the context of personas and market research you have a tighter case that can affect change across all channels and capabilities.

[not provided]…so what?

Google has positioned itself to take away all of our organic keyword referral data and let’s be honest they ultimately will take it all. Plus, and the consolidation of privacy policies to allow cross-product data access, is Google’s way of positioning itself to attain the Holy Grail of Marketing. However, measuring through our audience essentially allows us a new way to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. We know the keywords we are targeting for a given page and we can see rankings and analytics of a given landing page by channel to determine whether or not Search is driving traffic. The true measure of success was never the rankings, nor the traffic but how well the page a given page converted for our visitors. If we track conversions based on audience that is the only metric that is truly worth optimizing against. The holistic performance of a channel is what brands are concerned with, not necessarily the performance of a given keyword.

The following are a list of posts, pages, tools and presentations to help get a deeper understanding of personas and need states and how to apply them to various Inbound Marketing efforts.

Personas

• 10 Steps to Personas [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Develop Personas
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
• Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO [SLIDESHARE]
• Understanding Your Audience Using Social Media [MOZINAR]

Need States

• AIDA: Attention-Interest-Design-Action
• Landing Pages and the Decision Making Process
• McKinsey Customer Decision Journey [VIDEO]
• Customers Go On a Journey, Escaping the Funnel

Useful Social Tools

• SocialMention
• Amplicate
• Topsy
• Trendistic
• MentionMapp
• Twtrland
• FollowerWonk
• Listorious
• KnowEm.com
• Radian6 - PAID
• Lithium - PAID

Quantitative Analysis Providers (PAID)

• ComScore
• QuantCast
• Compete
• Hitwise
• Forrester Research

During the #seochat I did on the SEO Process there were some questions of whether this applies to small businesses or not, citing that small businesses only care about the #1 spot and they “just want rank.” Yes, understanding what makes an audience tick applies to all businesses. Again, the ability to quantify the interests and intent of your audience and track a brand’s ability to persuade is the advantage of digital marketing of any kind. As I said on Twitter, #1 is not a goal, but a means to an end. #1 gets users to the door; it doesn’t keep them in the house.

Finally, the new SEO process is a call for us to speak the language of other capabilities and deliver strategies that can plug and play with what brands truly understand. The new SEO process is not about chasing the algorithm; it’s about fulfilling the needs of the people the algorithm serves. It’s about creating and discovering the content that resonates with the people that a business is trying to reach and then also covering the technical bases required to get results. It’s about understanding the connections between keywords in the mind of your target audience in order to optimize for them effectively. And most importantly, it’s about having SEO become the driver of the marketing mix rather than the outcast. No doubt SEO will remain the esoteric “Calculus of Marketing” but it’s time to prove that we can actually do the math so to speak.

So fellow marketers—what’s it gonna be? Keep it classy or keep it Kanye? 

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This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I own and run ShirtsThatGo, which is a small ecommerce site running on the Volusion platform. I started the company about three years ago and have been learning everything myself. I have taken a particular interest in the marketing piece, especially search engine optimization. I have made all the usual mistakes and I am sure I have many more lessons to come.

I am a pure white hat and have done the SEO effort the hard way by slowly gaining links and trying to do everything by the book. I ran into a rather perplexing problem about one year ago and it took me over a year to resolve it.

My home page www.shirtsthatgo.com and the ice cream truck product page disappeared from the SERPs. The pages looked fine in the index but they would not rank for anything including the title tags. I read some of the great SEOmoz posts about what to do when a page will not rank for its title tag and tried to follow the steps. I had inbound sidebar links (non-paid) taken down for fear that I was seen as buying links. Yes, I went through a phase of chasing Google PR so I begged everyone to give me sidebar links! Sound familiar to anyone?

Next I reached out to some of you and begged for help to this issue. I was getting desperate to solve the problem and did not know how to solve it. I even asked folks on the Google Webmaster Forum and my forum posts would show up in the SERPs and not my missing page!

As it turns out I just needed to learn to listen. I was getting some great guidance from Dean Peckenpaugh, who is an SEO and e-commerce specialist and one of the main contributors at the Volusion customer internal forum. Most forums tend to have one or two contributors who really know their stuff that everyone listens to. At the Volusion forum Dean is one of those guys. So Dean was pushing me away from over optimizing and telling me to think like a computer but to write my pages for people. I got so caught up in optimizing that the site content was (well it still is) written more for the bots than my prospective clients.

My other product pages ranked so well that I was afraid to change anything. When I started to actually listen to what Dean was saying I took another look. Upon closer inspection the Ice Cream Truck page had maybe five more instances of the keyword than all the other product pages. I took a chance and backed way off the keyword count. I figured nothing would happen at all and that my needle in a haystack problem would still be there. On the next crawl the page was in position one on page one for the target keyword. Could it be this simple? I was blown away! I had badly overstuffed my site and my problem was so easy to fix!!!

For any given page there is clearly a keyword limit and the algorithm will simply flag the offending page and refuse to serve it up. Stay above the limit and the page is banished. Drop below the limit and it will rank! My expectation is that this is going to differ somewhat from page to page but the rule will hold.

Just this week I deployed some new product pages. I tend to put them online a few days in advance with a teaser product photo so that the page is already ranking by the time I have the product ready for the site. I ran into the problem again with our tank t-shirt page. I had inadvertently stuffed it a bit too full of the target keyword. On large pages a quick way to check this is to view source and use the find feature. This will paint all the instances and as you scroll through it will be apparent if a term is appearing too frequently. Note this screen shot does not show all the other instances that are below the fold.

As my pages are ranking great I do not want to make any drastic moves. That said I know my pages are still way over-optimized. Over time I will pull back on the keywords in the body and see if I can rely on the title tag, a couple of headings, and maybe one instance of the keyword in the body. Once I find a happy medium I will update all the pages. As I see it Google knows what the page is about by the title and the H1. Everything else that is not written purely for humans is stuffing plain and simple.

Here is a sample of our police car sell page and as you can see the target keyword is in there a lot. This page is ranking on page one for “kids police car t-shirts” and was just deployed a few days ago.

Once the ice cream truck page was ranking it was time to deal with the home page. At the time the home page was relatively skinny but I had content with anchor links pointing to almost all of the product pages. The home page was not even ranking for its title tag, so definitely something was way wrong. In this case though I did not see a keyword stuffing issue so I decided to think like a computer on this one and looked at the structure of the page for anything that might be confusing.

I noticed first that the page did not have an H1 or H2 which is how Volusion pages come out of the box. I read about how the importance of these tags is diminishing but they do add structure which is important. Also the page had content that was more about the various product pages. I had the idea that I was passing PR from my home page to all my product pages and thus helping them rank. It was not working!

As a computer I might be confused by the home page so I made the following change to add a very clear structure to the page and overall site:

Here are the changes that I made:

1. Added structure by putting an H1 and H2 that had exact match to the title tag main keyword.
2. Removed all content about product pages and the links to the product pages.
3. Added new content that was built up around the target keyword and the general topic of my site.
4. Added a link to the home page from the bottom of every product page with anchor text matching the <title> and <h1>< h2 >of the home page.

Within a few days the page started to rank for the title tag! After a few weeks the site was sitting around position 70 or so for the target keyword “kids t-shirts”. About a month later the page jumped to around page 20 or so in the SERPs for “kids t-shirts”. Position 20 seems about right given the other players in the space and the authority we have built up. I find it interesting the way the site sat in a lower position for many weeks then as if something came unblocked it popped up in the SERPs. This may illustrate some kind of a holding place Google uses for pages recently emerging from being flagged prior to giving them full ranking.

Here are the key takeaways from this experience that I wanted to share with you all:

• Consider keyword count if a page is indexed but not ranking for its title tag.
• Look closely at the structure of your site and ask yourself is it clear what the site is about.
• The idea of home page being general and product pages being specific makes a lot of sense.
• Be careful not to send mixed signals about what pages are about when building internal links.

I welcome all and any feedback. Any feedback about my site as well would be very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Nick Morgan
ShirtsThatGo

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At Distilled's SearchLove conference in London back in October, Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. This has a few uses, such as customising which social buttons you show your user or just for recording how many of your users are logged in to Facebook and then using this to show your boss that you guys should really be interacting with your visitors there.

I wanted to take this idea and extend it to Twitter and Google+, and record whether users were logged in there too. It wouldn't provided me with any immediately actionable intelligence, but over time I'd love to see the trends of what percentage of a website's visitors were logged into the different social networks. As a side project, I was also interested to record what percentage of visitors were logged into a Google account and were therefore responsible for the dreaded (not provided) in my Analytics, and also what percentage of these users were registered for Google+.

However, whilst Facebook provides an API to allow this kind of intelligence gathering, there is no such API for Twitter and Google+, and a bit of research failed to turn up any techniques that worked across all the browsers. So I rolled up my sleeves and did some digging around, eventually finding a way to trick the login mechanism of these sites to reveal whether a visitor to my site was currently logged in. If you want to try it out visit my Social Network Login Status Detector Demo; it should return something like:

Setting up the tracking

If you're a code junkie and don't need any help then you can just go and pull the code from this template page. Otherwise, let me walk you through it. There are two main steps:

1. Setup an empty Facebook app. This is free and only takes 60 seconds - it is required for the Facebook API code to work for your domain.
2. Install the Javascript code.

Complicated, eh?!

Setup a Facebook App

I'm going to blast through this quickly; but if you want more details there are plenty of tutorials online. If you already have an App that is registered for the domain you wish to track then you just need the AppID and can skip to the next section. We need to create an empty Facebook App because the Facebook API will only allow code on a domain to make requests regarding an App that is linked to that domain.

1. Login to Facebook.
2. Go to the Facebook Developers page: https://developers.facebook.com/apps
3. Press "Create New App" in the top right corner.
4. For "App Display Name" enter anything you want; I used "TomTrack". Check the box to agree to the FB Policies and on to the next page.
5. The next stage is pretty easy, just enter your domain in both the "App Domain" and "Website" sections:

6. Hit "Save Changes" .
7. Grab the App ID from the top of the page and save it ready for the next section.

Install Javascript Code

Firstly, make sure you have your Google Analytics on the page; the code below is for the asynchronous version of the code. Next you need to add this snippet of Javascript to the top of your page in the <head> section; this function will do the recording to analytics for us:

So far, so good. You'll notice that I used _setCustomVar, whereas Mat had originally used _trackEvent - I'm sure there are pros and cons to both, and the code on the template page provides both options.

Next we add the following code to the bottom of the page before the </body> tag, ensuring you replce the appID in the Facebook code with that AppID you created above.

You can copy and paste the code from the source code of this template page.

That's it - your tracking is all set!

Setting up Google Analytics

Once the code is installed you will be tracking right away, and can view the data in Audience > Demograhics > Customer Variables, assuming you are using the 'new' layout in Google Analytics. However, the power of this data becomes far greater when you setup Custom Segments so you can view how users logged into different Social Networks interact with the site compared to one another and compared to regular visitors.

Setup Custom Segments

Custom segments are really easy to setup, and can give a keen insight into your analytics when used well. 

1. Click "Advanced Segments" at the top of your analytics screen (once you're into the relevant profile), and hit "+ New Custom Segment" at the bottom right of the drop down.
2. You'll be prompted to select a name for your segment and to select which facets to base it on. We'll be using the Custom Variable slots that the Javascript tracking code uses. Analytics allows 5 Custom Variable slots, and the code above uses 4 of these (1 = Google, 2 = Google+, 3 = Twitter, and 4=Facebook) [side note: I think you could cram all these into 1 slot possibly]. We'll make a segment for each; here is how I setup my Twitter segment:

3. Hit "Save Segment" and you're done. Now repeat this for each of the other variables. Ensure you are selecting "Custom Variable (Value xx)" and not "Custom Variable (Key xx)".
4. You're done and are ready to play with some data.

Viewing the data in analytics

Once you have the tracking installed and segments setup you need to wait a few hours before you will see the first data appearing in Google Analytics. Once you have data coming in, the first step is to select which segments from your shiny new advanced segments you'd like to use:

Select those you are interested in and "All Visits" if you also wish to compare against all the traffic, and hit Apply. You can now go into any of your regular report screens and see these 2 demographics against one another; here you can see Facebook visitors to one of my test sites starting to be tracked after I installed the tracking code on Feb 13th:

We can immediately see that about 40% of the traffic to this site are logged into Facebook whilst browsing the site and the trend of visitors generally correlate. By adding a couple more segments I can see at the top of the page this breakdown across the networks

It turns out that most staff of this website are on Twitter and Google+, hence the quite high number for Google+ (this is a non-tech website) and the correlation between the 2 figures.

There are loads and loads of metrics you can compare and find of interest and you can spend hours playing around and digging down into the data for your site yourselves. One interesting one for this site, which has an explicit Conversion Goal (yes - comparing conversions could be a lot of fun) of trying to retain users on the site for 10 minutes or more:

Looks like driving users over from the Facebook page could be an area to think more about! They reach this target 50% more of the time than the average user. Just another little example of the kind of things you could be thinking about - I'd love to hear more suggestions and discussion in the comments for what other facets could be useful to look at.

Wrap Up

Currently, whilst Facebook provides a 'proper' API to access this information, Twitter and Google don't, and you should be aware that they might 'fix' the way this process works anytime soon. In the meantime I think there is some really actionable analytics you can gather in the meantime, beyond measuring the details in analytics. You might want to change the details of which social buttons are shown, or maybe provide a popup window to prompt further interaction via a particular Social Network.

In the meantime, I'd love to here what sort of suggestions people have for actionable intelligence based on the analytics you can gather via these techniques. I look forward to hearing what people suggest in the comments. :)

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This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Howdy Mozzers,

My name is Anthony and I'm from Fargo, ND. First-time YouMozzer here. After reading this post, I hope you (in?)voluntarily scroll back up to the top to follow me on twitter (@anthonydnelson) and check out my blog Northside SEO.

Today's post is about broken link building. It's been a popular topic in the industry, but I also noticed that SEOmoz didn't have a lot on the subject, so I thought it would be nice to write a kick-ass piece for the large SEOmoz community. Now, on to the post.

BROKEN LINK BUILDING: From Noob to Novice

Broken [broh-kuhn] adjective: not functioning properly; out of working order

Link [lingk] noun: anything serving to connect one part or thing with another

Building [bil-ding] verb (used with object): to construct (especially something complex) by assembling and joining parts

Definitions taken from dictionary.com.

Broken Link Building [lingk bil-ding gohld] verb: the act of acquiring a link to your website by pointing out a broken link on someone else's website

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken link building (sometimes called dead link building) is a technique that involves pointing out a link on another website that is no longer working and also asking for a link to your website. Often the broken link leads to a 404 page. The link will be on a page that is relevant to your niche and appears to be a good fit for inclusion of your site. You perform a solid by pointing out the broken link to the webmaster and in return, suggest that your link be added or be used as a replacement.

Why has Broken Link Building been so Popular Lately?

1. SEOs feel like they are making the web a better place. They are helping webmaster's deal with the problem of link rot. SEOs care about the quality of the web. The fewer broken links, the better.
2. It gives the link builder an easy value add to their email. You are helping them out, before asking them to help you out.
3. It can result in quick links. When broken link building emails are successful, you usually get your link within a day or two of sending the email. Much quicker then allowing a site owner to try and review a product or spending time making a connection and pitching a guest blog post.
4. It's a relatively new technique that has already yielded good results for numerous link builders.

Broken Link Building Required Tools:

1. A website that doesn't suck (no one is going to link to your crappy site, even if you point out a broken link)
2. Google Chrome with Check My Links Extension or Domain Hunter+ (Domain Hunter+ was recently featured on YouMoz)
3. Open Site Explorer: Limited use for everyone if you register for a free account at SEOmoz

Additional Tools for Increase Efficiency:

1. Xenu Link Sleuth (unless you're really cool like me and use a Mac)
2. Screaming Frog
3. W3C's Link Checker
4. Gmail plugins Rapporative and Boomerang
5. Canned Responses in Gmail or saving stationary templates in Mac mail are major time saving wins

How to Find Broken Links

1. Use the Check My Links Extension on any webpage you happen to visit and cross your fingers.
2. Check Top Pages tab in OSE for any competitor or site in your niche and look for 404 pages with external links pointing at them in the Top Pages tab.
3. Use search operators in Google to find relevant sites (my examples just below). This should result in hundreds of sites with lists of links specific to your industry. Switch your search settings to display the top 100 results and export them to a CSV using the MozBar's SERP Control Panel. Sort by Page Authority or Domain Authority and you're good to go. Find more useful link building search operaters or advanced search queries on Himanshu's site. Visit the sites and run a link checker extension.
   1. intitle:KEYWORD inurl:links -exchange
   2. intitle:KEYWORD inurl:resources
   3. inurl:links KEYWORD -
4. Add exported lists of links to Xenu/Screaming Frog to find 404 pages and easily run them through OSE. Alternatively, you can run a single page through to easily find the status codes of its outbound links.
5. Run a website through W3C's Link Checker to find broken links
6. When you find a broken link, run that link through OSE to determine who else is linking to it. You may find 5-10 other good link prospects from a single broken link.
7. Export numerous competitor's followed back link profiles in OSE. Combine results. Filter for URLs containing Link, Directory, Where to Buy, Resources or whatever words fit your industry. Sort sites by PA/DA, visit, run link checker, email.

Determining Link Target Quality

After you find a page with some broken links on it, you have to decide if it's worth your time sending an email and asking for a link.

But there are too many broken links!

It's a bit of a road block to run into a page with decent authority only to realize that it contains a ton of broken links. When you find a page with too many broken links on it (10+), you have a few options.

1. Decide the page is low-quality and choose not to contact them.
2. Send an email pointing out two or three of them and pretend that you don't know about the rest.
3. Point out all 10+ broken links and risk overwhelming them to the point that they decide not to update the page at all or completely delete it.

It's totally up to you to decide what is right for you and the site you are building links for. Personally, I've gone with all of the techniques above. Often times, it doesn't matter what you decide on because you may not hear back from them at all.

Finding a Website Owner's Contact Information

• Look for their email address on the contact page, about page or footer of the website
• Google site:DOMAIN.COM email
• Google site:DOMAIN.COM @DOMAIN.COM gmail.com hotmail.com yahoo.com msn.com live.com
• Look for their Twitter handle. A great casual way to introduce yourself
• Check WhoIs
• Look for a contact form on their website
• Citation Labs The Contact Finder if you are working with a large list

Stalk them to the best of your ability. It's OK if they feel a little uncomfortable that you found them through their sister's Twitter account. No contact, no link.

Broken Link Building Email Templates

Now that you know what broken link building is and how to find websites to target, let's get on to email outreach. I'm going to show you five email templates I use which will hopefully help you start your own successful broken link building campaign. Each template is slightly tailored for a different type of website or client. You may find that one of them works best for you, or you may find that you hopping back and forth between styles will give you the best results depending on your client, the niche or the targeted site for link acquisition.

Broken Link Building Template #2 - The Pressure is On Them

Subject Line: (DOMAIN.COM) broken link

Who to Send it to: Any website that has a list of links or resources (with a broken link) that you think is a good fit for your site.

Why it Works: You come clean immediately in the email explaining that you want a link. The webmaster might feel the need to include your link in order to find out what links on their site are broken. No webmaster will email you back and say, "No, I won't link to you. Now please show me the broken links." You get a link or they are on their own.

Broken Link Building Template #3 - In and Out

Who Should Use This Template: Any link builder that doesn't have time to follow up. This is a one and done send.

Subject Line: (FIRST NAME), (DOMAIN.COM) broken links

Hey (WEBSITE OWNER FIRST NAME),

Who to Send it to: Any website that has a list of links or resources (with a broken link) that you think is a good fit for your site.

Why it Works: When you nominate two unaffiliated websites for inclusion on the webmasters list of links, they will simply think you are trying to help them. You want to point out some broken links and also give them some additional sites to consider. Make sure the alternate suggested site is not a competitor to your site.

Broken Link Building Template #4 - Brand Power

Who Should Use This Template: Link builders (consultants or in-house) who work for a semi-recognizable brand name in their particular industry.

Subject Line: (SITE OWNER FIRST NAME), (DOMAIN.COM) broken link

Hey (WEBSITE OWNER FIRST NAME),

My name is (YOUR FIRST NAME) and I wanted to let you know I really liked your post about (TOPIC OF A BLOG POST - NOT EXACT TITLE AND NOT THE MOST RECENT ONE). The part I particularly enjoyed was the part about (QUOTE FROM THEIR POST).

I work at (COMPANY NAME) and after being in the INDUSTRY/NICHE field for a few years, I've become really passionate about INDUSTRY/NICHE and I'm happy to have found your site.

When I was looking at your (DESCRIPTION OF PAGE WITH BROKEN LINK) page, I noticed that one of the links was broken. The link labeled (BROKEN LINK ANCHOR TEXT) isn't currently working. (OPTIONAL: DO YOU KNOW WHERE THAT LINK IS SUPPOSED TO GO?)

Also, I hope you would consider adding our website (WWW.YOURSITE.COM) as an additional (RESOURCE/RECOMMENDATION/ALTERNATIVE) to your great (DESCRIPTION OF PAGE WITH BROKEN LINK) page. We'd be honored to be included on your site and I think the link would provide great value to your visitors due to our (BRAND UNIQUE SELLING POINT).

Have a nice (DAY/NIGHT).

I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

-(YOUR FULL NAME)

-(COMPANY NAME)

Who to Send it to: Any website that has a list of links or resources (with a broken link) that you think is a good fit for your site.

Why it Works: The website owner is flattered by having someone from a recognizable brand contact them with complements about their site. On top of that, they are grateful for you pointing out the broken links. How could they not give you a link?

Broken Link Building Template #5 - Zen Master Link Builder

The fifth template is essentially using no template at all. The Zen Master Link Builder builds a relationship before asking for a favor and the placement of a link. I'll outline the basic process below.

1. Comment on one the website's blog post. Make sure it's thoughtful and genuine.
2. Send first email with complement and question about a post of theirs or the niche they are in.
3. After they reply, you email back kindly thanking them. Consider repeating steps two and three if the conversation goes that way.
4. Follow them on twitter. Casually tweet at them or about their content to remain on their radar.
5. Email again to point out the broken link as an FYI. Mention your website as a replacement or addition to the page.

Who to Send it to: Ideally everyone. Realistically, use this technique on high quality websites. Sites where links are hard to come by.

Why it Works: You've shown that you care and connected with the website owner on a personal level first. The website owner should be grateful for your support (comments, tweets, emails) and will most likely happily add your link to the page in question.

Note: The Zen Master approach is the best approach to take for all link building outreach. It is definitely not exclusive to broken link building. The ultimate hang-up comes to the overall time and resources required to execute.

Outreach Email Link Building Tips:

• Send emails one at a time. From you, to them. Be real and try to offer as much value as possible.
• Don't use full URLs or hyperlinks in your actual email. This increases the chance your email lands in the spam folder.
• Find the website owner's email address and real name. Cyber stalk them to get it. Google them, find their twitter and check WHOIS.
• The email templates above will work even better if you personalize them more. Show some personality. Being unique and odd can be more effective than professional and stale. Be a person, not a canned response, even if you start your post from one.
• Use a woman's name.
• End emails with a question or a sentence that implies they need to respond to you.
• Always double check and proof your email. Using templates can be dangerous if you're not careful. Make sure it is personalized to the right website.
• If you do make a mistake in sending a templated email, come clean and do this.
• Hustle. You will never get a link for an email you don't send.

Pro Broken Link Building Outreach Tip

• If the website has a phone number, call it. A real conversation will monumentally increase your chance at landing a link. Admittedly, I still send emails 99% of the time.

301 Redirect Broken Link Building - Double Dipping

Sometimes the link you point out in your outreach email doesn't even have to be broken to get the webmaster to take action and change the page. I've had success pointing out links that 301 to a different site. Simply put, if you tell a site owner that they are trying to link to domainA.com and the result is a link to domainB.com they are often willing to remove that link. The benefit of this can be great.

Study your competitors' external backlink profile and find the urls of other websites that are 301ing back to them.

Example: DOMAIN1.com is redirecting to COMPETITOR.com.

Contact the sites who are linking to DOMAIN1.com and explain to them they are not linking to the site they were once intending to. Be sure to offer your website as an additional resource.

The end result: Your competitor loses a link and you gain one. Double win.

This technique will not work for links where the redirect clearly goes to the same company/website at a different URL. This technique works best when combined with an email pointing out a few broken links. "These links are broken and this one doesn't go to the right spot..."

Link Exchanges and Directories

Pointing out broken links is often enough to get you listed in a paid directory or on a site that is requesting link exchanges for submission. Of course, this only means something if you find a paid directory you actually want to be listed in or a site that exchanges links in a non-spammy way.

Content Recreation

Sometimes in the hunt for broken links, you'll find a 404 page that has 5-20 external links pointing at it. Some of them are juicy links. Links that you want. Bad. The problem is, your site doesn't contain a direct replacement for the 404'd content. Here is how you can get them.

Even though your site is in the same niche, your site didn't originally publish the results from that study in 2005 that was referenced so many times and no longer exists. You need to recreate the content. The first step is to put the broken link into the Wayback Machine to find out what the content originally was. Recreate the content for your site. If possible, feel free to repurpose it a bit to fit your branding and style.

Once you have created the similar content, contact the webmasters with the broken link pointing at the now non-existent content and gently nudge them towards your new piece. The exact piece they were looking for.

This technique takes a lot of time and effort but can definitely pay dividends. It is already established that the content you are creating is link worthy in the eyes of multiple webmasters.

18 Additional Broken Link Building Resources

1. 40 Broken Link Building Resources by Garrett French on Citation Labs
2. Broken Link Building In Action by Nick LeRoy on nickleroy.com
3. A Tactical Guide to Broken Link Building by Cleo Kirkland on ROI Factor Blog
4. The Reciprocity Link Building Method by Melanie Nathan on Search Engine People
5. Easy Link Building with Your Competitors' 404 Errors by Fabio Ricotta on Ontolo
6. Need Links? Make Up For Your Competitors Shortcomings by Napoleon Suarez on SEER Interactive Blog
7. 5 Creative Broken Link Building Strategies by Jon Cooper on Point Blank SEO
8. Broken Link Building for Content Promotion by Garrett French on Search Engine Watch
9. Check My Links Chrome Extension - A Link Builder's Dream by Jon Cooper on SEOmoz
10. Broken Link Building - A Case Study by Ben Jackson on SEO ROI
11. Broken Link Building: Feast On Your Competitors This Thanksgiving by Napoleon Suarez on SEER Interactive Blog
12. Fixing the Web's Lost Content: An 8 Step Guide for Link Builders by Jeremy Bencken on Search Engine Watch
13. 15 Questions with Nick LeRoy on Broken Link Building by Garrett French on Citation Labs
14. Broken Link Building: How Napoleon Suarez Gets 8-12% Conversions by Garrett French on Citation Labs
15. Broken Link Building Tips: an Interview with Melanie Nathan by Garrett French on Citation Labs
16. Busted Links as Reason for Link Request by Wheel on Webmaster World Forum
17. Improving Corrective Value-Adds in Link Request E-mails by Ross Hudgens on rosshudgens.com
18. Broken link building with Raven's Link Manager and local directories by Eric Scism on Raven Blog

If you know of a great broken link building resource that I am missing, please post it in the comments and maybe one of the mozzers or I (not sure how this YouMoz editing will work) will be able to add it to the list.

Noob to Novice

I gave this post the title from Noob to Novice because reading blog posts is not going to make you an expert or advanced link builder. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty. Send emails. Send a lot of emails. Try different techniques. Test and record. Broken link building is still a technique that is in its infancy and there is a lot of room for us all to improve and refine our techniques.

I still consider myself a novice link builder. There is so much to learn and the game is always changing.

Broken link building or any outreach based link building campaign is never going to compete with someone who creates link worthy content. Content that will continue to build links on it's own. Content that will build links on the weekends when they're not working.

Be sure to drop a comment and let everyone know about your broken link building successes or failures. It is still a relatively new technique and we can all learn from sharing. Don't be shy on giving this post a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Feedback is needed to grow.

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Hey gang - short blog post on a topic our product and marketing teams have been noodling around with. As many of you know, we've got our Linkscape index, which is crawled, processed and served out on a monthly basis (there's a new index about every 30 days). We also have a newer datasource, Blogscape, aka Freshscape (which is currently undergoing some repairs in Labs) which crawls a few million "fresh" RSS feeds and indexes full content.

The goal of Linkscape is to present a search-engine size link graph, while the goal with Freshscape is to provide a more realtime, full-content index of links and mentions similar to what Google Alerts does. The problem is... what to call them?

We're currently hard at work on a future iteration of the SEOmoz PRO platform that will include deeper integrations of both Linkscape and Freshscape data (so you can watch and competitively compare your wide link graph metrics as well as these fresher, primarily RSS-based links and brand mentions). As such, we need a way of segmenting these that makes sense to current and future users of PRO, and we'd love your input. The following polls have some of the names we like best right now for classifying Linkscape vs. Freshscape data:

If you have other suggestions or ideas, please feel free to include them in the comments. If there's one in particular that receives lots more thumbs up than anything in the poll, we might use your idea in the final version!

Thanks very much for the help - can't wait to show you our new stuff (though it will be more than a few months until this is ready to roll out).

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We're all familiar with: personalization, SPYW, and the mix of organic + local + shopping + news etc. we call "universal search". Today, we're going to talk about the results that APPEAR to be pure organic, ignoring AdWords, Google Places results, image, news, video, shopping, social influenced results, etc.

Now, looking just at these ordinary organic results, you might expect that if you're signed out, cookies blocked, pws=0, and a ski mask on, you'd get the same results for a given search as you see from any one of a number of rank-checking tools.

But you'd be wrong. Well...in some cases, you'd be wrong. If your location is set (auto-detected via your IP address, or set manually by you), in some cases Google is using your location as a ranking factor.

Mini glossary

Before we dive into some examples, allow me to fabricate some terminology so we're all talking about the same things:

• pure organic - this is what I'm calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that do NOT appear to be location-influenced
• local-ish: this is what I'm calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that DO appear to be location-influenced

Now let's look at some examples

For each, we're going to look at the results for our location set to three US cities: Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Brooklyn, NY. To set our location, we'll use the "Change Location" option in Google's left menu:

First, we'll start with a search phrase that we'd expect to have a strong local bias in Google Places results.

Search term: "thai restaurant"

Let's start with Portland, OR:

As expected, there's a lot of Google Places results there. But look at result #1: Typhoon. It's got reasonable PA/DA, but not enough to rank nationwide (unlike oshathai.com and sawatdee.com, which rank on page 1 if you set your location to "USA"). It's a Portland restaurant--Google might know this because of its Google Places page; also, it's got Portland in 2 of the footer links. No hCard markup on the address itself anywhere on the site however.

The 2nd result happens to be near Portland, but really located in Beaverton, and is ranking simply because of a near-match domain, in my opinion (it ranks #2 if your location is set to "USA"). Just to be sure Google wasn't still using my IP address and geo-locating me in Portland when I specified my location as "USA", I had Dr. Pete confirm this from his cave in Chicago (thanks Pete!).

In Dr. Pete's honor, we'll look at Chicago next, for this same term:

Now this is getting a little more interesting. Results 1, 3, and 4 are clearly not there because of a Google Places page, but rather, because on-page factors would make the page do pretty well if we'd actually typed in "Chicago thai restaurant", i.e. with the location name behaving like any other keyword. Result #2 is most likely there because of its Google Places page: it's an all-Flash site, with no mention of Chicago anywhere in the HTML; and, of course, Google's helpful "show map of..." link is a clue :-).

Just to be certain, I peered into the guts of a number of these all-Flash restaurant sites using FlashProbe to see if there was location-specific text in there....and for most of them, found nothing of significance.

Next up: Brooklyn.

Google Places results all up top, then the rest of the page is all local-ish results. The menupages.com result is clearly not Google-Places related but has "Brooklyn" all over the page, whereas most of the rest must be getting identified via Google Places as "Brooklyn" doesn't appear on their websites at all.

Next, let's look at a search for "auto parts", where you might imagine that what's going to be useful to the user is going to be a mix of the national parts websites and also local parts stores.

Search term: "auto parts"

First up: Portland.

As expected: dominated by about an even mix of Google Places and pure organic. But the last two are local-ish: the first could either be Google-Places influenced, but more likely it's a near exact match domain if you considered the city name to be one of the search terms. And a near exact match page title doesn't hurt either.

Back to Chicago now:

Similar results to Portland.

Lastly, let's look at Brooklyn:

Similar mix to Portland and Chicago, but clearly from looking at these three sets of results, Google is NOT "designating" slots on the page for each type of result (pure organic, local-ish, Google Places) regardless of city. The behavior is more like an ordering based on an overall scoring, where past click patterns (i.e. are users clicking on Google Places results for this term more, or pure organic, or shopping, or local-ish...etc.) might be a factor, keyword relevance (including the city name as a keyword) is a factor, PA/DA of course...etc.

Now I did some research on some other terms as well, including "web hosting", which returned a similar mix of local-ish results + pure organic...right up to when I started doing screen shots for this blog post, after which all the local-ish results disappeared...for all cities I tried. With the heavy click volume that must happen on a competitive term like that, I can't chalk that up to a change in click behavior statistics--it smells like a manual adjustment for that search term to me when it comes to the mix of types of results.

Conclusions

1. For some search phrases, the results that we've come to think of as "pure organic" are heavily influenced by location, in addition to the Google Places results.
2. There are at least two factors that Google is using to rank local-ish results:
   1. the name of the searcher's current location is found in traditional on-page areas (page title, body text, etc.), and
   2. because the Google Places page indicates the location matches the searcher's location.
3. Clearly the mix of ranking factors for Google Places and local-ish organic results is quite different, as in general, we're seeing the local-ish organic results NOT match the top local results from Google Places.
4. Certain search terms generate a higher % of local-ish results than others, just like certain search terms generate a higher % of image, or news, or video, or shopping results, BUT the mix of non-local organic and local-ish organic results varies not just by search term, but also by location.
5. It seems that it's more about a page's overall score in the ranking algorithm getting bumped by either being local (via Google Places) or containing the user's location name in traditional on-page elements, rather than slots in the page 1 results being set aside for local-ish results for a given term.

So what do I do with this information?

• Directory-type websites: you've got a shot at ranking your city-specific pages...even if the user doesn't type their city name in as part of the search.
• Local businesses: tune your pages for your city name as well as doing your Google Places page properly (but do NOT put your location name in your Google Places category), as you've got a shot at 2 listings on page 1: a Google Places listing, and a local-ish listing.

I look forward to seeing ideas/theories in the comments that are different from, crazier than, and more accurate than mine. Thanks to David Mihm, Tom Critchlow, Tom Anthony, Wil Reynolds, Carson Ward, Kate Morris, and Pete Meyers for their thoughts and research.

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This week we talk about the different roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team. What does it take to have a successful marketing team that will take your brand to the next level? What metrics should your team measure? Your marketing team will go through a few different stages while your company grows and this video walks you through those steps.

Some notes about this video, we shot this a few weeks ago and as with the other video we experienced some quality issues. Please bear with us while we work out the kinks of our new equipment. I also mention that we are looking for another web dev for our marketing team, but I am happy to mention that our new web dev Devin started on Monday! Don't worry we are looking to fill other positions which can be found here.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about some of the roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team and really how to design a successful web marketing team that can accomplish all of the goals that you've got on the Web.

The place that I like to start is with the metrics you care about. The metrics almost always start with customers or with revenue. Customers or revenue. From customers and revenue you can get down to the metrics that matter, the sources from which those people come externally on your site, the internal sources, the funnel, the marketing funnel itself, how far people make it down the funnel, if you're attracting customers, or the quality of those visitors that you're getting, if we're talking about a site that's driven by ad revenue.

The key metrics usually come from places like visits, visit quality, conversions, brand awareness, competitive intelligence, and the quality of customers being acquired. Those are very, very high level, but they typically filter down into deeper ones. When you look at visits, you might be looking at visit sources. You might be looking at the time that people are spending on the site and the number of pages browsed. You might be looking, when you're looking at conversions, at the quality of those conversions, how many of those people come back, what the customer lifetime value is, what the word-of-mouth spread is, you know, for every one customer, how many new customers do we acquire based on some viral co- efficient, etc., etc. You'll know these for your business, and you'll dig down into them.

These metrics map over to the right sort of team format. The teams that I like to build really come in stages. Those stages are natural evolutions and progressions. If you're extremely early stage, what I really like . . . by super early stage, what I mean is maybe there are three of you, four of you, five of you, up to maybe ten people in a business that's trying to do considerable marketing on the Web. I like having someone with a title at the very junior level. The most junior level I would have is a web marketing manager or a director of marketing or VP of marketing. It's certainly fine to have someone very senior so long as they're willing to get their hands dirty. They're responsible for all of this. They're responsible for where do customers and revenue come from, what are the sources from which we can generate those. I'm going to personally build a funnel, personally build out how we execute on all the sources, focus on the right ones, figure out what the channels are that work, etc.

In a mid-stage I like to extrapolate a little more. Have that VP of marketing who's responsible for the key metrics and for setting the goals and responsibilities and then start to break things out into two worlds. One is the inbound, organic world. This can also be organic or non-paid or free marketing or earned media, whatever you like to call this. Those inbound marketers worry about things like SEO, social, content marketing, blogging, videos, etc., all the things that you do on the Web that earn your customers, that earn visits, rather than buying them or interrupting them.

The other side is performance marketers. These are people who do things like paid acquisition, conversion rate optimization. I like having the person who's responsible for paid acquisition also run the CRO and the marketing funnel. The reason why is because these visitors usually are extremely high ROI and cost less. Hopefully, 60 to 80 percent of your traffic is coming through here.

This is where you're going to get a ton of your direct conversions. These people will be paying some cost to acquire those visitors. So owning the funnel makes a lot of sense for them. That way they can say, "Okay, customer lifetime value is $500. We will pay up to $150 to acquire a customer through these five channels. We'll pay up to $250 to acquire a customer through these channels because we know it's worth more. We're going to keep optimizing the funnel and improving the conversion rate."

Then, naturally, the stuff from organic will flow into those paid channels and into that same funnel. The ROI is usually higher, but the directness and ability to increase that takes longer. It takes more effort and more time, more energy expended. You'll have more things where you throw stuff against the wall to see if it sticks versus paid where, hopefully, you learn that very, very quickly. We bid on this keyword, it didn't work. We put an ad on this site, it didn't work. Fine, we take those down.

In terms of who you should assign to these teams, I would say start with one person responsible for each. This person up here, maybe they move into that VP marketing role. If they don't, maybe they move into one of these roles because they're particularly good at performance or at inbound. Then, the VP of marketing comes in and you hire someone more senior to take over those roles.

Then you could get specialized inside those. If you see that SEO is an amazing channel for us and we have a ton of content and ton of material that needs SEO'ing, we need to bring in a full-time technical and content SEO to worry about those types of things. Outreach is huge for us. We need a full-time link builder. Social is huge for us. We need a full-time community and social manager.

Great, those are fine things, and that leads you naturally into the next stage, the later stage or more mature stage where you usually have . . . I actually like to have at this point something like a CMO, someone who's a chief officer and has a higher purview of roles, of responsibility around that. This also means that people who have progressed in the organization from inbound or from performance channels can move into those VP roles: VP of inbound, VP of performance. Then you can have people under them who are very specialized in each of the requirements of that role. So it could be we have someone who just does PR.

We have someone who just does technical SEO. I cannot recommend this enough, have web developers or software engineers who work on each of these teams because it means that someone who's working on performance marketing doesn't need to wait for engineering to get projects done. They have someone who works on the team full-time. This is absolutely amazing here at SEOmoz. We have Casey Henry who works as a full-time web developer, and we're hiring another developer - if you know any great people, please send them our way - to actually work on our marketing team and worry about the www site and the marketing funnel and all the stuff that exists around the inbound and performance side. Obviously, with time, I'd like to see that become two or three or four people.

These people's roles really depend on the channels that are working for you and the channels into which you want to invest. You might have a full-time person who just does video content. You might have a full-time person who just does blogging and they do very little else. That could be a content marketer. You might have multiple people who are managing your community because you have so many people following you and interacting with you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, through your own social sources on your site if you have a social platform, a high level of community contributions, user generated content, those types of things.

This segmentation and role specialization is excellent too because people can move up and have opportunities as one of these channels takes off and becomes amazing.

An even later stage might be that we've got SEO as an entire department and it has its own director. Underneath the director are people who are responsible for specific parts. This person is responsible for UGC SEO. This person is responsible for video. This person is responsible for technical SEO. All those kinds of roles can get even more specialized, and you can move into a bigger division.

The nice thing about how this whole platform works is that it can organically grow. It can build off itself, and you develop strengths in all the areas without ignoring any channels. Early on in your stages, these people and then these people are going to be experimenting with all types of different channels. As you get here, you have specialists who can perform in those channels, leaving the CMO, the VP, the director free to explore new channels and find places where they might want additional specialists.

For an in-house team, this is how I personally like to do it. I am, of course, looking forward to your comments, seeing how you guys do this, seeing where I might be right or wrong here And I hope you will join us again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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