Posted by randfish

If your job or current tasklist includes building a social media strategy for your organization (or yourself, personally), you should be thinking about the branding created by the profiles you create. The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you’re perceived and how you’re remembered across the web.

Strategies for Choosing a Name

The name you choose should be based on branding considerations, SEO and reputation management intent. Choose the name of your profile based on your carefully thought out goal for social media participation (and if you don’t have one, get to work!): 

• Company Branding
  • Use the exact brand name of the company, not a modified version, a play on words or a name you picked for fun. If you’re going to be representing your brand officially in these spheres, you need to craft a profile that does just that. It doesn’t mean you can’t show personality or be fun with your profile, it just means you need to make it extremely clear that this profile IS your brand.
  • Consider adding a geographic or specific modifier only if this is part of your branding goal (for example, Utah SEO PRO). Because anyone can make a modified version of your name, you should also invest in owning the exact match brand name to be sure there’s no confusion (and, if possible, mention the profile you use in the exact match name).
• Personal Branding
  • First and last name must be included. Speaking from personal experience, if I could go back in time, I would alter all my profiles to be "Rand Fishkin" rather than "randfish." It seemed fun at the time (2001), but in retrospect, my full name would bring far more recognizable branding and credibility through those profiles, back to a personal brand. I can’t enumerate the number of folks who, offline, made the sudden connection that "randfish" and "Rand Fishkin" were one in the same - a clear sign of missed branding opportunity.
  • If your name is exceptionally long or difficult, you can consider shortening or modifying, but make sure it’s something you’re comfortable using in the real world as well. Remember that this advice is targeted towards professional use of social media campaigns, so if you’re just in there for fun, you don’t need to worry about this nearly as much.
• Boosting Search Rankings
  • Choose relevant, non-cannibalizing keywords and phrases to put in the name. You don’t want to directly compete with your own site on the keywords you’re pursuing - you just want the profile pages to have some keyword relevance (and oftentimes, the profile name is the only keyword opportunity you get in the title tag on social sites).
  • Make sure it makes sense, sounds reasonable and doesn’t come across as spam. No matter how much effort you put in, if the name is "student-credit-card-dude," no one will trust you or want you around.
  • A diversity of profiles may seem wise, but in reality, you may be able to draw far more link juice and value by contributing more significantly with fewer accounts.
• Pro-Active Reputation Management
  • Use the brand name and possible combination keywords to build phrases that make sense and can fill up important or risky search results.
  • Make sure to be extremely careful and non-provoking as you participate - aggressive or antagonistic behavior can turn a pro-active reputation management campaign into a defensive one very quickly.
• Re-Active Reputation Management
  • Consider using names synonmous with but not exactly your brand name. The reason is to avoid having responses to negative comments repeat the keyword of your brand name more times in the copy or having complaints about your profile come up in brand searches.
  • If you are representing yourself, be clear about it - if web users smell a rat, they’ll pounce, and you could end up exacerbating the reputation management problem.

Strategies for Choosing a Profile Image / Avatar

• Company Branding
  • Use the logo. If the logo won’t fit, use the most recognizable aspect of the logo that fits into square dimensions
  • If all else fails, go with the first letter or an Acronym for the brand name
• Personal Branding
  • Use a picture of yourself - a head shot, with your face as close up, visible and friendly as possible.
  • Make the photo fit your personality. Even if you’re going for a very professional profile, having a smile and a polo vs. a somber face and tie is OK. As with many things on the web, there’s a certain respect for the more casual and approachable profiles, but don’t miss the opportunity to brand visually.
• Boosting Search Rankings
  • It’s probably best to use a photo that’s cute, funny or enticing without being directly associated with your brand or you personally. After all, if you go overboard initially or learn the ropes by testing the boundaries of what you can accomplish from a pure rankings perspective, you don’t want that possibly negative branding reflecting back on you.
  • As others aruond the web (and in presentations) have noted on this topic, using an image of an attractive, younger woman on social sites can produce more interaction, more "friending" requests and a greater level of acceptance. I personally think it’s a sad example of sexism on the web, but my responsibility on the blog is to note valuable strategies, and this one certainly can deliver.
• Pro-Active Reputation Management
  • As with company branding, using the official logo is a generally wise move here.
• Re-Active Reputation Management
  • Using a photo that helps humanize you as an individual and your company can help - a group photo, a picture with your kids, significant other, on vacation, etc. One of the big problems in reputation defense is getting the opposing party to empathize, and this strategy can help start down that path. Now is not the time to be the faceless corporation.

I’ll let others tackle advice about how and where to link and how to optimize the descriptive elements of a social media profile page for maximum value (or maybe Jane can do it next week)

Also looking forward to your feedback about how you’ve had the most success with social profiles.

Do you like this post? YesNo

More: continued here

Posted by willcritchlow

We fall on the very search-engine-friendly side of SEO (I hesitate to use the phrase "white hat" because I think all the lines often blur). Despite this, I have a lot of respect for well-executed darker tactics and find it fascinating to watch and deconstruct them.

What I don’t want, however, is to take the blame on a client project for shady tactics employed before we even worked on the project. Some time ago, at Distilled, we had an issue with this when a client had a website banned. We weren’t to blame, but it was very bad timing - the course of events looked like this:

• Client (a pan-European brand) hires us as "outsourced SEO department" reporting to their chief marketing people
• We make recommendations regarding their main site
• Recommendations are implemented and traffic begins to rise
• Client buys a company with a well-known brand in one European country (SEO obviously falls under our remit since we are their SEO department)
• Shortly afterwards (and before our first recommendations), the website for the new brand gets banned…

What had actually happened was that their past had just caught up with them. The smaller brand had previously engaged a local SEO firm with tactics that were a bit past their sell-by date (mainly consisting of a huge link network of sub-domains off the SEO company’s own site and some other properties). There was not only a question of tactics here, but also of plain common sense - not only was part of the link network on the SEO company’s site, but so were proud links to "our clients" (all of whom got slapped, we believe).

Now, anyone who has worked with us will know that we typically look to improve the things directly under the client’s control first - most decent size websites have link equity they aren’t spending well and so technical and structural stuff is normally our first target. Many clients, unfortunately, still think we have magic buttons under our desks (or perhaps they’re hoping we’ll submit them to a few thousand search engines), and so it was perfectly plausible to them that even though we hadn’t yet made any recommendations for their new site, we might have pushed the button under our desk a little hard and got them banned.

It might be how some SEO companies work - get a new client and plug them into your shady link network - but it’s not our style. These kind of tactics might have their place, but in my opinion, that place is not when you’re playing with brand websites.

So, once we had diagnosed the issue, calmed the client down, bullied the old firm to remove the network, submitted grovelling reinclusion requests etc., we started to think….

The nature of our business is such that many clients have implemented ‘SEO’ suggestions before (whether in-house or agency) and many of them have pasts that contain the odd closet with perhaps a skeleton or two. How could we avoid this kind of scenario in the future - where we might get the blame for the sins of our predecessors?

The Pre-Sales SEO Due Diligence

Out of this conversation came a concept that we have gone some way towards but not 100% cracked yet. This is the idea that before signing a new contract, we should undertake due diligence regarding previous tactics independently of quizzing our prospective client (not only are clients not always up-front about previous tactics, but personnel could have changed, external agencies could have been responsible without being straight with the in-house team, etc.).

So, we are now starting to look out for a variety of things that signal warnings to investigate more closely before signing with a given client. We are looking for things like:

• Manipulative patterns in their backlinks
• Cloaking
• Doorway pages

Effectively, we are thinking like search engineers and giving them a little bit of a manual review. Now, we don’t have the tools that search engineers have at their disposal, but we can cobble together a bit of a toolkit to get some way towards this kind of process (and as I mention below, I’d love to hear how you guys go about this).

Pre-sales is not the only time that you might need to do this - sometimes you are going to be paid to do it. This happens when you are hired to work out what has gone wrong with a site when the owner can’t help. They might not be able to help because either the board doesn’t know details of what was done in the past and the team has moved on, the company purchased the site as a whole, or they outsourced SEO to a less-than-reputable source. As part of our global associate role with SEOmoz, we answer a lot of Q&A and this kind of diagnosis forms a fair bit of that work.

So, finally, I’m going to get to the point and present my methodology for diagnosing manipulative issues with websites:

Forensic SEO Process

I look for three main things:

1. Generally deceptive on-site practices (keyword stuffing, excessive internal linking, doorway pages)
2. Cloaking or other unusual serving of information
3. Offsite manipulation - strange linking patterns, etc.

1. For the on-site stuff, I typically:

• do a site: query and just see how many pages they have indexed versus the apparent size of the website
• search for some of their keywords across their site
• view the source of a few key pages
• check their internal linking structure

It’s pretty much a short, basic site review.

2. To check for cloaking, I typically change my Firefox user-agent to Googlebot, disable javascript and cookies and browse around a bit watching for different site behaviour. This isn’t enough to pick up sophisticated cloaking but it gives a good overall impression. The ultimate check is to compare the Google cache of their pages to the originals. This is a bit more time-consuming, but is the only way I know of to pick up all kinds of cloaking.

3. The one that caught us out with our client was deceptive linking practices. In an attempt to spot that, I delve into their backlinks a little. What I’m looking for here is things like:

• Repeated optimised anchor text
• Sitewide links
• Links from many low quality sites (long, hyphenated URLS, blogspot domains, etc.)
• Footer / sponsored links
• Hidden / cloaked links

Essentially, I look for anything that "smells wrong." Rand has written before about experienced SEOs’ sixth sense, and this is definitely the place for those skills.

I’m interested to know whether this is part of your process and what tools, tips or tricks you use. Share all in the comments!

Do you like this post? YesNo

More: continued here

Posted by gillian

Last week, as the US financial powerhouses began to pay the price for their lack of fiscal responsibility, I was on the road in Seoul, Nanjing (for SMX China 2008), and Tokyo.

I had a great time! I haven’t felt such excitement, vigor, and potential in a long time. SEOmoz sponsored the water bottles. Chris Sherman took a shot of me showing it off before the keynote speech.

I was going to post a standard review of the conference with stats, etc. but Shor wrote an admirably thorough review of the state of search in China and Chris posted a solid review and his thoughts of SMX Nanjing. So today, I’ll focus on things I came away with from the conference and on the financial market activity, what it means to the Search industry, and how I see it being perceived and responded to by our colleagues in China and Japan.

The Business Climate in Nanjing, Sept 2008

I met about 300 people involved in search, software, and technology at the Nanjing Conference and Exhibition Center (Chris got a great shot of the complex the day before the crowds arrived). Attendees were privileged businesspeople involved in a growth industry with sufficient expendable capital to attend a 2-day conference. The mayor came to open the event and Microsoft sent Zhaohui Tang, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft AdCenter, to demonstrate their suite of marketing and ROI-improvement tools. We’re not talking about reactions from the ‘man on the street’, but I think there is value in what I heard and saw.

On the surface, China seems impervious to the maelstrom in the US. The Asia Financial Times, however, begs to differ. Articles indicate that China’s growth has slowed from more than 12% to an expected 9% this year. Nine percent! Washington would donate a few right arms for that kind of growth. And there is no doubt that China is already a major force in the global economy in many sectors. China’s drop in production is affecting the global price of commodities. Carlos Slim suggests, “China is now the most important country to help responsibly in this crisis. China has great liquidity, large resources, surpluses in its current accounts and a lot of capital flow." That should give every American cause to think.

Some Observations from SMX China Nanjing 2008

Baidu is still the most popular search engine in China by a very large margin. Trying to use Google was, to put it lightly, frustrating, so I don’t see that equation changing anytime soon. However, this isn’t stopping Google or Microsoft from continuing their paid search promotion in the region.

Pay per click campaign management is still the major focus of concern for attendees. Making the financial case for SEO over SEM seems to be the biggest problem facing both in-house and independent SEOs. Pay per click provides a clear cost and ROI for business owners. SEO is more difficult to track. Not much different than the concerns of their counterparts around the world, is it?

Many indicated that they are involved exclusively or primarily with companies seeking to export their products to the US and other English-speaking countries. At the moment, pay per click campaigns on Google are the primary tool to promote products outside China. Alibaba, who swallowed Yahoo in 2005 in the China market, plays an important role in promoting export-active clients as well.

I was asked if SEOmoz would translate our tools’ interface to make them easier to use. Although some expressed interest in getting data and support for reaching other markets, they primarily requested US-centric data. With the meltdown in the US, I expected these people to be considering other markets than the US. But newspapers in China, Korea, and Japan are still describing the US market as the largest and strongest, despite the current woes. I didn’t speak to a single person who was worried about the medium or long term health of the US market.

Everyone expects a short term bumpy ride, but no one was considering holding back on their efforts to sell products to the US. As in the US, some people I spoke with were licking their chops at the low-cost buying opportunities. “Money is just moving around. Smart people just eat [buy] as much as they can while the others are being sick to their stomachs. It’s just time for the money to move around,” one attendee (whose name I sadly didn’t get) assured a group of us at lunch.

What the Market Activity Means to SEO

We are in for a recession. Not a depression, but definitely a recession. Smarter people than I argue about the length of time it will take, so I won’t ruminate about it. As companies tighten their belts, traditional media (print, radio, TV, even tele-sales) are already seeing a decline. Matt McDougal twittered about noticing that the economic slowdown is already pushing more advertising online. I’ll stick my neck out here – I predict that not only will this trend continue, but when things pick up, online advertising gains will continue to hold their ground and continue to increase. Furthermore, as SEM becomes more costly with more competitors for keywords, SEO will see a boon as well. I’ll revisit this prediction in the future to see whether I should get that Fortune Telling parlor set up.

Some basic business advice: when times are good, increase your market size as well as your market share. When times are tough, do it even faster. Stephen Noton has been consulting in China for some time; Stephan Spencer is opening an office in Beijing this month. And of course, SinoTech Group is growing. There are others. I’m encouraging you all to consider which markets outside your own cities, states, and countries will help you increase the size of your pie rather than continue to focus solely on getting a larger slice of your current market. In particular, I suggest you consider looking for companies outside your area that need experts to help them sell in your area. Be that expert and leverage it.

And now, Just for Fun…Seen and Heard at SMX China Nanjing 2008

On the first morning, crowds of attendees were delayed as our cars, buses, and taxis drove to the convention hall and again as we all passed through security screenings, had our bags x-rayed, and presented our badges for inspection. The mayor of Nanjing was on hand to welcome us to the conference, so security was high. That evening Inway Ni, co-producer of the conference, said, “The government wants to add more security tomorrow because we are expecting more people. They don’t know no one in China is going to do anything bad now. No one is interested in terrorism! We have found something with better ROI!”

• Inway Ni, on the same subject later: “We don’t have time even to argue with each other. We are too busy doing business!”
• Irene Wang, Alldao China:“Can you say something for the camera about the importance of our business?”

  "I don’t know your company.“

  "But we provide services for export companies to get their products to the US. It’s not about our company, just say something about the importance of the work we are doing!”

• TR Harrington: “Tell the man in the yellow shoes that the man in the yellow glasses said hi.”
• Unknown: “Look, SEOmoz and Google are on the same line and same size.” Well, there’s a moment to capture!

• Taxi Driver en route from the airport: “Nanjing is ancient! Nanjing is new! Look! [at the new 7-story shopping mall rising behind the city wall, circa 1038]"

Pictures of SMX China Nanjing 2008

Booth babes and giant spotted dogs were popular:

An amazing array of items are sold using cartoons. This cartoon is selling parental control software:

And finally, I’ve never been photographed so often by so many people in such a short time. Here I whipped out my camera and had a game of dueling cameras to the amusement of people nearby.

Do you like this post? YesNo

More: continued here

Posted by Jane Copland

Yesterday afternoon, as I was at home recovering from a form of black death known as the common head cold, I came across Danny Sullivan’s piece on Search Engine Land about his dealings with a lazy link broker. I recommend reading Danny’s post, which details how he questioned a person who wanted a link on the Sphinn.com homepage with the anchor text "search engine optimisation." The person represented a UK-based SEO firm. I’m not saying that reading or even acknowledging the status of Sphinn is necessary for success in our industry, but one should probably avoid trying to buy links from a site SEOs and search engine employees read with regularity.

Link requests are nothing new, of course, but the person with whom Danny was emailing did more than just propose link acquisition. This particular link broker attempted, with some not-very-clever smooth-talking, to convince Danny that the followed, non-redirected, non-javascripted, PageRank-passing purchased links would be within Google’s guidelines.

Danny was knowledgeable enough to mess with this person for a while and ended up revealing how much he actually knows about the issue, at which point the person stopped emailing him back. To quote:

I’d love to think there was an “oh shit” moment when this arrived in their email box…

Do you like this post? YesNo

More: continued here

Posted by Nick Gerner

After watching Nate Buggia a few weeks ago speak about Live’s Webmaster Tools, I was struck by his statistic about the number of domains on the web.  He suggested that there are 78 million domains.  There’s certainly room for disagreement about this number—don’t forget Google has one trillion web pages —but I bet he’s in the right ballpark.  If that’s right, could we manually review all of them?

Sure, 78 million domains is big.  But not that big.  A few months ago while investigating spam, Danny reviewed a fairly randomly chosen 500 domains in a matter of hours.  And I think he did a great job of it, too.  That’s a good foundation, but could we scale that up and review millions of domains?

I see a few challenges here.  Probably the biggest challenge I see is just getting this list of Live’s 78 million domains.  Next you’re going to need a lot of manual reviewers.  But if you’re Live (or some other search engine) you’ve already got that list, and a large contract labor force.  Too bad for the rest of us. 

I suppose if you’re clever you might be able to do this through Alexa’s Web Information Service and Amazon Mechanical Turk.  Taking a look at the Mechanical Turk pricing, it looks like you could charge one cent for every domain (or maybe each block of a few dozen domains).  So we’re probably talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.  But that’s pocket change for Google.  And Google has plenty of remote offices with lots of search quality engineers.  In fact, they say, "Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways."

So let’s say a single person can review 1000 domains in a single day.  And let’s say you’ve got 1000 reviewers working on this problem.  That tells me that 78 days later you’ve got all the relevant domains on the internet reviewed.  That’s less than 10% of Google’s workforce, less than 2% of Microsoft’s Workforce. Of course you could do it with less if you pre-filtered some of those domains, or took longer than three months to do it. If Google, Yahoo!, and Live haven’t already done this… well, I can’t imagine that they haven’t done at least part of this by now.

Do you like this post? YesNo

More: continued here