International CRO – Choosing the Wrong Colors and Other Mishaps

Posted by Sam Crocker Good morning Mozzers! Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries. WARNINGS: 1. There is something to be said for having a similar site, brand, and feel that can be recognized all over the world. 2. Some CMS systems do not allow for easy changes to be made for different versions of the site. 3. With Google Translation, many folks are becoming less interested in having multiple sites anyhow. 4. More sites mean more potential problems and things to worry about. Now, with these warnings out of the way let’s first jump into some of the potential benefits, and then look at some examples.

Foursquare Fixes, Responds To “Who’s Been Here” Privacy Hole

Yesterday, Wired published a report detailing an issue with Foursquare privacy, whereby a program could effectively harvest Foursquare checkin data by constantly refreshing venue pages and looking to see which users were showing up in the “Who’s Been Here” section, which shows a grid of users who recently checked in at that venue. According to the article, white hat coder Jesper Andersen was able to log around 70% of all check-ins in San Francisco — or 875,000 checkins — over the last three weeks. Today, Foursquare has addressed the report with a post on its official blog outlining the issue. As data breaches go I’m not sure this one was especially “sophisticated”, as Foursquare keeps calling it, but they apologize and explain what they’ve done to fix it. From the Foursquare blog: A little over a week ago (on Monday the 21st), our developers were alerted to a problem that enabled sophisticated users, by continuously scraping venue pages from our website through anonymous gateways, to capture private check-in information that users didn’t intend to share with the general public. Three days later, our team began rolling out a number of solutions to this problem. First, we ensured that any user that had opted out of appearing in the “Who’s Here” lists no longer appeared in the “Who’s Been Here” photo mosaics on our site (this fix went live last Thursday). Second, we updated the language on our “Settings” page to clarify what opting into the “Who’s Here” feature entails. Third, we randomized the order of the photos being posted under the ”Who’s Been Here” headings on our venue pages to prevent anyone from scraping this data to try to estimate check-in times of various users. This won’t be the last time we hear about privacy issues with location-based services, where security and privacy are going to be key. That said, the privacy concerns for Foursquare, where users are explicitly checking into venues, are less worrisome than if this had happened with one that constantly monitors your location, like Google Latitude. And privacy hasn’t really been Foursquare’s big selling point, either — don’t expect to see much of an uproar from its users over this. CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase

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Foursquare Fixes, Responds To “Who’s Been Here” Privacy Hole

Babbel Adds Speech Recognition To Aid Language Learning

Babbel , the language learning site, has added “realtime” speech recognition to enhance its practical application and enable users to fine-tune their pronunciation skills. This pits the service up against more traditional players such as TellMeMore or Rosetta Stone , says the company. The speech recognition functionality was built in-house – much of the team’s background is in audio technology – although it was realised with the latest 10.1 update to Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which enables developers to access audio data captured from the user on the client-side instead of streaming to a back-end server for analysis. For realtime feedback, local processing is preferable, says Babbel, and had Adobe not offered this option, the company would need to have built its own browser plug-in, which is hardly ideal.

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Babbel Adds Speech Recognition To Aid Language Learning

SEO Flows Through Everything

Anyone who has been an SEO consultant knows that SEO is often bolted-on as an after-thought. Which is, of course, the worst way of doing SEO. Part of the problem is that SEO is often thought of, by clients, as a fix. It is a fix applied to solve the unforeseen problem of not showing up in search engine result pages. Whilst some businesses get it, we know most never will. But this fact is to your considerable advantage if you build and run your own sites Relevant Traffic Is Everything We know that a site without traffic is like a billboard in the desert. If no one sees it, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, it is useless. A site without relevant traffic is a cost, not a benefit. Traffic that “just passes through” presents a major opportunity cost. What did that traffic really want to see, and why aren’t I providing it? Someone else will be. We know that search is the ultimate internet marketing research tool. Search is marketing nirvana. Visitors tell us what they want, using a keyword query, and all we need to do is match that query up with our site. Most people, outside search, still do not get this. But we do. Integrating SEO At Every Step One thing some SEOs may not get is that SEO needs is an integral part of business strategy. SEO is not just about positioning a site in the search rankings, it’s about positioning a site in the market. For example, it is pointless getting a #1 ranking for “cheap t-shirts” if a site sells designer t-shirts. Whilst this may result in a few rouge purchases, the site will constantly lose out to sites that offer cheap t-shirts. Because the visitors will reformulate their search queries until they find the service that is most relevant to them. From a business point of view, it may be better to run two sites – one offering cheap t-shirts, and one offering designer shirts. That’s what being relevant really means. Being relevant to a target market. An SEO strategy should look like this: Identify the target market Conduct a competitive analysis Create a business plan that shows how you will compete in that market Research keywords Create a brand identity related to those keyword terms Create a search-friendly site Get links SEO flows naturally out of the demands of the target market. The visitors tell us what they want. We look to see if anyone else is providing it. If they are, could we do better ? We create a basic plan showing how we will supply the need, and how much money we’ll make, after costs, if we succeed. We develop a strategy, as opposed to tactics . We investigate the many ways people phrase queries . We create a “language” for our site copy, and brand, that includes those queries, and addresses the intent behind them. We build a crawlable, well-ordered site and then we tell the world about it. We hope the world will talk about it, the send some attention our way . SEO Is Ongoing Just as business strategy is something we must do each day, so too is SEO. Integrate SEO into all you do. Even sending out a bill is an opportunity to ask someone to engage with your site. And hopefully link to it. Ask your friends, associates, suppliers and customers to link to you. Do the same for them. Create a personal link network of like-minded people and grow that network wider and wider. Think of it as a circle of trust. Your keyword referral stats are pure gold. Find the keyword terms people have used to find you. Use them as ideas for new page topics. Integrate their language into your copy. Repeat. Grow organically based on the demands of visitors. It’s just a case of “listening” to them. And responding with new pages. Join related clubs, forums and organisations. Find out the top sites in your niche that accept advertising, and advertise on them. Write articles for them. Contribute to discussions. Go to wherever your potential visitors are. Every page should link to another page on your site in a strategic, meaningful way. Think of any page you write as the start of a funnel that leads to other areas of your site. You want to subtly direct people to the page or action where they’ll engage with you. For this to work, you need to have a clear business directive in mind. What is it you want people to do? Every page is a step leading to that point. Be newsworthy. And remarkable. What do you do that’s really interesting? Social media thrives on, and rewards, the different – the thing that is new. Same-ness – not so much. Position for both business and rankings

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SEO Flows Through Everything

How to Get Links in Tough Industries

Posted by Paddy_Moogan Howdy SEOmozzers I’m Paddy Moogan I work for Distilled in the UK office. This is my first SEOmoz post, hope you find it useful and I look forward to your feedback. How this post came together… A few weeks ago we decided to try to help people who do link building in industries where links are not always easy to come by.

5 Ways Being An SEO Helps You With Online Dating

Posted by Tom_C Howdy mozzers. Since a lot of people in the search space are geeks, it naturally follows that there are plenty of single SEO guys and gals. Therefore this post is for you! Actually, it’s more of a collection of random SEO tips and tricks I’ve picked up recently that I decided to hang together by applying the tips to online dating at the same time! Disclaimer: I’m going to reference OKCupid throughout this post. They are not a client, I

Google Rolls Out Virtual Keyboards On Non-English Search Portals

This hasn’t been formally announced by Google yet, but industry blogs are picking up on it and so are our readers: the company has started to include buttons that open up virtual keyboards when doing a search on non-English search portals. You can see the buttons when you run a search on Google’s main search service pages for Russia , Israel , Poland , Croatia , Palestine , Czech Republic and plenty more. Clicking the button opens a virtual keyboard (see screenshot above), which can be dragged to anywhere on the screen by clicking the blue bar at the top. You can also use the up and down arrows to show more characters commonly not present on physical keyboards. The basic idea behind the virtual keyboard is that users can enter the precise search terms they want, regardless of the language keys on their real keyboards. As Google points out on its support pages, this can prove particularly helpful to people who use one of the many non-Latin script-based languages that require special characters such as Arabic, Greek, and Thai. (Thanks to Luboš Loužensky for the tip) CrunchBase Information Google Search Information provided by CrunchBase

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Google Rolls Out Virtual Keyboards On Non-English Search Portals

Seven JavaScript Things I Wish I Knew Much Earlier In My Career

Who Are The Top 10 SEOs in the World?

A lot of people who are well known as SEOs spend too much time on self promotion and not enough time on business development. BTW I would classify myself as being in that camp, though I have been slowly migrating since meeting my wife So much of SEO stuff is sorta ego in place of performance IMHO. And the problem when you hire top SEOs is that even if they have a strong brand and do great work on their own sites, the market pricing for services tends to be so dysfunctionally under-priced that… it is mostly an exercise in back patting to even do any client services after you have a good amount of capital, cashflow, and leverage online even if you think you are hiring one of the best SEOs you still rarely get to work with them because the people who are out there being really well known are by and large lead generation tools for the company, and the bigger the company is the more likely you are to have an intern servicing your account Getting serious cashflow out of servicing the SEO market is akin to squeezing water out of a rock, especially when compared against running your own websites. To me, the measure of an SEO’s success is not in their knowledge, but in their ability to leverage their knowledge to build cashflow. I know money isn’t everything , but we live in a world where the algorithms grow more complex every day. So each day you are working for less than your market value is a day closer you are to being broke! Spamming and jamming can get you some paydays, but its not easy to *consistently* pull down 7 or 8 figures a year in profit if you are not building at least 1 or 2 properties with serious staying power and momentum behind them. Given the complexity of SEO and the lack of liquidity in the SEO market I think that by and large the best SEOs who generate the greatest profits derive most of their profits from publishing . Given that I thought I would highlight some of the people who I would view as top SEOs (and why). Danny Sullivan Few people have Danny’s knowledge about the history of and trends in search. Even fewer have that type of knowledge while being accessible. And even fewer yet would have been able to put a decade in building up momentum for a brand and website in the industry, stop, start over from scratch, and compete against what they had built for a decade. Imagine the strongest site you have, giving it a decade of effort, and then one day trying to start from scratch competing directly against it with a similar business model. And yet he pulled it off . Greg Boser & David Naylor Greg is probably the first name that comes to mind when someone says “old SEO” (yes even before Bruce Clay). His knowledge is much like Danny’s in being rich with historical context. The thing that Greg has done to make consulting actually worth doing is tie payment to performance. Doing SEO in that manner is like becoming an affiliate, but one with few competitors and a huge advantage in the marketplace. Dave is the UK version of Greg (or maybe Greg is the US version of Dave?), and they have done some successful projects together for some of the biggest brands in the world. Stephan Spencer Stephan Spencer branded himself as being an expert at ecommerce SEO. And, rare amongst SEOs, he has the technical chops *and* the marketing skills to sell to big companies (speaking their language & touring the world speaking at dozens of conferences each year). They built a software program which is almost as sweet as cloaking would be (if you could get away with doing it constantly with no risk), but partnered with the right kinds of (big brand) companies and branded their GravityStream solution appropriately such that it was never viewed by Google from a negative lens. This created a business model where they could get paid based on performance (like many affiliates do) but be paid for the performance of the core brand website! NetConcepts was sold it to the SEM company Covario , which will be able to benefit from tying the GravityStream technology to their predictive analytics and Google’s quick-indexing caffeine search results. Patrick Gavin & Andy Hagans As people, at this point I don’t really trust or respect them ( and feel that those who do might be in for some eventual bad news ). But as far as being efficient at running businesses, few can compare. Patrick took a gamble and build the Text Link Ads link brokerage into a company he was able to sell for mid 8-figures. And his latest venture in the SEO space was so bold as to call “ensure you are not buying any links” an advanced SEO tip. Meanwhile on Andy’s personal site he recommends iAcquire for your link buying needs Not content with sitting on the results from TLA, they invested the proceeds (and other investor funds) into building a domain portfolio that even Kevin Ham or Frank Schilling would admire. But they also turned those domain names into functional websites, and have kept cost structures low, while creating blogs with more top x lists than the rest of the web combined and sending out millions of “congrats” emails at potential link sources. The net result? They have built a lead generation business that has been rumored to be pulling in 8 figures a year. Wherever there is an economic distortion in the economy leading to a large bubble you can bet these guys have at least a half dozen to a few hundred sites, chipping away at the markets 24/7/365. And the only thing increasing faster than their scale is their efficiency! Matt Cutts I always hate when I see Matt Cutts listed on top SEO lists and think “hey he is not even an SEO” …but… how many SEOs have seen Google’s source code? How many have written a good chunk of it? As one of the top few search engineers at Google, Matt not only has a pulse on what is changing with the web, but he constantly tracks & battles the evolution of spam. His knowledge and experience set allows him to just look at a search result and be able to spot the algorithmic weaknesses & exploits at a glance. Further, Matt Cutts is better at public relations than 99% of public relations experts are. He is able to constantly promote Google products and engage in issue shaping while rarely being called out for it. And he rarely makes *any* mistakes on the public relations front, even when defending some of Google’s most bogus & hypocritical policies. Imagine if your company had a b/s slogan of “don’t be evil” while operating with the above strategy. And yet he somehow manages to make it work. Jason Callus Anus Imagine entering an industry pulling in attention by calling everyone in the industry a bunch of scumbags – stating that you will clean things up through the use of manual intervention. Then imagine using the economic downturn to fire almost all your editorial employees and leveraging your built up domain authority to create a low quality automated general purpose web scraper , which stuffs Google with indexing their own search results (heavily wrapped in ads). And then imagine link farming to build authority , then using the leverage of that platform to start selling SEO services to corporate clients & selling links ! When Matt Cutts described scraper sites a few years back he said they were ” shoot-on-sight “. And yet Jason’s crappy site keeps gaining traffic while almost never adding any value anywhere. Whenever I think of Mr. Anus, I picture a used car salesman who moved to the state which doesn’t have a lemon law just so he could get the enjoyment of duping people with broken cars. And yet somehow he manages to pull it off. For public relations brilliance he gets a +1. And the same goes for claiming ignorance of SEO and claiming to be anti-spam so he can get away with passing his spam garbage off onto everyone else while rendering Google’s spam team flacid. Richard Rosenblatt In 1999 Richard Rosenblatt was able to sell iMall (have you ever heard of it?) for over a half-billion Dollars. He then sold MySpace near the top for $580 million. Trying to strike gold once more, he formed Demand Media and bought eHow.com to build a search-arbitrage content farm. Once growth rates began to slow he then created a controversy by trying to legitimize his model in the media, building his site tons more links. He then used that platform as a success story to get other publishing websites to engage in profit-sharing partnerships where he posts articles on huge trusted authoritative domains like USAToday.com. Now Demand Media is rumored to be gearing up for an IPO or sale : Demand Media, a closely watched startup that mines online search engine data to generate thousands of videos and web stories a day, has hired Goldman Sachs to explore an initial public offering. People familiar with the plans say the company could file for an IPO as early as August. Details have yet to be finalised, but the discussions involve pricing shares around November in an offering valuing the company at about $1.5bn. A little known fact amongst the SEO industry is that Richard also is the chairman of iCrossing , which is currently being rumored for sale to Hearst Publishing for ~ $400 million : Under the deal, which is in the final stages of negotiations, iCrossing, one of the nation’s biggest independent digital-marketing shops, is likely to fetch about $375 million, plus bonus payments if it reaches certain targets, these people said. … One person familiar with the matter cautioned that iCrossing, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz., could still decide to remain independent if it doesn’t attract the right price. Nice side gig! That guy flat out prints money. If he keeps it up, in a few years he might put Ben Bernanke to shame. Honorable Mentions Over the past few years certainly Jeremy Shoemaker , Brian Clark , and SugarRae have built up some nice empires – each with a vastly different approach. In terms of being great at building on the consulting model, Bruce Clay comes to mind. Tim Armstrong is tasked with turning around AOL, and if he is successful with it he would deserve a mention. I would also put Cygnus high on any SEO list, but he tends to be a bit shy, and is not very boastful in terms of what he has accomplished. John Andrews would make the list too, but then he doesn’t like lists !

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Who Are The Top 10 SEOs in the World?

Futuristic Ways of Creating Automated Link Building Tools

Posted by willcritchlow Rand recently asked you all for feedback about improving the blog. The two areas that you asked us to write about more were linkbuilding and tools . In a shameless populist move, I thought I’d write a post about tools for automating (bits of) linkbuilding . Recently, I