Screencast on links, SEO, and Google

A while back I did an information-packed 90-minute webinar for Marketing Profs called “Google in the Real World: How Links Boost Your Ranking”. I obtained permission from MarketingProfs to post an archived version of all the webinars I did for them on my site. I just created a screencast of this webinar on link building and uploaded it. Check it out…

Watch it as a streaming Flash video »

Or, alternatively download/watch as a Quicktime movie (72 MB).

Stay tuned and I’ll be posting many more!

Deriving Value from LinkedIn

I had been on LinkedIn for quite a while but I never gave it much thought or attention. I had never bothered filling out a meaningful profile for myself. And I had never sought to add any contacts to my network.

This year I saw the light — I saw how valuable LinkedIn can be if you know how to work it. I witnessed my colleague Brian Klais use LinkedIn to find some amazing candidates for SEO positions at our company Netconcepts. At the best of times it’s hard to hire for SEO positions, as those who are the most qualified are undoubtedly already pulling in a very respectable paycheck. LinkedIn made it a breeze for Brian. Brian’s success spurred me on to give LinkedIn a bit more of my attention.

So I completed a profile, worked to quadruple the size of my network, and obtained several endorsements from clients like SuperPages.com and Eurekster.com. (You can view my profile at www.linkedin.com/in/stephanspencer, if you’re curious.) Lo and behold, simply the act of adding friends and acquaintances to my network had within days resulted in a number of them renewing their conversations with me — including an SEO client from several years back who I hadn’t spoken to in many months; out of that renewed conversation he agreed to become a reference for our firm. Sometimes all it takes is to reach out to old friends and acquaintances and things start to happen. LinkedIn helps faciliate that process.

Some folks remain unconvinced of the value of LinkedIn. Like David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, who tried to pull the plug on his LinkedIn account but encountered difficulties doing so and very publicly riffed about it on their company’s Signal vs. Noise blog. I was pleased to see LinkedIn staffer Konstantin Guericke chime in and defuse the issue with a very constructive comment. I also noticed buried in that post’s comments several other excellent bits of commentary from LinkedIn users who have had similarly positive LinkedIn experiences to Brian’s and mine.

For example, Gordon Strause, a Senior Product Manager at Yahoo, had this to say:

…I have found Linkedin useful. It’s reconnected me with some former co-workers; I’ve used it to hire contractors and employees; I’ve even researched some competitive start-ups with it. I’m curious–is there anyone here claiming that Linkedin isn’t valuable, did they try to do anything? Did you try to find someone you’d lost touch with? Did you try to find someone that might be helpful to you (contractor or employee or expert)? Or, is it, I signed up and I’ve been waiting for my cookie? Waiting around for more invitations is clearly not that useful, unless someone finds you interesting.

And Ted Shelton, Founder and CEO of Personal Bee had this to say:

I have been using Linked In for a long time and feel that I have gotten a lot of value from it. I also feel that, as with any tool, it is the amount of time and effort that I invest in the tool that has determined the value that I have derived.

I don’t believe there is any magic bullet to having and making use of a social network — no software tool is going to replace the need to meet people, provide value to those people, develop relationships with those people etc. A tool can make it easier though to keep track (or rediscover) those people and can make it easier to handle routine communications requests.

Here are my rules for using Linked In–

(1) I never invite anyone to join my network that I don’t have a good real world relationship with.

(2) I never agree to join a network of someone else that I don’t have a good real world relationship.

(3) I never ask anyone for assistance through Linked In if it isn’t the kind of request that I would respond positively to.

As a result, I have hired employees referred through Linked In, I have been reconnected to colleagues from the past, I have done reference checks on people through the people we know in common, and I have been able to refer jobs to people in my extended network, helping my friend who are in my immediate network.

Some great points made by Ted and Gordon! (Funny how the comments on a well-trafficked blog like Signal vs Noise can actually exceed the quality of the post itself!)

For those who want to become masters at using LinkedIn to recruit great talent, you might want to check out the book Happy About LinkedIn for Recruiting, which is co-authored by Bill Vick and Des Walsh. (Des is a smart guy, I know him as a fellow contributor to BusinessBlogConsulting.com).

Bottom line: you’ll get out of LinkedIn what you put into it.

So all you social butterflies out there, put some effort into LinkedIn! Mark my words: it’ll be worth it.

eComXpo Virtual Trade Show opens its doors today

If you’re burned out from business travel but still want to partake in conferences / trade shows on ecommerce and online marketing, then a virtual trade show like eComXpo might be just the thing for you. eComXpo opens today and will go on for three days (Oct 24-26).

With such intellectual powerhouses as Chris Anderson and John Battelle keynoting, I’m sure the show will be a hit.

I’m speaking as part of their “eComXpo University,” their on-demand portion of the show that covers various aspects of Affiliate, Search and Interactive Marketing. My session, “Link Building Your Way to the Top of the Rankings” is a joint presentation with link building guru Eric Ward. Many of the University presentations (including my own) will be available free of charge to attendees (registration to attend the virtual trade show is free, btw) during the 3 day event. Check out Eric’s and my session if you get a chance. The University sessions will continue to be available to University Subscribers for up to 6 months following the close of eComXpo.

I’ve got 5 four-month Univerity subscriptions to give away to my loyal readers. That’s a $100 value. Email me at sspencer@netconcepts.com if you want one, but BE QUICK!

Screencast on how to optimize your blogs and RSS feeds

Since at least a few people seem to want me to expand on my presentation from the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, I have put a one-hour screencast together. In addition to covering all the slides in the Powerpoint deck, I also ran through an example of a corporate website that is powered by WordPress and that uses, in novel ways, a lot of the blog optimization techniques discussed in my presentation. The corporate site I am referring to is that of my company, Netconcepts.

Enjoy! And do let me know what you think of it.

Download or watch the video via streaming: Flash (10 MB) or WMV (22 MB) or Quicktime MPEG4 / iPod Video (59 MB)

Speaking today at DMA06 on blogs and RSS

If you’re at the DMA Annual Conference (DMA06), then I encourage you to check out the panel session I’m doing later today here in San Francisco at 4:30pm called Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been busy, so apologies for the lack of posting.

Last week I was in NYC speaking at the Shop.org annual summit. I moderated the Vertical Search panel at the Web 2.0 bootcamp. If you want to download my Powerpoint, which is a short intro to vertical search, you can get it here.

The art of requesting links

A compelling link request that I as a blogger want to act on is as rare as hen’s teeth. Nearly all the ones I get are complete garbage, like this one. When making a link request, these are the sorts of statements to avoid, as they will doom your request to the recipients Trash folder. I’ve included with each statement a hypothetical response from the intended recipient to give you a sense what they might be thinking as they delete your email in disgust…

Are your email response rates dropping?

If you’re seeing a decline in your email response rates, it wouldn’t be surprising; it’s a trend seen industry-wide over the the last 2 years. With open rates for B2C (business-to-consumer) at around 30% and clickthroughs at 6-7%, and for B2B (business-to-business) open rates at about 40% and clickthroughs at 10%, email marketing has become a tougher game than it was in the early days. Luckily, there are some actions you can take to stem this loss, and indeed counteract it, at least to some degree.

I should preface this by saying that some popular email clients (e.g. Outlook 2003) and webmail services (e.g. Gmail) don’t support images by default. This doesn’t mean that your email was not read, just that the email was not reported as read due to images not loading.

Nonetheless, fewer people are reading emails than before, and it’s becoming increasingly harder to peak your recipient’s interest and spur them to action. Here are a few tips to help you on your way to higher response rates in your email campaigns:

• Clean up the email format to make it more ‘scannable’. Cut down on the gratuitous branding at the top of the email and put the key messages / content teasers there instead. Remember, email messages are not web pages and should not be designed to look like such.
• Consider smaller, more targeted campaigns, tied to broader campaign strategies. e.g. your lists could also be segmented to target geographic groups or by gender. Indications are, from industry data, that smaller lists produce better response rates.
• Get more specific in your Subject line. A/B split tests show that Subject lines with specific calls-to-action increase open rates.
• Practice spam filter avoidance. This includes revisions to body copy, message headers, and HTML. I could write a whole article about that. Oh, wait a minute… I have!
• Experiment with send times. Friday has been shown to be the most ‘opened’ day, but this is a moving target. As soon as marketers all jump on the Friday-send bandwagon, response rates on Friday will drop because recipients will be overwhelmed by all the volume. At this point, Thursday night send seems like an appropriate send time for B2C emails.

Multivariate testing platforms and SEO compatibility

A client recently asked me if there were any SEO concerns around websites managing their content via automated content “enhancement” or “testing” systems such as Touch Clarity, Optimost, Vertster or Offermatica.

I am not aware of any issues with search engines misconstruing this as spam. I had a short conversation with the CEO of Offermatica when he presented at Search Engine Strategies last year and he said that Google is okay with what they are doing. There are too many major AdWords customers using multivariate testing for Google not to be careful not to penalize sites for this.

Offermatica use JavaScript to overlay and in effect replace the existing content for browsers with JavaScript enabled, so the spiders (who don’t execute JavaScript) don’t execute the Offermatica scripts and the underlying default HTML is what is “viewed” by the spiders.

As one blogger describes it, Offermatica’s solution produces a “control” copy for the spiders and through JavaScript (mboxes) display different pages to end-users. The blogger raises the concern that It potentially violates Google (see 1st bullet in “Quality Guidelines – Basic principles” section: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html) and Yahoo!’s (see 2nd bullet in “What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted” section: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html) search quality guidelines.

Nonetheless, as I stated above, I think the engines are careful not to penalize sites running Offermatica, Optimost etc.

The problem I have with conversion optimization services like Offermatica and Optimost is less that they could be misconstrued as spam, but rather the fact that they don’t take the potential SEO impact into account. So, for example, a conversion optimization test of the home page might show a clear winner as far as the the best converting variation. However, when that variation is then implemented as the new permanent home page, the rankings and search traffic may tank. The likelihood for unforseen consequences is great because Offermatica and Optimost do not understand SEO deeply at all.

Scott Miller, CEO of multivariate testing vendor Vertster whom I met at SES explained to me that they use an AJAX/DHTML approach to modifying the page content, done in a way that they claim is imperceptible to the search spiders. They identify areas on the page with specific id attributes, and then modify the content shown to users. This would only cause problems if it was used for “gaming” the search engines, and you get caught. They do not allow this usage of the tool, and will delete any users who may use it for this.

Sounds like a similar approach to Offermatica.

Anyways, a few considerations to take into account when implementing a multivariate testing platform…

My interview with the King of Website Content

I had the privilege of interviewing web content guru Gerry McGovern this week. Gerry shared some real gems. Here are a few highlights…

Gerry says the biggest mistake that companies make in regards to their website content is thinking that customers care one little bit about the company.

“Customers care about themselves, their loved ones and their community. They hate websites that are organization-centric. And how do you know if you have an organization-centric website? If any of your sentences or headings begin with the name of your organization. Stop talking about yourself. The customer knows who you are. They’re at your website. There’s a big fat logo at the top of the page screaming out your name. You’ve already got their attention. Now’s the time to give them some attention.”

Gerry says the best way to be customer-centric is to talk about benefits — in the second person — YOU. Paint a picture for your customer. Speak their language. Use their words. Stand where they stand. Feel what they feel. Forget you’re part of the organization and think like the customer.

Gerry then went on to share his own experiences as the leader of an agency with over 100 staff in the dotcom heydey, then as a solo consultant, and the lessons he has learned along the way.  He also has something to say about blogging. But mostly, he talked about Content. Content is King.

Read the full interview.