Ask Kalena

You look familiar. Are you on Twitter? Subscribed to my feed yet?

Greg Boser from 3DogMedia is now up to talk about creating a bulletproof link strategy.

Step 1: Link Map / Blueprint

Greg’s team creates a Link Map Profile. Greg says analyse the top sites in your space and work out the job ahead

Things to look at during this stage:

- average number of links

- average age of competing sites

- average PR of competing sites – will determine how hard it’s going to be to compete. Also take into account the unique IPs.

- average number of linking domains

- average age of linking domains

- average PR distribution of incoming links

- average concentration of anchor text

Greg then showed an example profile for an *Online Poker* site – to give us an idea of the data he’s dealing with. Each of these profiles will be different. This particular profile proves that it’s going to be a hard space to get results in using link strategy. Provides the blueprint

Step 2: Tactics

Once you have the big picture – your blueprint and now it’s time to look at the individual tactices each competitor is uins to gain links

- make a list of the top 2-3 tactics

- usually competitors will only be using 1 or 2 tactics, giving you the opportunity to overtake their efforts by using all tactics available to you.

- Yes, you can purchase links – provided they fit the criteria established in your blueprint.

- Get the quality links first – because as links age, they count more.

- When you get to the end of the process, your link map will look just how you planned it.

Tools

- Majestic SEO is highly recommended by Greg

- Linkscape

- Use tools that go out to get data then compare with your own

- Site Explorer

- RavenTools

- SEOBook Toolbar

During Q and A, Greg Boser said that if you want to target Australia and get good link popularity in Oz, make sure 90% of your links are from Australian sites.

Welcome to Day 1 of the SMX Sydney Conference!

I’ll be live blogging as many sessions as I can and writing up the others later. Today we kick off with the keynote from Chris Sherman, Executive Editor from Search Engine Land.

Chris starts his presentation with a YouTube video by Raymond Crowe using shadow puppets to mime “What a Wonderful World”. Like shadow puppets, search marketing looks impossible to do but we’re just out there doing it.

Chris says that the last few weeks have brought incredible change. Seismic change in the industry! We’ve come out of the global economic crisis. Online ad spend is picking up. WE’ll see $54B in global ad spend. Search is 47% of that spend, which is promising for our industry. B2B lead generation spend is still lower than before the economicdownturn, but that may be a lagging indicator.

Chris then showed a series of videos to describe online search marketing.

1) The Renaissance Site:

Video from 1969, taking a look at the *future* of electronic technology. Chris says that what they’re describing in that video is really the Google of today. Although they started laser-focused on search, now they offer “something of everything to everybody”.

Google Fast Flip

New product – combines Google News with a easy view layout.

Google News Timeline

Takes news and shows how stories are developing over a specific timeline.

Google Dashboard

Allows you to see what info Google is tracking about you. How you are represented as an entity on Google. Showed his own dashboard. The amount of data is extraordinary. The dashboard now gives you control over how much of this information is public and available. Demonstrates Google’s commitment to privacy.

Google Australia new products:

- Google Insights for Search – compare one search with another etc.

- Google map icons – allows you to claim a local business using Google Places on Google Maps.

- Google Sponsored Listings – within maps now.  An alternative to Google AdWords.

- YouTube promoted videos – You can now sponsor videos via YouTube so your videos come up the top – not officiallyavailable in Australia yet, except via AdWords AU.

- Google AdWords Webinars – new to GG Australia

- Google Speaks ‘Strayan! New feature to hep Aussies find local info, in local jargon. Cute!

This week, GG has hired a team of photographers to use cameras within the Streetview cars to focus in on more interesting visual data they come across (similar to what Bing are doing with virtual reality?).

Google Woes

- legal woes

- privacy issues

- China and censorship

Google: The new evil empire?

Chris has heard rumors of GG replacing Microsoft as the new evil empire.

- Photographers have sued over book deal.

- EU looking at antitrust

- Execs convicted of privacy violations in Italy

- Xerox and Quintura sue over patents

- Streetview lawsuits in multiple countries

- Launch of Google Buzz

- and the beating goes on…

Chris doesn’t think they will get into major legal difficulties. In terms of privacy though, they might have trouble. When they launched Buzz, they did it without permission and that was a major concern – especially if you use public shared computers.

In response, Matt Cutts went into great detail on the European Public Policy Blog about privacy and transparency. Mind you, he link dropped in a nuclear fashion in that post which amused Chris greatly.

Keep in mind, Facebook’s privacy is MUCH more relaxed and dangerous, in his opinion.

Dealing with the Great Firewall

- Google moved Google.cn servers to Hong Kong last month

- But China is blocking access to the site from mainland computers

- Excellent analysis at http://bit.ly/93pmnY

- Not just China: Google is censoring in other countries as well

- You can use proxies from within China to get past the censorship

- Chris has never personally experienced censorship when running SEM conferences in China

New as of Yesterday

The Google Govt Requests and Removal Tool – a new tool which is a maps overlay to allow people to request information to be removed or request more data. You can even see in real time what requests have been complied with or not. When you mouse over China, it says “Chinese government considers this information a State secret so data is not available”. Article at: “Google Responds to Privacy Concerns With…”

2) Emperor’s New Clothes

Showed video of a plane experiencing a very very dodgy landing. Chris says this represents Yahoo.

- Yahoo is the proud owner of the Emperor’s New Clothes

- Microhoo competition: Salvation or sellout? Microsoft does the heavy search lifting while Yahoo sells ads.

I was discussing this with Chris last night at the Tweetup. Chris thinks this is a clever move by Yahoo, but it really gives all the power to MS/Bing.

- Yahoo has divided the labor – “we’re more interested in what happens before and after search than search itself. In other words, we’re going back to our *browse* / portal mode.

3) Assimilator as Innovator

Showed a clip from Star Trek from The Borg. This represents Microsoft / Bing.  “You will be assimilated”. In other words, Chris says, MS is very clever at making people do what they want. Acquisition after acquisition.

Now part of the collective:

medstory

tellme

aquantive

jellyfish

multimap

farecast

Fast Search & Transfer – AllThe Web

Powerset

Bada-Bing!

- Bing is arguably a better na,e than Live Search, but what does it mean? In Chinese it means “Very certain to answer”.

- Fun image licensing for their home page means rotation of photos – always different. Chris uses Bing as his home page because he loves their home page photos so much.

- Powerset does a semantic search rather than algorithmic. Different to other SE’s. Uses Freebase to gather data. If you drill down, it will give you options like Wikipedia on steroids – will go and semantic search ALL Wikipedia articles on a topic you search for – very powerful.

- Bing Maps – geolocation can be an issue (e.g. Thinks Chris is in Melbourne right now). But they do some things very well. Mapp Apps are very cool. What’s Nearby also good. Signs and Billboards etc.

- Bing has captured billions of data sources for travel sources and put them into searchable form. Based on historical data, Bing.com/travel can tell you things like when is the best time to buy a ticket to New York – when it’s cheaper etc. This is powerful stuff! Shows graphs and charts and heat maps to tell you costs of flights, accommodation etc. Unique to Bing.

Chris sees this as the way going forward. This type of travel data may get rolled out to retail, eg volume of sales etc.

Bing SearchRank – another new feature not yet available in Australia. Get an idea of what searches are popular right now, similar to Google Trends.

4) The Shiny New Disruptor

Wofram Alpha. It’s a new computational knowledge engine. Wolfram’s founder believes the complex world can be reduced to simple rules and those rules are computable.

- WA contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50K types of algorithms and models and linguistic data for 1000 languages.

- In WA, put in a mathematical problem and Google will shoot out an answer. But in WA, it will give you the ellipse, a visual definition of the calculation. Put in a chord search and it will come up with the scale visually, plus allow you to play it.

- Ask questions and WA will give you all the data you could ever wish for. People can type in things like “When will I die?” Scary answers. *10 peanut M&Ms* WA will respond with the dietary calories. *Who’s the fairest of them all”?* Snow White. They are obviously paying attention, as answer has changed since Chris first started asking it some months ago. *Am I drunk?* Will give you the alcohol percentages of common drinks.

Social Media

- love it or hate it, SM is huge.

- How big?

- Globally, 1 billion+ users wasting spending 2 billion minutes/month

- Share of global online time:

Facebook 16%

YouTube 9%

Google 5%

This is HUGE. If you’re SEOing for Google, you might want to rethink your priorities and start advertising on Facebook and YouTube.

Email’s not going away anytime soon, but stats show that Social Media is more popular with people. Email has flatlined in terms of time spent, while SM has gone to vertical curve.

Twitter

- 75% of Twitter’s traffic comes from APIs

- Twitter has become a *real* search engine

- Twitter has just announced monetization – “promoted Tweets”. Chris finds this disengenous, although he concedes it will probably be successful.

- Based on KW bids, ads will be displayed at top of search results

- Resonance reuqired (think Quality Score), based on retweets, replies, hashtags, clicked links etc. Searchers need to engage with the ads for them to maintain position – this is a Google approach. Makes sense given key staff are ex FeedBurner / Google staff.

- Third party distribution

- Twitter palns to expand program to it’s partners and then it will become massive.

- other options – Tweetup – contextual sponsored tweets displayed on  publisher sites, using a CPM model now with cost-per-click and cost-per-new-follower.

- TweetUp – is a new tool -the brainchild of GoTo.com’s founder. It’s a network of the world’s best tweeters. Response has been sceptical, but hey, the response to GoTo’s idea of PPC caused the same reaction in people.

Facebook

Chris says Facebook is here to stay. So many ways to reach people and the size of the audience is astonishing, he says. You can’t ignore Facebook. There are definitely ways to measure the impact of a Social Media campaign.

- If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

- lots of fertile options for marketers

- pages, apps, ads, polls,

- And analytics via Facebook Insights

If you’re looking for ways to leverage Facebook, try:

InsideFacebook.com
AllFacebook.com

One third of the people ON Facebook are interested in marketing on Facebook – encouraging. Chris says, if you’ve avoided SM until now? STOP and reconsider.

Real Time Search & SEO

- As real time search becomes more commonplace, it is displacing *traditional* search results

- Fundamental SEO is still important, but there are new opportunities to gain exposure thanks to real-time algos

- At it’s heart, Caffeine is an attempt to capture real time crawl. Larry Page is very impatient about this concept.

- Real time search impacts SEO in a huge, huge way. The algorithm has basically been re-written. Can’t do much right now except continue to use best-practice.

Personalization

- This will amplify things

- Personalization affects search results

- For text results, can’t do much

- However, opportunities to gain real estate via universal search are still good

- Think *digital asset optimization*

Chris says, don’t despair, these changes offer oppportunities for you to use them to your advantage. Because most people won’t be – now’s your chance.

Mobile Search

Chris says “Are we there yet?” YES we are. Tipping point has hit this year – mobile advertising has become popular with the advent of smart phones.

-mobile advertising is the new Point of Sale

- 5.8 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2013; 30% will be smartphone users (Portio Research)

- Mobile ad spend 2015

New Data from Morgan Stanley:

- Sometime between 2013 and 2014, there will be more mobile Internet uers than desktop PC users

- Growth of the iPhone happened at 11x the growth of Desktop Internet!

- These stats will impact Facebook users too obviously

- If you’re not already doing so – GO MOBILE NOW

- Little competition right now

- Go multi-mobile – see Cindy Krum’s article on Search Engine Land

- Consider optimizing your site for mobile search

- Use GPS based mobile apps to leverage your business e.g. 4Square, Gowalla, Placecast (GPS based advertising)

Video Marketing

- YouTube is second largest search engine right now

- Syndicate your videos widely

- Use video because your competitors probably aren’t

- Embed meta data, relevant titles & filenames

- Use appropriate on-page SEO

- Descriptive text

- Include your URLs in the video to encourage viral linking and viewing

A Huge Trend: Targeting

- Types of targeting include device / geographic / demographic / behavioral

Device Targeting

- GG, MS Yahoo

- Device platofrm tgt allows you to target your ads to PCs and iphones and others

Goegraphic Targeting

- GG, MS, Yahoo

- Language targeting occurs at country level or radius

- Also beningn, used to reach specific groups and exclude others

Demographic Targeting

- MS (full), YH (partial), Google (exploring options)

- Targeting ads based on age, gender, income etc.

- similar to direct mail, but uses data from volunteered information

- Can be problematic, especially on shared computers

Behavioural Targeting

- MS, YH, Google content only. Not search or Gmail

- Ads targeted based on online behavior (visits, pruchases, queries etc).

- Benefit = ads match interest closely

- Concern = privacy? What privacy?

Merging Online and Offline Data

- Exelate & Aperture pull data from Neilsen and other co’s to combine data with search behaviror

Opting out of Targeted Ads

- Google makes it kind of fun but not clear and hard to find

- MS uses legalese and it’s boring

- YH also makes it unclear and difficult to find

- You can opt out of 200 Ad networks by going to NAI (inc big ones)

Conclusion

- Web search has consolidated to few major players

- Good news – competition among majors has also increased, good for SEM and searchers

- Counterintuitive: Advertising may DECREASE as search engines continue to refine targeting options

Dear Kalena

I have a site: balirental.net, which is a forwarded URL to a subdomain of surfwomen.com/balirental.

When I view the page source of balirental.net, there are no Meta Tags at all. There is this however, src=’http://surfwomen.com/balirental/’, which, when clicked on, shows all my Meta Tags. Is this hurting my SEO? Do the robots see/crawl the src?

Thanks, Paul

Hi Paul,

There are many ways to forward or redirect URLs or domains – not all of them are search engine friendly.

The technique used on your site is not actually a redirect at all, it uses “frames”, which is a largely outdated technique which is one of the worst methods, and is not doing you any SEO favours at all.

Currently all the search engines see when they look at your site is what you can see yourself when you view the source – i.e. 13 lines of code with no content and no keywords.  At the moment, there is no chance of this domain achieving any sort of rankings in the search results.

Any “content” which is on the page within the frame is all associated with the surfwomen.com domain rather than your own domain.

If you want your domain to be found via search then you will need to develop your own unique content, under your own domain, and get as many good quality links to your site as possible.

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

A few  years ago I discovered a terrific new business tool and I was so excited about its potential that I wrote a review article about it to share my discovery with others.

The product was Proposal Kit.  My review was called Close the Sale With Proposal Kit and I’ve had a lot of feedback from readers of that article, thanking me for introducing them to the product.

In case you’re not already familiar with the software, Proposal Kit takes the guesswork out of drafting a proposal or contract. It automates the chore of putting together a complex business proposal. Basically, Proposal Kit provides a comprehensive range of templates to suit any business requirement and helps you build a framework for your proposal to match virtually any product or service offering.

You then flesh out the templates with your own data and contact details. Templates are particularly suited to online businesses and include documents for the initial sales pitch, the planning stage, estimating, contracting, project timelines, analysis and even invoicing.

I’ve been using Proposal Kit for over 5 years now and I am still as enthusiastic about it as ever. So when developers of the product (Cyber Sea) told me of their latest upgrade this month, I was very excited.

You see, amongst the 40 new contract templates available in the new versions of Proposal Kit Pro and Contract Kit Pro is a Search Engine Optimization Services Contract, designed for SEOs just like me.

Let’s take a look at what’s been upgraded in the latest versions of the product:

Proposal Packs 9.0

• Over 300 pages of new material have been added to Proposal Pack (new templates, checklists, samples, instructional material) adding over 60% more material to this version.
• Added 61 new proposal templates increasing the total number of templates to over 270. Templates added include: Profile, Client Summary, Abstract, Estimate, Significance, Activities, Design, Planning, Approach, Innovativeness, Project Plan, System Plan, Promotion, Site Planning, Environmental, Public Relations, Community, Coordination, Responsibilities, Documentation, Authority, Measures of Success, Dissemination, Budget Information, Wholesale Price List, Retail Price List, Cost Effectiveness, Resources, Hourly Services Contract, Invoice, Memorandum of Understanding, Credentials, Capabilities, Accreditations, Certifications, Geographic Information, Key Positions, Contractors, Legal Eligibility, Authorization, Board of Directors, Policies, Flow Chart, Board Resolution, Contact Letter, Letter of Transmittal, Support Letter, Commitment Letter, Collaboration Letters, Report, Tab, Worksheet, Supplied Form, Appendix F, Appendix G, Appendix H, Appendix I, Appendix J, Fax Cover Sheet, Bid / No-Bid Checklist, Grant Proposal Development Checklist.
• Added a proposal bid/no-bid decision checklist.
• Added a government grant proposal development checklist.
• Added a complete service level agreement to the Contract and Terms template.
• Added an additional manual for writing Federal government grant proposals using Proposal Pack.
• 15 general business sample proposals have been added.
• 10 Federal government grant sample proposals have been added (USDA, Department of Justice, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development).
• New Title Page graphics have been added for “Resume”, “Contract”, “Plan”, “Submission”, “Presentation”, “Report”, “Study”, “Estimate”, “Response”.
• The Table of Contents has been updated to add all of the new templates.

Proposal Kit Pro 12.0

Over 500 pages of new material have been added to Proposal Kit Pro (new templates, checklists, samples, instructional material) adding over 50% more material to this version.

Contract Pack:

• Minor grammar changes made to some documents.
• Four new categories of contracts have been added: Advertising and Marketing, Graphics and Printing, Computer Systems and Internal Company Plans.
• 41 new contracts, agreements and related documents have been added (over 144 pages of new material): Authorization to Start Work, Replication Quote Order Form, Email Marketing Creative by Agency Agreement, Email Marketing Creative by Designer Agreement, Pay Per Click (PPC) SEO Campaign Services Contract, Signage and Printing Order Form, Print Quote Form, Colocation Hosting Short Form Contract, Managed Hosting Service Level Agreement, Web Hosting Change Addendum, Pocket Photo Release Agreement, Photo Reprint Rights Agreement, Photo Credit Waiver, General Services Agreement, Repair Estimate Quote, General Contractor Work Order, Right of First Refusal Partnership Agreement, Right of First Refusal with Non-Disclosure Agreement, Works for Hire Agreement, Project Acceptance Partial Signoff, Project Acceptance Simple Signoff, Software Development Plan, Reprint Rights Agreement, SEO Services Reseller Contract, Disaster Recovery Plan, Software Disaster Recovery Plan, Human Resources Guide Update Addendum, PDA Usage Policy, Wireless Networking Usage Policy, Application for Employment, Employment Non-Compete and Non-Disclosure, Drug and Alcohol Testing Consent Form, Employee Promotion Authorization Form, Employee Notice of Salary Increase Form, Employee Injury Report Form, Expense Report, Hourly Services Agreement, Company Equipment Checkout Form, Agency Photo Shoot Model Release Form, Employee Grievance Form, Employee Demotion Form
• Many existing contracts have been updated with new replaceable tags and consistent usage of terms.
• Added 20 new standard mail merge tags to many documents.

Estimate Pack:

• Updated HTML organizer to help find and open documents easier.
• Added Customer and Proposal Number tags to all spreadsheets for helping organize estimates by customer and proposal.
• Updated line items in existing spreadsheets with additional material.
• Added Help Desk Services Estimate Spreadsheet.
• Added Print Project Estimate Spreadsheet.
• Added Flash Animation Project Estimate Spreadsheet.
• Added Network Server Setup Estimate Spreadsheet.
• Added Software Services Project Estimate Spreadsheet.
• Added Computer Repair and Maintenance Estimate Spreadsheet.
• Project Management Pack:
• Renamed product from “Web Plan Kit” to “Project Management Pack”.
• Minor updates to existing documents to update outdated material.
• Added Web Development Worksheet Overview.
• Added Describe Your Web Site Worksheet (R01).
• Added Describe User Controlled Content Worksheet (R02).
• Added Describe Your Web Site Functions Worksheet (R03).
• Added Describe Your Web Site Users Worksheet (R04).
• Added Describe Your Web Site Administration Worksheet (R05).
• Added Describe Your Web Site Home Page Worksheet (R06).
• Added Project Plan Worksheet.
• Added Project Analysis Overview Worksheet.
• Added SEO Organic Keyword Report.
• Added SEO Pay Per Click Keyword Report.
• Added Customer Service Call Log Spreadsheet.
• Added Disaster Recovery Plan.
• Added Software Disaster Recovery Plan.
• Added Expense Report Spreadsheet.

Visit the Proposal Kit website for details on pricing, a product comparison chart and information on how to upgrade.

SEO Proposal Template

Now, about that SEO Services Contract that I’m so excited about. Having run an SEO business for over ten years now, I KNOW how difficult it is to produce a reliable, standard contract to give to SEO clients. Search engine optimization can be such a complex process that it is vitally important your client contract spells out your services, delivery schedule, responsibilities and campaign expectations while addressing all areas of potential client confusion.

Such contracts take time to develop and can be very expensive if drawn up from scratch by a law firm. Many SEOs, especially those just starting out, simply don’t have the time, resources, knowledge or budget to have a high quality, water-tight contract developed for their business. That’s why I see the inclusion of an SEO Services Contract in the latest Proposal Kit upgrade as a boon for SEOs everywhere.

Even if your business already has a contract in place, the purchase price of Proposal Kit Pro or Contract Pack Pro, (both which come with the SEO contract included), is well worth the investment to be able to compare your contract with the detailed sample provided. Something important to keep in mind is that legal contracts in the Contract Pack should not be viewed as binding legal documents until they are reviewed by your lawyer. Because every business has different products, services, clients and operates in different geographical environments, legal requirements vary widely. By all means use the contract templates to draft your contract, but make sure you have the document carefully reviewed by your company law firm to ensure it meets your specific legal requirements. This is emphasized within the templates.

Not all sections of the SEO Contract will apply to every SEO business, particularly those listed under “Services Provided”, but the document is so comprehensive that you can mix and match sections and clauses that are specifically relevant to your business, such as “Delivery Dates and Milestones”, “Web Page Creation, Edits and Custom Programming” and “Keyword Selection”. I’ve already spotted three or four important clauses that our existing client contract overlooks. Not to mention the benefits of having access to hundreds of professional proposal templates from which to pick and choose to match your own business requirements.

For smaller SEOs or those just starting out in the industry, the latest version of Proposal Kit could save you a fortune and give your business a much needed injection of professionalism.

Of course that goes for non-SEO businesses too!

Hi Kalena

I’ve been looking at purchasing a good SEO tool. Have been looking at WebCeo and Internet Business Promoter. What is your opinion of these, are they worth the price tags? (Looks like they scan entire webpages, spot problems, and suggest solutions).

Or do you have any good suggestions?

Cedric

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Hi Cedric

No tool will do the SEO for you. But some tools can speed up the SEO process by providing information about a page such as:

- title and meta tags
- keyword density
- backward links
- alt img tags
- anchor text

Some tools can also save you a lot of time by looking up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a variety of search engines and showing you the keyword rank for a particular page on those SERPs.

I haven’t reviewed WebCEO or IBP for a number of years, so I can’t comment on those. But I recently had the opportunity of reviewing the following tools and can recommend them:

KPMRS
Raven Tools (this one I tend to use almost daily)
SEOmoz Tools
SEOBook Tools

Search Engine Wiki also has a whole category on SEO/SEM tools.

Hope this helps!

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Like to learn more about SEO? Download my free SEO lesson. No catch.