Real-Time Insights Finder: A How-to Video

We recently launched our Real-Time Insight Finder on the new Think Insights site — centralizing access to all our insights tools across Google. We hope you’ve tried it out and are finding it useful. Check out our new video to show how you can use Google’s Real-Time Insight Finder to support your marketing planning process [...]

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Ads stuck under review?

You have created some new ads, submitted them to AdWords only to find that they have been given a status of "Under Review". Normally, ads are reviewed and approved rather quickly, however you can often find yourself in a situation where your ads are stuck under review for weeks. Because of the number of accounts [...]

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Coming Soon: Ad Group Impression Share Metrics

Based on advertiser requests, we will soon offer ad group level impression share metrics for the Search and Display Networks. Once released, you can use ad group impression share data to, for example, better identify high performing ad groups that aren’t capturing the majority of available impressions. In the next few weeks, you will see [...]

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Create more Automated Rules and undo changes

We heard your feedback that you want Automated Rules to be even more flexible and useful, so we rolled out two improvements – increased rule limit to 100 and the ability to undo changes made by a rule. 1. Increased rule limit to 100 We increased the number of rules you can create from 10 [...]

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How to Use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder

By Tom Demers This is the third post in our series on creating and analyzing Google AdWords ads. In the first two posts we walked through creating an AdWords text ad and creating an AdWords image ad. Today’s post will focus on an alternate means of creating AdWords image ads: using the Google AdWords display [...]

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What’s new with Sitemaps

January 28th, 2012 admin

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:

The Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed. With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.
Another improvement is the ability to test a Sitemap. Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors. Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.
In addition to on-the-spot testing, we’ve got a new way of displaying errors which better exposes what types of issues a Sitemap contains. Instead of repeating the same kind of error many times for one Sitemap, errors and warnings are now grouped, and a few examples are given. Likewise, for Sitemap index files, we’ve aggregated errors and warnings from the child Sitemaps that the Sitemap index encloses. No longer will you need to click through each child Sitemap one by one.
Finally, we’ve changed the way the “Delete” button works. Now, it removes the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, both from your account and the accounts of the other owners of the site. Be aware that a Sitemap may still be read or processed by Google even if you delete if from Webmaster Tools. For example if you reference a Sitemap in your robots.txt file search engines may still attempt to process the Sitemap. To truly prevent a Sitemap from being processed, remove the file from your server or block it via robots.txt.
For more information on Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools and how Sitemaps work, visit our Help Center. If you have any questions, go to Webmaster Help Forum.
Written by Kamila Primke, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools

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SEO Pricing: 600+ Agencies Share Costs of Services & Pricing Models

January 26th, 2012 admin

AYTM

Near the end of December 2011, we ran a survey on this blog asking consultants and agencies of all sizes and geographies to contribute their pricing models and cost structures. I’m pleased to share the results of that survey in the hopes that it will give everyone in the search industry a better idea of the range of fees and the services provided.

Obviously, this data is imperfect – SEOmoz is not a professional data surveying firm and our only tool was a basic list of questions on SurveyMonkey. That said, I’d be surprised if a professional surveyor found dramatically different data – there was enough participation to receive a trustworthy sample size and firms provided their personal/contact information (many of which I recognized while digging through the responses, but obviously will not be sharing identities publicly), which means we likely did not receive intentionally manipulative/misleading information. The data is provided below in three formats – first, some personal, high level takeaways from the survey, next an infographic from the great folks at AYTM Market Research and finally, a dump of the responses in CSV and Excel formats (without any personally identifiable info).

Hourly Rates
(via AYTM’s infographic)

Do note that while 600+ responses were received, we’ve elected to share data only from those regions with 10+ responses (490 total), which include:

  • United States – 287 respondents
  • United Kingdom – 76 respondents
  • Canada – 34 respondents
  • Australia/New Zealand – 28 respondents
  • Germany/France/Italy/Netherlands – 34 respondents
  • India – 31 respondents

Many countries had 1-3 respondents and while we certainly appreciate those contributions, it’s our feeling that sharing this data could actually be misleading/non-productive as a single firm/consultant could dramatically skew the results. All the information in this blog post, the infographic and the Excel data dump are split into those 6 regions.

Top 9 Takeaways

These are my personal takeaways from the data:

  1. Hourly SEO Costs Vary Across Countries, but $76-$200/hour is Most Common
    With the exception of India (the only developing region that was well-represented in our survey), hourly costs of $76-$200 (representing three responses) covered 50%+ of all firms. It was highest in Australia/New Zealand at 62%, followed by 58.1% in the US and 56% in Canada. Granted, this is a wide range, but it provides the answer to a frequently-asked question from those seeking SEO services for the first time.
    _
  2. By-the-Project Pricing is Popular and Most Commonly $1,000-$7,500
    70.1% of respondents said they offer project-based pricing (the most common pricing system selected in the survey). 43% of consultancies were represented by the four price ranges: $1,001-$1,500, $1,501-$2,500, $2501-$5,000 and $5,001-$7,500. Obviously, there’s a wide variety of prices here, not surprising given that the types of projects offered may be quite diverse. 
    _
  3. Monthly Retainer Pricing Has the Widest Distribution
    While both hourly and by-the-project rates do have a wide range of pricing, monthly retainers are certainly the most distributed of the price questions asked in our survey. The two most common were $251-$500/month (13.8%) and $2,501-$5,000/month (11.3%).
    _
  4. The Death of Hands-On SEO Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
    There’s been plenty of hand-wringing over the past few years from both bloggers and SEO clients complaining that consulting firms don’t provide enough "hands-on" help. Yet, in the survey, 88.5% of respondents said they offer "hands-on SEO changes to sites" and 79.1% provide "hands-on link building." Clearly, hands-on help is still very popular.
    _
  5. Inbound/Organic > Pure SEO
    Pure "SEO" consultants/agencies may be fading as broader "inbound marketing" services firms (offering SEO, social, content, conversion, analytics, etc) rise. The data showed 150 respondents (25%) saying they were primarily focused on SEO while a slightly greater number, 160 (26.7%), offered a broader range.
    _
  6. Web Design/Development Agencies do a Lot of SEO
    The third most popular type of respondent was a web design/development agency offering SEO services. In the UK, these types of firms were better represented than either SEO-focused providers or broader inbound/organic firms.
    _
  7. Employees:Clients/Month Ratio is Between 1-2
    The screenshot below takes advantage of SurveyMonkey’s crosstab feature, which enabled me to look at the number of monthly active clients broken down by the quantity of employees a consulting firm has (you can only choose 5 responses at once, but the data’s still revealing). 
    Employees:Clients/Month Ratio
    _
  8. Vast Majority of Consultants Service Small-Medium Businesses
    This may seem mathematically obvious, but it’s not always top of mind at many of the marketing conferences I’ve attended, nor the blogosphere in general. A disproportionate amount of attention is often focused on top brands, but in the world of consulting, most firms service relatively small businesses. Even those who do serve larger businesses (perhaps aspirationally) often offer services to small and medium businesses. 41% of respondents offer consulting to small, hyperlocal businesses, e.g. the restaurant around the corner.
    _
  9. Though Project-Based Pricing is Most Popular, the Majority of Consultancies Also Offer Monthly Retainers and Hourly Rates
    Early in my SEO career, project-based pricing seemed relatively rare (though quantifying this is hard since no formal surveys I’m aware of collected this info). Today, it was the top response, offered by 70% of the participating firms. Monthly retainer pricing was next, offered by 60%, followed closely by hourly rates (55%).

I’m certain others perusing the data will find other interesting takeaways (hope to read some of those in the comments).

Infographic from AYTM

Many thanks to the team at AYTM for putting together the following graphic representing the data in the survey across the 6 regions with more than 10 respondents. The image below shows a sample of their work and links to a larger version here on Moz:

Small version of SEO Pricing Infographic

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Real-Time Insights Finder: A How-to Video

January 25th, 2012 admin

We recently launched our Real-Time Insight Finder on the new Think Insights site — centralizing access to all our insights tools across Google. We hope you’ve tried it out and are finding it useful.
Check out our new video to show how you can use Google’s Real-Time Insight Finder to support your marketing planning process and take your trend spotting to the next level. Discover how this real-time data can be a window into the attitudes and perceptions of your consumers. Even better, see how it can help inform your next brand positioning, media strategy or just look smart in your next big meeting.


Posted by Justin Joy, Marketing Manager, Agency Marketing
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Ads stuck under review?

January 21st, 2012 admin

You have created some new ads, submitted them to AdWords only to find that they have been given a status of "Under Review".

Normally, ads are reviewed and approved rather quickly, however you can often find yourself in a situation where your ads are stuck under review for weeks.

Because of the number of accounts that I manage, I can run into this situation several times in a week. I have created a template email that usually helps to resolve the issue. 

It seems like this is a common problem for others as well, as Google have now created a new form specifically for this issue. Here is what they have told me: 

"For future reference, if your ads have been under review for more than 3 business days, you can send your ad review request to our team directly via this link: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/request.py?contact_type=approval_request "

I have yet to use the form. Hopefully it will work even faster than my emails.

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Coming Soon: Ad Group Impression Share Metrics

January 18th, 2012 admin

    Based on advertiser requests, we will soon offer ad group level impression share metrics for the Search and Display Networks. Once released, you can use ad group impression share data to, for example, better identify high performing ad groups that aren’t capturing the majority of available impressions.

    In the next few weeks, you will see three new columns that can be added to your ad groups tab:

    1. Impr. Share: the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.

    2. Lost IS (Rank): the share of impressions lost due to your Ad Rank. Note that Lost IS (rank) will not be shown if you were at or near your budget for part or all of a given day (a.k.a. were “budget constrained”) during the date range being examined.

    3. Exact Match IS: (Search Network only) the percentage of impressions you received for searches that exactly matched your keyword divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions you were eligible to receive.

        In addition to providing more detailed metrics, we are also planning to update our algorithms to provide more accurate campaign impression share metrics. As a result, there are some important changes you should be aware of:

        1. Refined campaign-level statistics: Since we are improving our algorithms, we will update all campaign-level impression share metrics back to May 2011. As a result, you will no longer be able to see campaign-level historical impression share metrics before May 2011. If you wish to preserve a record of the pre-May 2011 campaign impression share data, you will need to download a report before January 30, 2012.

        2. Once-a-day updates: In order to calculate your impression share metrics with a greater degree of accuracy, we will update all impression share metrics once per day (approximately noon Pacific Time [GTM-8]). As a result, the impression share data that you see will not reflect impression share for the current day, and may not include the previous day’s impression share as well (depending on what time of the day you run your report).

          These changes will begin to roll out to all advertisers globally on January 30, 2012, so look out for them in your account soon. Once these changes are live, you’ll be able to find more detailed information in the AdWords Help Center.

          Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

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          Create more Automated Rules and undo changes

          January 18th, 2012 admin

          We heard your feedback that you want Automated Rules to be even more flexible and useful, so we rolled out two improvements – increased rule limit to 100 and the ability to undo changes made by a rule.

          1. Increased rule limit to 100

          We increased the number of rules you can create from 10 rules per user to 100. This should allow you to easily try out new rules — have a look at common examples to see how advertisers are using Automated Rules.

          2. Ability to undo changes made by a rule

          In the event that a rule doesn’t make the changes that you expect, you can easily undo them by clicking the “Undo” button in the Logs table. We hope that undo can help you feel more comfortable experimenting with Automated Rules. You can try out new strategies for a few days and quickly return to the state in which you started if you’re not happy with the performance. Please see this AdWords Help Center article for more information about the undo feature.

          Not currently using Automated Rules?

          Automated Rules is a feature that lets you save time by scheduling automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify. Please see this AdWords Help Center article to see popular types of rules created by advertisers. To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations.

          Posted by Andrew Truong, Product Marketing Manager

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          How to Use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder

          January 17th, 2012 admin

            By Tom Demers This is the third post in our series on creating and analyzing Google AdWords ads. In the first two posts we walked through creating an AdWords text ad and creating an AdWords image ad. Today’s post will focus on an alternate means of creating AdWords image ads: using the Google AdWords display ad builder.

            Using the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder

            The display ad builder has a lot of different features and options, so we’ll walk through some of the different things you can leverage the tool for in your AdWords campaigns. First you navigate to the tool and start to create a new ad with it:

            Display Ad Builder

            The first decision you’re faced with is the type of “template” you want to leverage in your campaign. In the left navigation of the display ad builder product you have a lot of options:

            Display Ad Themes

            As you can see there are a number of “themes” and templates available to you. Assuming you’re creating a standard image ad for your display campaign, you can either leverage the featured/suggested/show all options or the specific themes (the seasonal or industry-specific options). Once you select a category of ad you’ll be shown the different visual templates available in each section:

            Display Ad Templates

            As you can see you’re also offered the opportunity to sort the ads by:

            • Newest

            • Most Popular

            • Highest Click-Through Rate

                Since you’re likely looking to drive qualified traffic using these ads, I find it’s best to consider the “highest click-through” and “newest” ads first as these have a history of working from a CTR perspective in the case of highest click-through, and are fresher in the case of the newest ads. The most popular ads are just that: the ads being most often used by other advertisers. One of the major disadvantages to using the display ad builder is that the ads can sometimes be too cookie-cutter and not sufficiently customized to your own brand and offering; choosing the ads most frequently used by other advertisers actually exacerbates this problem.

                In choosing a template you want to keep in mind a few things:

                • Which ads best match the look and feel of your landing page? Remember anyone who clicks your ad will be sent to your landing page; you want that experience to be fluid and consistent.

                • Which option offers the best means of messaging to prospects? Choose a theme that will give you the right amount of space with your headline, benefit statement, and call to action while also positioning each of these properly.

                • Which ad maps most closely with your goals? If you’re using this display campaign for direct response, you want an ad that will be differentiating, disruptive, and eye-catching – which best accomplishes that? If you’re using the ad more for branding, which layout most closely aligns with your brand and allows for the best use of your logo and brand colors?

                    Also note as you’re evaluating your options in this initial screen that the colors the ad currently uses can be changed:

                    Customize Display Ad

                    As you can see the next step in customizing your ad with Display Ad Builder is applying:

                    • Colors and fonts

                    • Your logo

                    • Your display and destination URLs

                        If you’re severely design-challenged, you might try to enlist someone with at least a bit of a “design eye” to make these customizations, but altering fonts and colors is actually quite easy, particularly if you’ve chosen a template that already fits well with your site’s basic look and feel and will incorporate your logo and messaging well.

                        Also note that much like with uploading a display ad, we’re presented with a series of size options. As I mentioned in the last post in this series (on creating an image ad) creating your ad in multiple formats offers you an opportunity to have it show up in multiple formats, and is generally a good idea (you get to see how your creative performs on a variety of different sites).

                        Finally you’ll be presented with a preview of your ads – take a moment to review the ad layout in different formats here, as the different shapes can sometimes change the look and feel of an ad fairly dramatically.

                        That’s it! In a matter of minutes you can have a presentable image ad created for your AdWords campaigns. While this really is a very handy tool, it’s worth noting that often having an ad professionally designed to be a bit more customized and differentiated can more than pay for itself in terms of improved performance. That said, the Display Ad Builder can be invaluable if you’re looking to:

                        • Get an ad or series of ads up very quickly

                        • Need to rotate ads in and out seasonally or for frequent promotion (and need control and speed in this process)

                        • Are looking to test one or a few headlines/basic concepts and would like to get feedback quickly before committing design resources to building out different banners

                            • And many small to mid-sized advertisers in particular can build out a perfectly profitable display campaign without engaging any design resources and costs whatsoever by leveraging the Display Ad Builder.

                            About the Author

                            Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM LLC, a boutique search marketing agency offering search marketing consulting services including pay-per-click account management, a comprehensive SEO audit, content marketing services, and a variety of link building services and packages such as guest post placement and blogging strategy.

                            You can learn more about how Measured SEM can help your business by getting in touch with Tom directly via email at tom at measuredsem.com, or by following him on Twitter.

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                          71 Good Ways to Build Links

                          January 14th, 2012 admin

                           

                          Love for Lists

                          1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can’t resist linking to these (hint, hint).

                          2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

                          3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

                          4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

                          5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)

                          Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

                          6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.)

                          7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

                          8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

                          PPC as a Link Building Tool

                          9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

                          News & Syndication

                          10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

                          11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

                          12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

                          13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

                          14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

                          15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

                          16. Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

                          17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

                          Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

                          18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

                          19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

                          20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

                          21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

                          22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

                          23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

                          Local & Business Links

                          24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

                          25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

                          26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

                          27. List your site at the local library’s Web site.

                          28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

                          29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other’s business cards.

                          30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links.

                          Easy Free Links

                          31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

                          32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

                          33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

                          34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

                          35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

                          36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

                          37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).

                          38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

                          Have a Big Heart for Reviews

                          39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

                          40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

                          41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

                          42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

                          43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

                          44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

                          Blogs & the Blogosphere

                          45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

                          46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

                          47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

                          48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

                          49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

                          Design as a Linking Element

                          50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

                          51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

                          52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

                          Hire Help

                          53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned ‘PR’ (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

                          54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

                          Link Trading

                          55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

                          56. In case you didn’t get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

                          Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

                          57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

                          58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

                          59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

                          60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

                          61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

                          Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

                          62. Sue Google.

                          63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

                          Freebies & Giveaways

                          64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

                          65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

                          66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like WordPress. Don’t forget the "Designed by example.com" bit in the footer!

                          67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

                          68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

                          Conferences & Social Interaction

                          69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) "celebrities" in your industry make great link bait.

                          70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem "real" in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

                          71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

                          30 Bad Ways to Build Links

                          Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

                          Directories

                          72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

                          Forum Spam

                          73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

                          74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

                          75. Post nothing but "me too" posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

                          76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

                          77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

                          78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

                          79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

                          Blog Spam

                          80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

                          81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

                          82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

                          83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

                          84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

                          85. Don’t even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

                          Garbage Link Exchanges

                          86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

                          87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

                          88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

                          89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

                          Spam People in Person

                          90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

                          91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

                          Be Persistant

                          92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

                          93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

                          94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

                          95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

                          Getting Links by Being a Jerk

                          96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

                          97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

                          98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

                          99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say "excuse you, jerk".

                          100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

                          101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more "hilariously dumb" than it is a "bad linking practice".

                          Calls to Action

                          Did you really make it to the end of the list? Thanks for staying with us! And now for our shameless plugs:

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                          30 search quality highlights (with codenames!): December

                          January 11th, 2012 admin

                            Today we’re continuing our monthly series with details about many of the improvements we make to search. For the month of December, you’ll find a list of 30 search improvements, 9 of which we’ve blogged about previously. In addition, to have a little fun we’re including a sampling of codenames along with the list.

                            Codenames make changes easier to talk about and remember, and they can also be a lot of fun. You might remember “Panda” and “Caffeine,” but you probably don’t remember last month’s “Top result selection code rewrite.” That’s why many of the search quality improvements we make have internal codenames.

                            To give you just one example, our old question-answering feature in search was codenamed “DAFFIE,” which stood for the “Database of All Fact Fiction Information and Exaggeration.” In 2010 the team did a complete overhaul of the system and released a new short answers feature. Amit Singhal, thinking of Daffy Duck, decided to codename the new system “Porky Pig”, because Porky Pig was trying to kill Daffy Duck. The team laughed thinking that Amit was just confused (everyone knows Elmer Fudd is the hunter). But, it turns out Amit was right, as he often is. In 1937 in theoriginal cartoon to feature Daffy Duck, Porky Pig was in fact hunting Daffy.

                            Here’s the list for December:

                            • Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.

                            • More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.

                            • Soft 404 Detection. Web servers generally return the 404 status code when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist. However, some sites are configured to return otherstatus codes, even though the page content might explain that the page was not found. We call these soft 404s (or “crypto” 404s) and they can be problematic for search engines because we aren’t sure if we should ignore the pages. This change is an improvement to how we detect soft 404s, especially in Russian, German and Spanish. For all you webmasters out there, the best practice is still to always use the correct response code.

                            • More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”] On domains other than .com, users have the option to see only results from their particular country. This is a new algorithm that uses several signals to better determine where web documents are from, improving the accuracy of this feature.

                            • More rich snippets. We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.

                            • Better infrastructure for autocomplete. This is an infrastructure change to improve how our autocomplete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes (the beginning part of a search).

                            • Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.

                            • Google Instant enhancements for Japanese. For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.

                            • More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”] We made a few improvements to how we determine what date to associate with a document. As a result, you’ll see more accurate dates annotating search results.

                            • Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”] We’ve added new live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results. These results now provide the latest scores, schedules and standings for your favorite football teams.

                            • Improved dataset for related queries. We are now using an improved dataset on term relationships to find related queries. We sometimes include results for queries that are related to your original search, and this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.

                            • Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”] Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are related to the original query but have fewer words. We made several changes to our algorithms to make them more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.

                            • Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”] This change improves our result quality for lyrics searches.

                            • Tweak to +1 button on results page. As part of our continued effort to deliver a beautifully simple user experience across Google products, we’ve made a subtle tweak to how the +1 button appears on the results page. Now the +1 button will only appear when you hover over a result or when the result has already been +1’d.

                            • Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”] We launched a new Vietnamese spelling model. This will help give more accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.

                            • Upcoming events at venues. We’ve improved the recently released places panel for event venues. For major venues, we now show up to three upcoming events on the right of the page. Try it for [staples center los angeles] or [paradise rock club boston].

                            • Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.

                            • Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”] This update refines how we handle Hebrew synonyms across multiple languages. Context matters a lot for translation, so this change prevents us from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context.

                            • Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"] We updated our SafeSearch tool to provide better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.

                            • Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr.

                            • Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

                              Posted by Pandu Nayak, Member of Technical Staff

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                              Conversion Optimization: Go Beyond A/B Testing and MVT

                              January 3rd, 2012 admin

                              A/B testing and MVT are a great way to help you drive more conversion on your website. A/B testing and MVT help you decide the best layout, headlines, images, message copy etc. that motivates the visitors to complete a transaction.
                              However, A/B testing and MVT will only get you so far. If a visitor does not complete a transaction during later steps of the funnel then there are generally other reasons than those that can be simply fixed by changing the page layout, copy, images etc. . Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you can’t improve conversions by optimizing later steps of the funnel. You can, but you will get to a point of diminishing return and you will need something else to drive more conversions. Moreover, the learning from A/B and MVT will only help you going forward but you will lose many customers while you are doing the tests.
                              Keep in mind that as a visitor moves down the conversion funnel his/her commitment to complete the transaction (convert) increases. If you are able to capitalize on that motivation in time, you will drive higher conversions.
                              Here are some of the ways to help you drive conversions from those visitors who walked away without converting (sales, download etc.):

                              1. On-Site Targeting – This is very effective technique to drive user to take desired actions. You can target visitors with personalized message/offer, prompting them to complete a transaction, when they come back to your site at a later time.
                              2. Remarketing or Retargeting via Ads– This works great to bring the potential customers, who have wandered away on the internet, back to your site. Using a service like Google Adwords you can reach your visitors on various sites which use Google Adsense. There are several remarketing services that you can use but Google Adwords, though not very sophisticated, is a good way to get started. Read my post on Google Adwords Remarketing before moving forward.
                              3. Online Chat – Online chats are a great way to make a human connection with the visitors while he/she is still on the site and in the buying mode. Some products/people need human interaction to persuade and a triggered online chat might just do the trick.
                              4. SMS – Everybody seems to own a cell phone these day, follow-up the shopping cart abandoners with an SMS message, hit the iron while it is still hot. SMS marketing is not very prevalent in US but is heavily used in many other countries.
                              5. Email Follow-up – Following up with an email is another excellent and widely used way to drive conversions from those unfinished conversions.
                              6. Phone Calls – Similar to online chat, phone calls have a human element to them. Phone calls work very effectively even in converting a person who might have decided otherwise. Phone conversion rate is generally a lot higher than web conversion rates and phone salesperson can even do upsell to drive more revenue/visitors, though the cost also goes up. Striking a right balance is critical and needs proper assessment and strategy.
                              7. Direct Mail - Yes it still does work in many cases.

                              Keep in mind that timing and right follow up strategy is very critical when contacting those that did not convert. If you do need help in this area send me a note.

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