An APPSUMO + MIXERGY

Production

SEO for Startups*Building A Brand and Getting

Found by Customers

* Transcript

Rand FishkinCo-Founder & CEO, SEOmoz

with

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STARTUP SEOAndrew: So, Rand, do you have an ex-ample of what our listener will be able to do at the end of this program?

Rand:Yeah,IthinkIcandefinitelydothat,Andrew. So why don’t we talk real quick about a promotion that we did. We’re try-ingtohiresomeengineersand,specifically,get people to refer software engineers to SEOmoz. I’ll show you something cool that we’ve done recently. Let’s see if you search for “refer an engineer,” oh, look at that, what a convenient coincidence. “Refer an engi-neer” surprisingly comes up number one and there you go; “Refer a software engineer to SEOmoz, make $12,000.”

This is a promotion that we did and then wedidsomeSEOaroundit.Wefigureditwould be very convenient if we could just tell people, we’re out at a conference, we’re meeting people at a hack-a-thon, “Google ‘refer an engineer’ and you’ll not only see that we’re good at SEO, which is something we should be good at, but also exactly the promotion that you need.” You don’t have to hand them a business card and you don’t have to give them the URL. You can tell them to just Google “refer an engineer.” So it’s a cool thing.

Andrew: That’s incredibly powerful. By the way, I can’t believe you’re offering $12,000 to anyone who refers an engineer to SEO-moz. That gets my attention on its own.

Rand: I was going to say and the engineer gets $12,000 for signing up. Yeah, so we went all out with this.

Andrew: Wow. All right. Well, I’d like to learnhowtodothat.Here’soneofthefirstis-sues that I have. I don’t know what keywords

I should go after. How do I decide?

Rand: Yeah. This is a tough call, right? I’m goingtolookatmytrafficsourcesoverthelast few months, and if I go in and look at thekeywordsthatsentmetraffic,thisisinmyGoogle Analytics account for the SEOmoz website. I can see that there are a lot of dif-ferentkeywordssendingmetraffic,butnotallofthemaresendinggreatqualitytraffic.Some of those send conversions, people who end up buying a membership or taking a free trial or signing up to get e-mail from us, andsomeofthemsendtrafficthat’soflowto middling quality at best.

So here we go. We can look down the list, and you can see some branded terms. SEO, that’s a pretty good keyword, get a lot of trafficforthat.SEOtools,ourtoolbar,SEOblog, that’s a good one to rank for. But you get this idea of like, huh, if I just looked at the things that are already sending me traf-fic,Iwouldn’thavethatideaofopportunity.WherecouldIgoandfindthekeywordsthatmightsendmegreattraffic?Andtodothat,Google’s actually got some really good tools for this. So let’s go in here and search for “SEO tools,” and I can say I only want ideas close to my website, but I’m going to be pretty international.

Andrew: How do we get to that? We go to adwords.google.com, and we look for keyword tools?

Rand: That’s right, or you can just search for AdWords tool or keyword tool in Google. I believekeywordtool,thefirstresultwillcomeup as that AdWords tool. There you go, the firstone.Googleisalsoreasonablygoodattheir own SEO, which is nice. When I do a search in here, it will show me a few things that are kind of interesting. I get this idea of

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how many searches there are per month, the competition. Now remember, that’s AdWords competition, not SEO competition.

I get this list and then I can say, “Well, why don’t we sort by the global monthly search-es, free SEO tools, SEO tools for keywords, Google SEO tools, best SEO tools.” These all might be kinds of things that I would consider. And if I want to, the next step that I might take is actually buying some of these in paid search. So if I do a quick search here.

Andrew: I just wanted to make sure that I understood what was on that page be-fore we move on past it. Is it still up on your screen?

Rand: Sure. It’s right here.

Andrew: There it is.

Rand: Essentially, we’ve got these keyword columns, and then we’re showing global and local searches. The biggest thing to be aware of over here on the left-hand side is this match type. See that broad, exact, and phrase?

Andrew: Right.

Rand: If I show only exact, it’ll make sure that it only shows phrases that contain that exact word, and that can actually be a much bet-ter idea. So let’s do that.

Andrew: And at the top, you typed in a key phrase that was already sending you trafficandyou’relookingforphrasesarounditthatmightsendyouevenmoretraffic.What you’re seeing is keywords on the left. The competition, I guess the bigger the bar, the more competition there is for people who are trying to buy those keywords from

Google AdWords. Monthly global search-es gives you an indication of how many searches are being done, and local monthly searches, I guess, means in your neighbor-hood, in your part of the country. Is that right?

Rand: Right. So in the advanced options up here at the top, if I had selected just the United States, for example, I can redo that search, and then the local monthly searches should show me just the queries that are tak-ing place in the U.S.

Andrew: I see.

Rand: And that’s what I’m seeing now. So 6,600 in the U.S., 33,000 worldwide.

Andrew: What’s our goal here, Rand? Are we looking for a phrase that has not much competition but a lot of global searches?

Rand: It depends on what you’re trying to do. The three things that I really look for in a keyword – and only a few of these can be gotten from this tool – you want as high a volume as possible while being relevant to the things that you’re trying to achieve. So SEO tools might be very relevant for us. It’s probably not super relevant for lots of other people.

Andrew: Right.

Rand:Ifyouhavespecifice-commerceprod-ucts,themorespecificthoseproducts,thosequeries tend to be, the more products you’re likely to sell versus the broad searches. Let’s say I’m selling Batman comic books. Some-one who searches for Batman is probably go-ing to be a terrible customer. Someone who searches for Batman the Dark Knight graphic novels is probably an excellent customer.

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So the volume is one thing. The value or potential value of the conversions is another. Andthenthethirdoneisdifficulty.Unfortu-nately, competition only shows you the dif-ficultyorthepriceofrankingintheAdWordsresults. So let’s take a quick look at a Google search result over here. Here’s SEO tools, and you can see SEOmoz up there at the top being a high amount. So right there’s an ad, and then here are the normal results. So we’re ranking fourth for that, below the new search, unfortunately. This is called the or-ganic results, and Google doesn’t really give you a great idea of what it takes to rank in those results, but luckily, there are some tools to help with this.

I’m going to show off a tool that SEOmoz makes that does this. But there are several other ones, too. If I search for a keyword dif-ficultytoolandItypein“SEOtools,”it’llgiveme a sense of how powerful and important those sites are that are ranking. Wow, that is extremely [inaudible 07:42] results. That’s going to be very hard to try and rank for or to try and move up in. And there I’ve got the Google AdWords volume number that I saw [inaudible 07:51] from the tool, as well, sort of showing that.

So I can see, based on the importance, this is from SEOmoz data, but page authority, domain authority, how tough is it going to be to outrank the pages that are in there. And you can see those top four results. Oh, man, those are beasts, those are monsters. That’s goingtobehard.Sowhatyouwanttofindare words that have high volume, high value, lowdifficulty.

Andrew: I guess using both these tools, we canfigureoutwhicharetherightkeywords,which are the ones that have high volume,

lowdifficulty.

Rand: Yeah. One of the things that we like to do is kind of store this data just in a key table here. So you can see, I guess I recently searched for “what is the best chat tool for customer support,” which is actually kind of surprisingly hard. But here are some easy ones: “Dreams La Romana,” not too hard; “Maritime Hotel New York,” less challeng-ing; and then tougher things like “pony and peanut butter,” which are harder to search for. And there’s the volume, so I can get kind of a sense and then maybe build out a da-tabase or build out an Excel spreadsheet, rather, that can help me identify which terms and phrases I should be targeting.

Andrew: So we come up with a few hunches and we test those hunches by buy-ing keywords that match those phrases. And if those phrases covert for us, then we know we’re on to something, we’ve got keywords that we need to try to rank for in the organic search results. What do we do next?

Rand: This process is not entirely unchalleng-ing, but the biggest thing that we need to do next is what I call keyword targeting. So why don’t we just do a quick on-page opti-mization. It’s kind of nice that we rank for all thisstuffbecauseitmakesiteasytofind.Thisprocess of on-page optimization is essentially we want to do some things on the page to indicate, not just to search engines, but also to visitors that this page is about the topic that they are searching for and it contains great information on that topic, maybe a great tool, a great resource, something they can download.

The search results, particularly in the organic side, bias towards things that people want to link to, want to share, have good, relevant,

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deep, accurate content, oftentimes have good visuals or video or images. Those are all the kinds of things that we need to be think-ing about when we’re building these per-fectly optimized pages for Google.

It’s much less about things like, “Oh, I need to worry about putting my keyword seven times on the page or using the meta keywords tag,” which isn’t even used anymore by the search engines, and much more about say-ing, “Hey, here’s the keyword. Let’s make surethatthefirstwordisinthetitleandit’sinthefirstfewparagraphsandthatthesubjectof the page is actually about that, because search engines do pretty sophisticated text analysestotrytofigurethesethingsout.Andthen let’s make sure that it’s super relevant and valuable for visitors so that they’re very happy when they see that result.”

Andrew: Okay. So if I were to use Word-Press, Drupal, Joomla – I’m looking here at a list of all the publishing platforms that are out there – they all make it easy for me to put in my keywords in the sections that you’ve got up on your screen right now, on your blog post. And what you’re saying is if you’re targeting a phrase like “SEO tools,” in that header, use the word SEO tools. If you’re using SEO tools as one of the phrases that you’re targeting, make sure to include it in the blog post itself. Even in the picture, it looks like we should include it?

Rand: Yeah. Well, what I would say is in the picture, what I really like having is, for exam-ple, a relevant image that someone might say, “Wow, that’s a great image. If I was go-ing to make a presentation and I was going to talk about this topic, that’s the image I would want to use.” That means lots of good things for your page. Not only have we seen better ranking correlations with pages that

use good alt attributes and good text in their alt attributes, but we also see that people link more to those pages and they share those pages more on Twitter and Facebook and all these kinds of things.

I’m just going to quickly show you inside WordPress. This is my personal blog, and I’ll show you in here it couldn’t be easier to target a keyword inside WordPress. It’s really, really quite simple. You can see at the top, “enter title here”, and then there’s the post. Let’s say I wanted to target something like “Andrew Warner rocks the house,” which is probably a highly competitive search result, lots of people are trying to rank for that. It gets so many searches every day, it’s just unbelievable.

And then I might want to say, “Why does An-drew Warner rock so hard?” It’s easy, right? I’ve got these things in here. Maybe I want to make a graphic showing the amount of rocking that you’ve done over the years, that graphic showing a nice chart going up, may-be a picture of your face, the kinds of things where people would think, “It’s relevant, it’s sharing worthy, it’s got good content, it an-swersthequestion.I’mverysatisfiedbythis.”You can see Google doing so many things over the last few years to make sure that the relevancy and the quality of the results that they have is going up dramatically, especial-ly the last few months.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about things like the Google Farmer update or the stack overflowupdatethattheymade,butbothofthose had a big impact on a lot of, let’s say, low quality sites going down.

Andrew: And with all those changes, what we’re talking about here today still works, still applies, and it sounds like you’re

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saying it works even more because the com-petition that was creating shoddy text and shoddy content before is getting downgrad-ed.

Rand: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s kind of a beautiful symbiotic relationship. If you’re doing great inbound marketing, great con-tent creation, and doing these things with a sharing-likely audience in mind, you just have so much more opportunity to rank because Google is doing such a good job.

Andrew: Now that I understand the ba-sics, I understand that I’d want to have a good picture, I’d want to have a good headline, I’d want to have content that re-lated to my keywords, what about the other elements of the page here, like categories, the tags are somewhere on there, maybe even the excerpt? What else should I be paying attention to, to help me with the . . .

Rand: There are a few things that can make some sense. For example, I might want to have something like, let’s take this up here and we’ll make it the headline, heading one. That might actually be a good idea because it will make it stand out for users, and the H1 has some SEO value, as well. I might want to add a new category. So not necessarily, but if I decide that Andrew Warner is a topic that I’m going to be writing about a lot or maybe I’m going to be writing about people who rock the house quite a bit, I can create that category, and now it lives inside that catego-ry. It helps tell the search engines, “Hey, this is relevant,” and it helps tell visitors when they get to my site, “I want to know more people who rock the house,” and they can click that link and see those types of things.

We also talked about the images, so I might want to do something like put in an actual

image. Let’s go throw an image in here. I canselectafile.I’mgoingtopretendthatIdon’t have ten pictures of you on my hard drive already. It’s being a little slow here. There we go. Let’s take this back link screen shot and we’ll put that in there.

SowhenIuploadthisfile,Imightwanttodothingslikecallthefile“AndrewWarnerrocksthe house” and I might want to make the alternate text, which is the text not just that search engines see, but remember, anyone using a screen reader, anyone who’s on a mobile device that’s not rendering images, that’s the text that they’re going to see to describe the image. So you really want to make sure that you’re not spamming or misleading with that because you’re not just fooling the engines, you’re essentially screw-ing over blind or disabled users and mobile device users. So that’s a really bad thing to do.

But we can go in here and say, “Andrew Warner rocks” into my alt text there, and I can save my changes and have that nice relevant image. Well, we’ll assume this is a relevant image. It’s not in this case, but you get the idea. We can put that into the blog post. So these are quite good things to be doing for SEO.

But this on-page optimization is really kind of the tip of the iceberg. It’s the things that you don’t see, the things behind the scenes that really matter.

Andrew: First of all, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve read some of this stuff before and it just didn’t click with me until I saw here up on the screen. The other thing that I like about what you’re doing is I don’t feel overwhelmed. I feel like I could do all this stuff. Can I set up WordPress? Absolutely. Is Joomla similar to

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this? Absolutely. Can I do this tomorrow? Can I do this as soon as you and I are done? A hundred percent.

Rand: Yeah.

Andrew: I don’t feel overwhelmed and that feels good, because a lot of times SEO, it feels like there are all these experts that are really good at it and I’m never going to learn any of it and I’d better just stay away and leave it to the experts and just mind my own business.

Rand: One of the things that’s pretty nice about this is let’s say that, for example, I don’t have WordPress or Drupal or Joomla or some of these easier systems, and I’m wondering did I do a good job, did I not do a good job. There is a free tool on SEOmoz to help do on-page analysis. There are other good ones out there. I just want to express that this is simple, basic stuff. You don’t need to know very much about SEO at all to be able to do this.

So let’s take, for example, a page. Why don’t we take our SEO tools page on SEOmoz and plug it in there. So here’s this SEOmoz.org/tools, and I can plug that in and do some on-page optimization. Oh, look, here we go. So here’s title tag, something that SEOmoz might want to rank for because lots of people are searching for title tags. How do I optimize for that? And here’s a nice little report grade. I’ve got a B. Maybe I want to get an A. What would I have to do to get an A? Well, I can scroll right down here and see, “Oh, I haven’t used rel=canonical. That might a good idea, because if people are producing my URL, linking to it with weird things like the Feed-Burner or Twitter parameters at the end, it might not be getting all the credit it could.”

Oh, look at that. That’s no good. I have used the words “title tag” 21 times on this page. It’s possible I’ve gone a little bit overboard. I might want to look into that. Maybe I’ve gone too far. But I’ve done a lot of other things right. I can see this is pretty good. Here’s a nice little explanation.

So this type of stuff, it tends to be pretty sim-ple. If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole, there are always options. That’s why thereareexpertsinthisfieldandconsultantswho charge $1,000 an hour is because there are deep ways to do it. It’s so wonderful because, like you said, you can pop open WordPress, do a little bit of keyword research, say I want to target this keyword, build a page around it, and then start working on marketing that page, which will really bring more links and references to it and help it move up in the search engines.

Andrew: All right. I’ve got a couple of other questions about on-page optimization, actuallythreequestions.Thefirstis:Whatison-page optimization and as opposed to what?

Rand: On-page optimization is all the stuff we’ve been doing. It’s essentially anything that I do on my actual website or web pages to help make them rank higher. It compares itself, I guess, to off-page optimization, which is really about the links and citations and references to the page; things like, “Can I get the news to link to me? Can I have other bloggers link to me? Can I have forums linked to me?” Those kinds of things.

Andrew: The other question was: We talk-ed about categories and how we can cat-egorize our posts to make them more useful for users and for search engines. What about tags? I know that that’s another feature.

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Rand: Yeah. Actually, there’s a great blog post about this if you ever want to learn a ton about the history of meta tags. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land did a great article called “The Meta Keywords Tag 101: How to Legally Hide Words on your Page.” He talks about how, back in the old days of SEO, this was really important and search engines really stopped using it around 2002 to 2003, and now they’re all publicly saying, “No, we don’t use the meta keywords tag at all. We ignore it. It doesn’t help with ranking. It doesn’t even help with discovery.”

You can see Danny doing a test in there of his meta keywords tag and showing how it doesn’t impact anything. At SEOmoz, we have some correlation data showing it’s use-less. So, the only thing I would say about the meta keywords tags is if you want to show your competition all the keywords that you’re trying to rank for, I recommend using it. If you don’t, then I wouldn’t recommend doing it.

Andrew: Okay. Then you used a phrase earlier that I wanted to come back and ask about. Rel=canonical, what is that? Rand: The canonical URL tag is something that the search engines came out with be-cause they realized that there’s a big prob-lem in the SEO space in general. Basically, the canonical URL tag, I’ve got some nice cartoons here that help illustrate this. The ca-nonical URL tag was meant to solve a prob-lem that exists across the Web and has for a long time.

Check out this URL. I’ve got SEOmoz.org/blog and then I’ve got SEOmoz.org/blog?ref=123. And you see this all the time. If I follow a link from Twitter, from FeedBurner, if I’m on a site like the New York Times and I click the print

version, I get a different URL but with the same content. So the engines have this really tough time saying, “Wait a minute. Which one is the original? Which is the one that I should rank, because there are these four different versions? They all look really similar. Some of them earn links. Should we be as-signing that link juice separately, or does it all go to one page?” And this is a great way of telling the engines, “Hey guys, this page over here, that’s the original. Any other copies that you might see of this, refer them back to here.”

So we can essentially take something like I’ve got category systems that create multiple versions of the same page, or I’ve got print-only URLs, or I have something like session IDs, the guy down here in Orange who’s got these session IDs at the end of his URLs. All of those can be solved with the rel=canonical text. It’s a [inaudible 23:33], I think the en-gines came out with it, I guess, whatever day this blog post was published, 2009, and it’s been super helpful.

Andrew: Okay. And I see the blog post up there on your screen, too, and people can go directly to it. So we talked about on-page optimization. What’s next?

Rand: From here, the next part is where the tough part really begins. In SEO, the build it and they will come mentality, generally speaking, does not work. Unless you can findanareaoranichewherenobodyelseis competing, you’re going to really have to get your feet on the street, start beat-ing down people’s doors, and make them aware that you have this great content.

When I look down the search results . . . let’s do a quick search for your name, Andrew. Hopefully this won’t bring up anything em-

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barrassing.Icanseeherethatthefirsttwore-sults are from Mixergy. In fact, they’re ranked even higher than your personal website, An-drewWarner.com. One of the reasons for that is that there are more links pointing to Mixer-gy, and higher quality links potentially, point-ing to Mixergy saying, “Here’s where Andrew Warner talks about these things.” So even though look it’s not in the title tag, [inaudible 24:55], and it is clearly in the title tag here, it’s in the title tag of your Twitter account.

Twitter is a really powerful website. It’s sur-prising that they don’t rank. But, wow, that’s strong, and it’s [inaudible 25:06] based on the fact that lots of people are referencing it. Google invented page ranks, just a classic link citation method, and now there’s all this focus on links. So you need to be out there marketing, trying to earn those links and ref-erences back to your site.

Andrew: I see. Okay. So that’s the off-site optimization that we need, the right content that will get people to link over to us.

Rand: Yeah. And once we write it, we can’t just stop there. We need to then go and proactively promote it. Just like we wouldn’t build a great piece of software and then sit on our hands and hope that people are go-ing to come and use our software, or make a great startup and not tell anyone about, we’ve got to go tell people.

That’s where social media and inbound marketing have been so great. I can go to Twitter and I can tell my friends about it. I can go to Facebook and I can update about it. I can write a blog on that site and tell people about it. I can make presentations and up-load them to SlideShare and DocStoc and Scribd. I can make videos and put them on YouTube. There are all these marketing chan-

nels, many of which will lead back with a link. Even the ones that don’t can lead to a sec-ond order impact of more people seeing it, findingit,andlinkingtoit.

Andrew: Okay. So we go to all the sites that you talked about and we point there and we create links back to our site and we get content that’s so exciting that oth-ers link back. What about using the phrases thatwepickedoutinthefirstsegmentofthisprogram? How do we use them when we’re gettingtrafficandwhenwe’regettingallthese links?

Rand: Sure. Let’s go back to our “refer an engineer” example. Google came out last year and said, “We’re now using Twitter data, the links that are tweeted in Twitter, to help us rank results, kind of like the way we used links for the last decade.” So we said, ‘Hmm, really? All right, let’s make a custom bitly URL that uses our URL shortener and then the text of that URL is ‘refer-an-engineer.’” This is probably one of the things that helped this page rank so well because everyone started tweeting it and linking to it with “refer an en-gineer.”Thatdefinitelyisgoingtohelpitrankhigher than it ordinarily would.

I like to think really hard when I build my bio. The biography that I’m putting together goes onto a lot of different websites. I make sure that, okay, [inaudible 27:44] to SEOmoz. I make sure that the name is in there, and when I link to my wife’s site, I’m going to put her name in there and then I’m going to link to these sites in a relevant way. I’ll link to the book that I wrote, “The Art of SEO,” in a rel-evant way. So thinking about how you’re link-ing is important.

I wouldn’t go overboard with this. Just like everything else on the planet, you can abuse

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and manipulate it and that causes lots of nasty problems. Be smart about what you say. Don’t just put click here and here, check this out, and oh, here’s another thing you should look at. Call them what they are. Call them what you want to rank for. Use the text that people are searching for. It’s not just good for search engines, it’s good for people who are browsing that page, too, because theyknowwhatthey’regoingtofindonthelink that they click.

Andrew: I remember after I interviewed you,oneofthefirstthingsIdidwas,inorderto give you your biography on my page, I just copied and pasted the bio exactly as you wrote it with all the links and everything that you had and put it in the bio on my page with the links. So what I was doing there was saying, “40 Under 40” list and linking to, since that’s one of the phrases there that’s hyper-linked, I was linking the way you wanted me to, to the page you wanted me to point out. Why did you pick “40 Under 40” as one of the phrases that you were going to hyperlink?

Rand: In this case, what I’m actually trying to do is to get these things to generally rank for or to appear next to when you search for my name. So what I want to see is the words and phrases that are associated with Rand Fish-kin. Actually, let’s do a quick Google search. You can see a bunch of these rankings. So there’smyLinkedInprofile,myTwitterprofilethat I link to, there’s my personal blog that I’ve been linking to. This stuff works kind of well.

I’ll show you some others. So Mixergy, there’s the interview I did with you, which is some-thing I regularly link to, the book, “The Art of SEO” book, SEO, the blog, the interview. These are all kinds of things that I want to come up and want to be associated with my

name. So using those in the bio intelligently. I would love it if, maybe sometime soon, “40 Under 40” list or “30 Under 30” comes up in there.

Andrew: So if anyone says, “We need to findahotnewentrepreneur.Let’slookatthe‘30 Under 30’ or ‘40 Under 40’ list,” you want them to be able to come up on your page andsay,“Let’sfindoutmoreaboutRand.”

Rand: Yeah, you got it.

Andrew: That’s the way it would work if that was your plan.

Rand: Exactly. When I come up, I want Mix-ergy, for example, to rank number one for interviews with entrepreneurs or learn entre-preneurship. So I might say, “Andrew Warner runs Mixergy, the number one startup site for learning entrepreneurship,” and you can have that whole phrase, “Mixergy learning entrepreneurship” link back to the Mixergy website. That’s probably a great way to go because your bio gets put all over the Web in these ways.

And it’s not just about bios, it’s about all sorts of things. When you have a signature link that you might leave in a forum, or in your Quoraprofilewhenyou’reansweringques-tions in there, you might want to have those linkspointback.Googlenowhasprofiles.There’sGoogleProfiles.Iwasjusttestingthatout a couple of days ago. They let you cus-tomize the text that you want to have over here.There’smySEOmozcompanyprofile,my personal blog, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter. I can actually edit the text of what those links are. I should probably do that.

Andrew: Isee.Sowefindthekeywords,we use them on our page, we start tweet-

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ing out the keywords that we want so that people start re-tweeting using the phrases that we’re coming up with. We link to them fromourprofileandallovertheplace.Evenfrom bit.ly, you go to bit.ly and you create a shortcut and you customize that shortcut by adding the key phrases that you want. What else? Those seem pretty easy. What’s the nextlevelofdifficultybeyondthat?

Rand:Thedifficulty,inalotofthesecases.. . so this is our bit.ly account and you can see that I can create a keyword. I’ll just go ahead and make a quick link here to show you. I might say, “Oh, let’s customize that link sothatit’skeyword-difficultyasopposedtojust fm6qvs.” That might actually be a smart thing to do when I tweet it out. That’s pretty cool.

What I was going to say is that the tough part comes in when you’re trying to outrank peo-ple who have quite a bit more years of doing SEO work, of trying to rank for these things ahead of them. For example, let’s say boy, if I want to overtake SEO Chat, which started running about three or four years before SEOmoz did, has had a tools page for a long time, has had a lot of people linking to them, they’ve got embedded tools, I might actu-allywanttofigureoutsomethinglike,“Hey,where did they get their links? Can I get the same links or some of the same links that they got, some of the same links that all these other people got?”

Andrew: So how do you do that?

Rand: Well, it turns out there are actually some good tools. This is a tool called Open Site Explorer, and most of it is free to use, much of it is free to use. So I can dive in here, click “get link data,” and now I can see here’s all these people who are linking

to that SEO Chat page. Why don’t we take a look through the linking domains and see which domains, which websites, are actually linking to them. Wow, they’ve got a link from Wikipedia, from StatCounter, from Reference.com, Squidoo, Submit Express, from Word-Press, from Mashable. That’s a pretty good set of links. I can export to CSV and sort of seethespecificpages,orIcanclickonthelinking pages tab and see where those links are coming from.

For example, I might want to say, “Just show me the followed and 301 links from external tojustthispageandfilterthoseresults.”ThenI can get a real sense for like, huh, Web De-signer Wall, okay. They got a link from there. I wonder if I should contact the guys who run Web Designer Wall, which are a couple of pretty cool bloggers in the design space and see if next time they write about SEO, could I could contribute an article for you. I’ll write a good piece about SEO, and then in my bio or the snippet about who I am, who wrote the article, I can link back to my stuff. Maybe I can even get listed on that SEO guide for designers page if they like my stuff better.

Andrew: I see. And if I see Mashable on there, I can reach out to Mashable. I know that they take a lot of outsourced writers or contributed writers and ask to write a blog post there.

Rand: Guest posting is a great way to go. It’s not just these sort of more manual systems of link building. You also want to be thinking bigger and broader, like, “Hey, how could I build something that everyone would always be linking to? Maybe I could build an em-beddable widget. I’ll make an SEO tool or I’ll make a tool or a graphic that someone can go put on their website and then it will auto-matically link back to me with the right kinds

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of anchor text.”

Infographics are really popular for this. I’ll show you a great one. This comes from Oli Gardner, who’s the Director of Inbound Mar-keting at Unbounce, Unbounce being some pretty phenomenal software for creating landing page testing. Here is their new guide to online marketing. It’s a phenomenally cool infographic. It actually illustrates a lot of the things you and I have been talking about, about inbound marketing and all these dif-ferent kinds of things.

So you can see here – content marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization, there are things in SEO. I can actually take this graphic, and if I want to, I can embed it right on my site. So you see I grabbed that piece of code there and I can paste it right into my blog or my website if I want to show it off.

And then what’s great is, they were pretty smart about this, so they have the anchor text say “Unbounce, the DIY landing page platform.” That’s who made this infographic, Unbounce, the DIY landing page platform. I bet if I go “DIY landing page platform,” what do you know, Unbounce, fantastic. They’ve done some smart marketing. They didn’t spam anyone. They didn’t manipulate any-thing. They just made a great infographic showing off all this stuff, sharing it with the right people, getting some good people to guest post about it. And now, boom, they’ve got the top three positions for DIY landing page.

Andrew: This is a little outside the scope of our conversation, but is there a place that you know of that you can recommend our audience go if they want infographics made?

Rand: The best luck that I’ve actually had is findingpeoplewhodogreatdesignworkandcontractingthemtodoitspecifically.I think a lot of what I’d call the infographic farms out there create kind of low qual-ity stuff that people don’t share as much. If you have an in-house designer or someone you love that you contract with, or you do a search like “CSS gallery”, look, here’s CSS Elite. Why don’t we see who’s listed in there? Wow, this guy looks like he has an awesome looking site. Let’s see who the guy who de-signed that is and I’ll contact him.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Rand: So those kinds of things, particularly if I’m going through and I’m like, “Oh, I love these. That artist, that art style meshes with my design aesthetic. I want to do this.”

Andrew: All right. Now that we know what to do on our site, what to do off-site, how do we measure success and know whether we’re on the right track or need to adjust?

Rand: That’s a great question. There are a couple of things that I recommend. I don’t totally want to push our own stuff, but I would say that SEOmoz Pro is actually quite good for this. A couple of things that is does nicely are crawl diagnostics, so crawling your web-siteeveryweek,findingerrorsandwarnings,keeping track of keyword rankings so you can see when you’re going up and down, keepingtrackofyourlinkandtrafficdata.

You can also do all of this stuff more manu-ally and for free, so I don’t want to suggest that this is the only way. For example, Google Analytics is totally free and I can go in here andIcanseemysearchtrafficandIcanseewhichkeywordsaresendingmetraffic.Icanmeasure over time how many different key-

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wordsaresendingmetraffic.Whichengines?How much? Which pages is that going to? Aretherepagesthatusedtoearntrafficthatnolongerare?Youhavetodosomemodifi-cations to the service to see all these things, but it’s quite good.

Two services, Google and Bing both make webmaster tools. They are completely free. Site owners can register with them. I’m going to try and dive in here, depending on if I can remember my password. They even give nice warnings like, “Hey, we found a lot of URLs on Open Site Explorer. You might want to be aware of that.” That was back last year, so I think we’re probably okay at this point. But we can dive in and they’ll show me some data that’s pretty accurate. The search query data, unfortunately, inside webmas-ter tools, for some reason, is really bad. Use Google Analytics, it’s much more accurate. I know, they’re both Google, you’d think they’d get it right.

The crawl errors are phenomenal. I can click on this. I can see, “Oh, look. Here are all these 403 errors. Here are the ones that were in my site maps. Here are the soft 404s. Here are URLs that timed out.”

Andrew: What does all that mean? What are all these errors, and why should we be paying attention to them?

Rand: I’ll start with the reason to pay atten-tion. Any time Google or SEOmoz Pro or somethingfindsanerror,youshouldprobablypay at least a little bit of attention, because what it means is that there’s an automated bot that crawling through your site looking for pages, looking for keywords, and it’s having problems. This means that you are not poten-tially capturing all of the opportunity that you could be capturing. It means that the spiders

of the search engines are missing out some-how, and that probably means you’re miss-ingoutontraffic.

So I might want to go in here and say, “Hmm, what is going on, because this page, footer link optimization for search engine users, there are 100 pages that link to it.” I can click those, see them all, and then say, “Oh, man, I wonder what I did wrong. Something must be broken about that page. I should go in-vestigate. Maybe someone on my engineer-ing staff broke the page. Maybe the page was just timing out for a little while. Maybe I made a dumb error in my CMS and I told WordPress to block Google bot from visiting this page.” Whatever it is that I did, I want to findthosethings,knowwheretheyarebe-foretheystartreallyhurtingmysearchtraffic.

Andrew: I see. Anything else that we should be measuring or other tools that we should use to measure?

Rand: I do like Bing webmaster tools, as well, which I would recommend. But between these, you’re going to get a pretty good sense of how things are going for your site. I might actually suggest doing some custom reporting. On a regular basis, the marketing team here at SEOmoz has sort of key metrics, KPIs, that they’re trying to achieve in terms of socialmediatrafficandsearchtrafficandre-ferringlinktraffic,directtraffic,e-mailmarket-ingtraffic,allofthosethings.Sothey’vegotkind of a leader board up on a whiteboard and they write all those down, they keep track of them in an Excel spreadsheet, and every board meeting we can report those.

That’s actually a really smart idea, no matter what size you are, having those data backed marketing efforts. Marketing has become so technical and there are so many channels

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that it comes through that all of these are re-ally smart.

Two more things that I’ll just point out. They’re not for everyone, but if you produce a blog and you do a lot of social sharing, I think Post-Rank offers some really phenomenal intel-ligence essentially about the blog posts that are produced, whether they get tweeted, or Facebook liked and shared, or mentioned on Hacker News or Reddit or Digg, these kinds of things.

The second one is if you are producing a blog and you are doing RSS feeds of any kind, FeedBurner is a really excellent thing to have running on your site. FeedBurner will show you your feeds. They’ll show you data about them. That’s another good solution.

Andrew: Yeah, I use FeedBurner all the time and have for years, but I didn’t know about PostRank. I’ve got to check that out.

Rand: You’ll like it a bunch.

Andrew: I’ve never seen them before. I love tools like that. How long will it take for me to start seeing measurable results from all the work that we talked about in this inter-view?

Rand: I started a personal blog probably in November, and by January I was regularly

getting 50 to 100 search visits a day and 50 to 100 social visits a day. I haven’t been blog-ging regularly, so that’s actually been going down now. But you can see results reason-ably quickly. It depends on a few things, though. It depends on the niche you’re targeting.Itdependsonwhatkindsoftrafficthose keywords are sending. It depends on how much content you’re producing and the effort that you’re putting into this.

But what’s beautiful about all this stuff, SEO, social, inbound marketing, etc., is that it re-ally relies on your creativity and your hustle. If you’ve got great hustle and you can just go out after this stuff and you’ve got great creativity and can come up with great ideas and execute on them, you are going to win in this space. That’s what I love. It’s not about spending the most money, being the biggest brand. It’s about being the best, the most creative, the most interesting, the most for-ward thinking, and doing the best work.

Andrew: That’s motivating to know that it’s all within our control. Now we know the levers that we need to manipulate, that we need to adjust, and we know what to do and we know how to measure them. This has been very helpful. Thanks, Rand.

Rand: My pleasure, Andrew.