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Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 It’s here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has – among other things – improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google’s algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devestation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs).

A lot of people ask what parts of their existing SEO practice they can modify and emphasize to recover from the blow, but alas, it’s not that simple. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses how the Panda updates work and, more importantly, how Panda has fundamentally changed the best practices for SEO. Have you been Panda-abused? Do you have any tips for recouperating? Let us know in the comments!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re talking about the very exciting, very interesting, very controversial Google Panda update.

Panda, also known as Farmer, was this update that Google came out with in March of this year, of 2011, that rejiggered a bunch of search results and pushed a lot of websites down in the rankings, pushed some websites up in the rankings, and people have been concerned about it ever since. It has actually had several updates and new versions of that implementation and algorithm come out. A lot of people have all these questions like, "Ah, what’s going on around Panda?" There have been some great blog posts on SEOmoz talking about some of the technical aspects. But I want to discuss in this Whiteboard Friday some of the philosophical and theoretical aspects and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach SEO.

So let’s start with a little bit of Panda history. Google employs an engineer named Navneet Panda. The guy has done some awesome work. In fact, he was part of a patent application that Bill Slawski looked into where he found a great way to scale some machine learning algorithms. Now, machine learning algorithms, as you might be aware, are very computationally expensive and they take a long time to run, particularly if you have extremely large data sets, both of inputs and of outputs. If you want, you can research machine learning. It is an interesting fun tactic that computer scientists use and programmers use to find solutions to problems. But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y. So that was quite nice. Thanks to Navneet, right now they can scale up this machine learning.

What Google can do based on that is take a bunch of sites that people like more and a bunch of sites that people like less, and when I say like, what I mean is essentially what the quality raters, Google’s quality raters, tell them this site is very enjoyable. This is a good site. I’d like to see this high in the search results. Versus things where the quality raters say, "I don’t like to see this." Google can say, "Hey, you know what? We can take the intelligence of this quality rating panel and scale it using this machine learning process."

Here’s how it works. Basically, the idea is that the quality raters tell Googlers what they like. They answer all these questions, and you can see Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts were interviewed by Wired Magazine. They talked about some of the things that were asked of these quality raters, like, "Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust the medical information that this site gives you with your children? Do you think the design of this site is good?" All sorts of questions around the site’s trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference.

The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.

So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you’ve been doing the same kind of classic things. You’ve been building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?" Now we kind of have to think about that.

It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda. The things that they are measuring is not, oh, these sites have better links than these sites. Some of these sites, in fact, have much better links than these sites. Some of these sites have what you and I might regard, as SEOs, as better content, more unique, robust, quality content, and yet, people, quality raters in particular, like them less or the things, the signals that predict that quality raters like those sites less are present in those types of sites.

Let’s talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect. Now, it has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn’t all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren’t that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that’s surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don’t look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform. And don’t forget, Google has actually said publically that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down. Wow. Crazy, right? That’s what a machine learning algorithm, like Panda, will do. It will predicatively say, "Hey, you know what? We’re seeing these features here, these elements, push this guy down."

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, "Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content." Not enough. Sorry. It’s just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough when it comes to content. If you say, "Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is." You think to yourself, "Hey, I have good unique content." No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, "God, not only is this well written, it’s kind of funny. It’s humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It’s got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don’t care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I’d be tweeting about this, I’d share it. I’d send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page." That’s what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that’s decent. That’s pretty good. If they’re browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, "Ew, I don’t know if I want to get myself involved in that. They’ve got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I’m not going to get involved." Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.

They are going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people from all around the world or all around your local region, your country, visit your website directly? They can measure this through Chrome. They can measure it through Android. They can measure it through the Google toolbar. They have all this user and usage metrics. They know where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. They know about what happens from the search results too. Do people click from a result and then go right back to the search results and perform another search? Clearly, they were unhappy with that. They can take all these metrics and put them into the machine learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate. This why you see essentially Google doesn’t issue updates every day or every week. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejiggering all this stuff.

One of the things that people who get hit by Panda come up to me and say, "God, how are we ever going to get out of Panda? We’ve made all these changes. We haven’t gotten out yet." I’m like, "Well, first off, you’re not going to get out of it until they rejigger the results, and then there is no way that you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics around your site." So if you go into your Analytics and you see that people are not spending longer on your pages, they are not enjoying them more, they are not sharing them more, they are not naturally linking to them more, your branded search traffic is not up, your direct type in traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and yet you think you have somehow fixed the problems that Panda tries to solve for, you probably haven’t.

I know this is frustrating. I know it’s a tough issue. In fact, I think that there are sites that have been really unfairly hit. That sucks and they shouldn’t be and Google needs to work on this. But I also know that I don’t think Google is going to be making many changes. I think they are very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a user happiness perspective. Their searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much junk in the results. Google likes the way this is going. I think we are going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more aggressive. I would urge you to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and to be ready for this new form of SEO.

Thanks everyone for watching. Look forward to some great comments, questions, feedback in the post. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by russvirante

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As an SEO agency, Virante has always prided itself in having research-based answers to the questions presented by our clients. A year or so ago, I caught myself referring to the a site as having "a great looking natural link profile" without really having an numbers or analysis to describe exactly what that profile should look like. Sure, I could point out a spam link or two, or what looked like a paid link, but could we computationally analyze a backlink profile to determine how "natural" it was?

We dove into this question several months ago while trying to identify automated methods to identify link spam and link graph manipulation. This served dual purposes – we wanted to make sure our clients were conforming to an ideal link model to prevent penalties and, at the same time, wanted to be able to determine the extent to which competitors were scamming their way to SEO success.

Building the Ideal Link Model

The solution was quite simple, actually. We used Wikipedia’s natural link profile to create an expected, ideal link data set and then created tools to compare the Wikipedia data to individual websites…

1. Select 500+ random Wikipedia articles
2. Request the top 10,000 links from Open Site Explorer for each Wikipedia article
3. Spider and Index each of those backlink pages
4. Build tools to analyze each backlink on individual metrics

Once the data was acquired, we merely had to identify the different metrics we would like to compare against our client’s and their competitors’ sites and then analyze the data set accordingly. What follows are three example metrics we have used and the tools for you to analyze them yourself.

Link Proximity Analysis

Your site will be judged by the company it keeps. One of the first and most obvious characteristics to look at is what we call Link Proximity. Most paid and spam links tend to be lumped together on a page such as 20 backlinks stuffed into a blog comment or a sponsored link list in the sidebar. Thus, if we can create an expected ideal link proximity from Wikipedia’s link profile, we can compare it with any site to identify likely link manipulation.

The first step in this process was to create the ideal link proximity graph. Using the Wikipedia backlink dataset, we determined how many OTHER links occurred within 300 characters before or after that Wikipedia link on the page. If no other links were found, we recorded a 1. If one other link was found, we recorded a 2. So on and so forth. We determined that about 40% of the time, the Wikipedia link was by itself in the content. About 28% of the time there was one more link near it. The numbers continued to descend from there.

Finally, we plotted these numbers out and created a tool to compare individual websites to Wikipedia’s model. Below is a graph of a known paid-link user’s link proximity compared to Wikipedia’s. As you will see, nearly the same percentage of their links are standalone. However, there is a spike at five proximal links for the paid link user that is substantially higher than that of Wikipedia’s average.

Even though paid links only represent a ~25% proportion of their link profile, we were able to detect this anomaly quite easily. Here is the Link Proximity Analysis tool so that you can analyze your own site.

White Hat Takeaway: If you are relying on link methods that place your link in a list of others (paid, spam, blog-rolls, etc.), your links can be easily identified. While I can’t speak for Google, if I were writing the algorithm, I would stop passing value from any 5+ proximal links more than one standard deviation above the mean. Go ahead and use the tool to determine if your site looks suspicious. Run the tool on your site and make sure that you are within about 18% of Wikipedia’s pages for 4+ proximal links.

Source Link Depth Analysis

The goal of Paid Links is to boost link juice. The almighty PageRank continues to be the primary metric which link buyers use to determine the cost of a link. Who buys a PR0 link these days? It just so happens that PageRank tends to be highest on the homepage of sites, so most Paid Links also tend to come from the homepage. This is another straightforward method for finding link graph manipulation – just determine what percentage of the links come from homepages vs. internal pages.

Once again, we began by looking at the top 10,000 backlinks for each 500 random Wikipedia pages. We then tallied the number of folders deep for each link acquired. For example, a link from http://www.cnn.com would score a 1. From http://www.cnn.com/politics would score a 2. We created a graph of the percentage at which each of these occurred and then created a tool to compare this ideal model to that of individual websites.

Below is an example of a known paid-link user’s site.

As you can see, 79% of their top links come from the homepages of websites, compared to Wikipedia’s articles with average around 30%. SEOmoz, on the other hand, receives only 40% of its links from homepages, well within the standard deviation, and Virante receives 29%. Here is the Source Link Depth Analysis tool so that you can compare your site to Wikipedia’s.

White Hat Takeaway: If your link strategy involves getting links primarily from the homepages of websites, the pattern will be easily discernible. Run the tool and determine whether you are safely within 15% of Wikipedia’s pages in terms of homepage links.

Domain Links per Page Analysis

Yet another characteristic we wanted to look at was the number of links per page pointing to the same domain. Certain types of link manipulation like regular press releases, article syndication, or blog reviews tend to build links two and three at a time, all pointing to the same domain. A syndicated article might link to the homepage and two product pages, for example. Our goal was to compare the expected number of links to Wikipedia pages from a linking page to the actual number of links to a particular website, looking for patterns and outliers along the way.

We began again with the same Wikipedia dataset, this time counting the number of links to Wikipedia from each linking page. We tallied up these occurrences and created an expected curve. Finally, we created a tool to compare this curve against that of individual sites.

The example below is a site that heavily relied on paid blog reviews. As you will see, there is a sharp spike in links from pages with three inbound links to the domain.

Caveat: Chances are when you run this tool you will see a spike at position #1. It is worth pointing out that the majority of website homepages tend to fall in this category. When you run this tool, as with the others, you should probably take a second to look at your competitors as well. Is your site closer to Wikipedia’s model than your competitors? That is the question you should be asking first.

White Hat Takeaway: Is your link strategy creating patterns in domain links per page? A natural link graph will have great variation in this. Moreover, it is not uncommon for authoritative sites to have 10+ links to pages from sites. This should be expected – if your site is the authority, it would make sense for it to be cited several times on a thorough page about your subject matter. Here is the Multiple Links Analysis tool to compare your site to Wikipedia’s.

What to Do?

First things first, take every result you get with a grain of salt. We have no reason to believe that Google is using Wikipedia’s backlink profile to model what is and is not acceptable, nor do we pretend to believe that Google is using these metrics. More importantly, just because your site diverges in one way or another from these models does not mean that you are actually trying to manipulate the link graph. If anything, it demonstrates the following…

1. If you are manipulating the link graph, it is pretty easy to see it. If Virante can see it, so can Google.
2. If you are still ranking despite this manipulation, it is probably because Google hasn’t caught up with you yet, or you have enough natural links to rank despite those that have been devalued.

So, what should you do with these results? If you are using a third party SEO company to acquire links, take a hard look at what they have done and whether it appears to differ greatly from what a natural link profile might look like. Better yet, run the tool on your competitors as well to see how far off you are compared to them. You don’t have to be the best on the Internet, just the best on your Keyword.

Tool Links One More Time:

• Link Proximity Analysis Tool
• Source Link Depth Tool
• Multiple Links Analysis Tool

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Posted by iPullRank

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

So you want a career in SEO? Or maybe you already have an SEO role and it’s time for a change. Well, I’ve been doing SEO for five years now and I can safely say that I’ve endured the pros and cons of almost every type of SEO career situation. So let me give you some insight on the good, bad, and ugly for all of them.

What’s an SEOMoz post without graphics? I’m partial to the Mr. Men characters by Roger Hargreaves, I tend to use them in my presentations to bring what I’m talking about to life. So let’s meet the key players:

Mr. Persnickety – This is me. This is you. This is the SEO. You know your stuff very well, you come with case studies and analytics to make your points but it is essentially your job to tell people who have gone as far as to win awards in their capability that they are doing everything wrong. You are oftentimes the conductor of a cacophonic symphony – that’s why you wear a bowtie.

Little Miss Stubborn –Will be playing various members of the defensive Creative Team (Copywriter, Art Director, Creative Director, Graphic Designer). They are very stuck in their ways and instead of building for SEO they’d rather try to retrofit SEO and effectively placing a band-aid over the mouth of an active volcano.

Mr. Lazy – Will be playing the part of the Tech Department or the Web Developer who most likely knows the right way to do things but likes to take a shortcut instead because they think you don’t know enough to push back when they say they can’t do something. Note to non-technical SEOs: LEARN HOW TO BUILD A WEBSITE!

Mr. Nonsense – Will be playing the Account Manager. Depending on the agency these guys usually don’t have any idea what you do. They sell based on what the client is asking for rather than what you can actually provide. By definition it is their job to make the client happy which means you will be responsible for unreasonable requests that keep you at work until 10PM. These are the people that will make your life very very hard.

Mr. Fussy – This is your boss. This guy typically knows just enough about everything to be annoying. He’ll drop buzzwords of the day out of context like “siloing” and “canonical redirect” because he follows Bruce Clay’s blog and has never touched a site before in his life. He will also complain to you about things like utilization.

Mr. Impossible – Will be playing the client. He wants you wave your magic SEO wand and make his thin ad copy based content rank #1 for highly competitive terms. He wants you to drive conversions with landing pages that were clearly not optimized for conversion. He wants exact projections of when he can expect rankings. He doesn’t care if you emailed 10,000 people he only sees that you only got seven links. He wants to dominate every position in the SERPs – today and he wants it all for as close to free as possible. After all Organic Search is "free" traffic, right?

Note: If I’ve worked with you in the past and you think I’m using these characters to personify you — you’re right.

Now that we got our key players, let’s talk about the playing fields.

Agencies have the highest allure for digital. They make me think of scenes from "Who’s the Boss" where Angela Bower ran her own Ad agency with the constant shuffle of people busy making the world turn. They make me think of the off-the-wall Creative ideas scribbled on whiteboards and the brand rooms that house their realizations. They make me think of drinking beer at my desk, and brainstorming meetings that birth viral campaigns so successful your friends send them to you rather than you having to beg them to watch in order to get your views up.

As far as SEO, agencies allow you to make your SEO success real for your friends and family. Up until about a month or so ago I could say "hey man Google ‘sweaters.’ Yep, I helped make that happen" because I worked on Ralph Lauren and they were #1 for sweaters in location-agnostic searches in March and April. Sure I could have already said that for [insert small company you never heard of here] but to be involved in brands that everyone is aware of is next level. In short, agencies are cool.

I separate agencies into two types. There are boutique agencies where SEO is the main focus and there are other capabilities that they support to facilitate SEO. These agencies can have any type of client from small to enterprise. Then there’s what I’m going to call fully featured digital agencies. These agencies have a large department for every different capability. They are generally full of very smart people, there is a constant pipeline of Fortune 500 business and companies like Google fill their lobbies with branded ping pong tables and sofas to thank them for continuing to pump money through Adwords.

Overall Pros of Agencies:

• People know their stuff – In an agency you are generally surrounded by people that are leaders in their field and are on the cutting edge of industry trends.
• Diversity of Client Portfolio – In an agency you are not tied to one niche or one type of client so it doesn’t get boring and the things you learn from one client you can apply to another.

Overall Cons of Agencies:

• Employee Turnover – The average lifespan in my experience at agencies is about two years. This is because it’s not hard to learn the next level’s job and once you do it’s not hard to convince another agency that you are worth more money. It’s actually gotten so bad that holding companies have developed programs that allow you to bounce between agencies. So this is clearly not a con for an SEO’s pocket however the work and client relationships do suffer.
• Live and Die by Business Development – Depending on how the agency is set up if a client does not renew then that means a bunch of employees are getting laid off or there are no new hires and the agency has to contract and everyone has to do double duty. Unless of course you are upper management then you are mostly safe until there is some sort of merger.

Boutique Agency

My boutique agency experience is interesting and as I look at billboards and SEPTA bus ads for a local SEO agency or I see agencies that use their TopSEOs.com ranking as a selling point, I wonder how many people at boutique agencies are having the same experiences. Typically boutique SEO agencies are just that. While they may fill in the other capabilities around SEO as needed such as presentation layer and back end web development, a lot of them just focus on SEO.

I got my start in SEO at a boutique agency in 2006 as a technical analyst (read: web monkey). The place I worked at had some talent but we were basically an SEO chop shop. The owner got into it early somehow and built it into something big enough where he drove a Mercedes SL350 and lived in penthouse apartment downtown. Our production team was seven people at its largest. We had three Account Managers, three Technical Analysts, and an Art Director and about 50 small to mid-level clients. Our sales team was 15 people cold calling companies on an autodialer that scraped WHOIS records.

We were effectively the Walmart of SEO promising results and timeframes that were unrealistic. They’d taught me all I knew about SEO so I had no idea; I just kept on with the keyword stuffing and the hundreds of quick links across the bottom of the page and the bold and italics on every instance of the keyword. I had no idea that not redirecting non-www to www could lead to a duplicate content issue. Our link-building consisted of me spending hours searching for [keyword] + add url and posting links to anything I could find. Needless to say we rarely (if ever) delivered; clients blew up our phone daily and my then-boss never answered the phone which ultimately led to credit card charge backs.

Ultimately my boss got fired and I became the boss and I actually delivered to the best of my ability. That is the say the work they’d taught me to do I actually got done for our clients. I stayed as late as 10pm sometimes, I let clients call me at home and I hacked Zen Cart to make it easier for the client to input products. I worked my behind off and in the end even though I didn’t know that we were doing 1999 SEO in 2006 I did know that the owner wasn’t about delivering quality results for the clients so I’d had enough. Guys like him give our industry a bad name.

Granted my experience is not indicative of the experience to be had at reputable boutique agencies like SEER Interactive or Portent Interactive, so let’s distill (no pun) it down to pros and cons that you may find in both cases.

Pros of Boutique Agencies

• Familial Atmosphere– People are less about having an ego and more about getting the job done. It’s essentially the startup "let’s make it happen" ethos in which people are trying to pull their weight to build something successful. Your coworkers become more of a close-knit family that shares victories, has group lunches and pushes each other to be better.
• Agility – Boutique agencies have the ability to stop on a dime, fail fast and adopt early. Who do you think is already implementing Schema.org markup and complaining about the two seconds Google’s +1 adds to page load time? I’m going to guess it isn’t R/GA.
• Hands-On Approach – In my experience at larger SEO agencies we don’t do any implementation which makes the process very annoying. However at the boutique agency we did all the implementations so we saw the results and could tweak as needed. I understand why but I sorely miss the ability to do that these days.

Cons of Boutique Agencies

• Clients Expect the World for $5 – Clients are generally smaller for boutique agencies and if they are not smaller they expect to pay your company less because you’re smaller. Despite that they still expect performance at the speed of light for such a low rate. They believe since they are paying you that they own you and your "little agency."
• Team is Often Spread Thin – Your team is doing double duties because there are only five of you but there are a hundred clients to make sure your owner is making money. You’re an account manager, copywriter, developer, and a short order cook. One of those balls you’re juggling is going to fall. You should have juggled eggs instead so when they fall you finally have time to eat – multitasking!
• Lack of Clout – You’re not going to be visited by the Google fairy with branded basketballs and throw rugs. You aren’t running $50 million through Adwords monthly, so you don’t have a Google rep that gives you the exact numbers from the internal Adwords keyword tool. You’re a civilian on the battlefield but at least you’re MacGyver.

Full-featured Digital Agency

This is the primetime. My full-featured digital agency experience has been a fast-paced roller coaster full of impressive successes and disheartening setbacks. It’s truly a challenge of wills because you are dealing with your stereotypical digital prima donnas but it is very exciting work so it’s worth it.

I moved to a big agency after an in-house gig and was quite surprised by the fact that we just wrote about SEO best practices rather than implemented them and that we did so many menial tasks by hand. Truthfully the job felt kind of intimidating because I was surrounded by people who really got the results for highly competitive terms. In my interview they asked me "what would you do if a client was targeting an impossibly competitive term like ‘tv’?" and I said something to the effect of "tell them to pick an easier keyword." These were the guys that could rank #1 for "tv" so all I wanted to do was learn from them.

It was a great learning experience; there were all types of awesome resources, coworkers bringing back great info and tools from conferences, great training sessions, discounts and free offerings from all types of places. Many times when I’d sign up for an API or inquire about software people were very receptive and went out of their way to be helpful due to what was behind the @ symbol in my email. In short, it was an incredible experience and I learned a lot from leaders in the field. After seven months of jedi SEO training I landed a gig at another agency where I now lead SEO.

These days I have a ton of meetings internally and with clients and it’s hard to wrangle other capabilities into doing what needs to be done but when things align properly, I’m accomplishing SEO the right way on the big agency level the right way – or at least my way. It’s a lot of work but it’s oh so rewarding!

Pros of Full-featured Digital Agencies

• Clientele – I like walking through the King of Prussia mall and being able to point at the different high end stores and say I do their SEO. The perks of working for these brands can be pretty incredible too; let’s just say I don’t pay retail for any home electronics or home appliances. The other cool thing from an SEO standpoint of working with big brands is that they generally already have a ton of links so you really get to see large scale ranking changes when you fix something simple.
• Work with Rockstars – Adamanatium sharpens adamantium. You’re surrounded by very smart people who have mastered something that you haven’t had time to. The information sharing and friendly competition is going to make you better at what you do at an exponential rate. I was obviously a good SEO before I got my first big agency job but I learned more in three months at that job than I’d learned in the three years prior. Ok that’s an exaggeration, but I learned a lot, yo!
• Resources – You want training in Omniture? You want to go to MozCon? You need a million API calls monthly from the SEOMoz Site Intelligence API? You want search volume that’s not to just three significant figures from Google? You want to go back to school? There’s an app(lication) for that! Simply put, these guys generally have the resources to get you what you need to do what you want to do.
• They Treat You Like An Adult – That’s the way one of the Senior Analysts put it when I was interviewing for my first big agency job. You can work from home whenever you want, you have beer at your desk regularly and it’s ok to curse when you’re mad. Just be at work when you’re needed and get the job done.
• The Pay – My salary doubled when I moved from full-time in-house to full-time big agency.

Cons of Full-featured Digital Agencies

• Multi-Agency Involvement – This never works simply because it’s never in one agency’s interest to help the other. For example when one agency has Paid Search and another has Organic, Paid can always dial up the results with more money and then throw Organic under the bus. Or if one agency is building the site and another is preparing SEO recommendations, the building agency could just never implemented the recommendations and then the SEO agency gets the blame.
• Multi-capability involvement – Your Creative department hates you. Your Tech team hates you. Your Account team hates you. The Strategy & Analytics team gets along with you and you may never once talk to your Paid Search team. Why so much hate? Well you undermine everything that it is natural for them to do.
• Your Creative team is thinking about the "golden mean," gridded layouts, widows, orphans and color schemes. If you are a true inbound marketer you’re thinking about conversions, bounce rates and eye-tracking as well as SEO. So when you say "Let’s A/B test the CTAs to see what messaging and sizing drives better conversions" Creative hears "let’s open up the door to ruining the beautiful design that I just put into my portfolio."

Your Developers or Technical team think you’re a hack. Rightfully so, in my opinion there are too many SEOs that cannot build a website. In that regard developers are movie producers and you are a film critic.

Your Account team generally has no idea what you do, they just know you are responsible for making the team miss launch dates. They barely knew how to sell SEO to begin with and really had no idea what they got themselves into. These people often refer to SEO work as "SEO Optimizations" and ask you "will this domain name affect the SEO quality score?" Uhh….What?

Strategy & Analytics thinks, "Yay! Here’s someone that will actually put our data and insights into play." These guys will be your best friends in the agency world. They’ll be interested in what you’re doing they’ll even come up with reasons for things that are happening that you wouldn’t think of. I love the Strategy guys if only because they know enough math to turn that AOL CTR data into progressive forecast models.

Paid Search looks down their nose at you and says "Oh, you do SEO? That’s cool. Good luck with all that link building. I’ll be over here doing marketing with ROI that you can accurately forecast." As we all know an integrated search approach is the best way to go especially to test landing pages and to make those Paid Search dollars work the hardest. Even still Paid and Organic Search rarely pow wow.

• No Direct Implementation – If your agency does do implementation it’s most likely the web development or technical team that handles it. These guys don’t want to be bothered. They assume that you don’t understand what it takes to develop a website and that your knowledge of code is limited to whatever it is your favorite SEO tool told you to is out of whack. A lot of them even randomly know just enough about SEO to be dangerous to your cause. That is to say in 2003 they read a blog post or attended a panel discussion so they say things like "you worry about making sure the content has 4-7% keyword density, I’ll worry about the code." I’ve learned that if I make a joke about multi-dimensional arrays in our first conversation they are a lot more open to me telling them to make changes to their JavaScript to account for Page Speed issues.

• Corporate BS – There are very few big agencies that are not owned by WPP, Publicis Groupe, or some other holding company. This is great for your salary and benefits but people are laser-focused on bottom lines and corporate politics. Your super duper boss (your boss’s boss’s boss) will worry more about utilization and productivity numbers rather than the initiative you put forth by building something that helps you work faster. If you can’t navigate the high school clique archetype that is our world, a big agency may not be for you.
• SEO is an Afterthought – Aside from the fact that the other capabilities are not in your corner SEO is not the biggest money maker in the house. Typically SEO is sold in the SOW as the site being built with SEO best practices or if SEO has its own clients you’re still not bringing in the money that a $10M site redesign is. That said you will most likely see the site as its going out the door and you will have trouble getting your optimizations in to the build. It will be up to you and your team to fight with Creative to make SEO work because people in the building aren’t all that concerned with it. Creative is perfectly fine with building pretty cars with no engines and letting Media push it up a hill. Creative won’t come running until the client is asking why their car is sliding back down the hill once Media is gone.

Let me be up front, I think in-house SEO is absolutely boring, so boring that when I did it I automated most of it while I focused more on deciphering Aesop Rock lyrics. However I also believe it’s the most effective way for a company to accomplish its SEO goals. By definition in-house SEOs are experts in their niche and succeed because the effort is so focused.

Site Management

I worked for a company that did basement waterproofing, basement finishing, crawl space and foundation repair. We developed products and also had a lot of dealerships internationally so we developed and optimized the dealership sites for lead generation.

Yo, if I ever see another sump pump as long as I live….

Anyway, so I put the work we were doing in the shooting fish in a barrel category simply because we dominated a niche and focused on geotargeted keywords with very low competition. As you’ve probably guessed we were awesome at it. I was hired as the resident whiz kid because I had previous agency experience and before I bored myself out of it I’d offered a bunch of changes to their approach. We had to build a ton of sites that basically looked the same with different logos and color schemes and the biggest hold up was generally that our two copywriters would have to "scuff" up existing content, updating it for the service area. Truthfully, the copy was as good as it was going to get so what I did to speed this process up was have them write four versions of each page with the same number of sentences in such a way that sentence one in version A made sense with sentence two in version B and so on. I also had them leave in markers for towns, cities, states and dealer names. Then basically I wrote a script that randomized the lines and positions where it would place the variables, then it checked how close it was to previously generated versions and it wouldn’t spit out copy unless it was 90% original. Not quite your typical content spinner and to date I haven’t heard of that content getting penalized or not ranking #1.

It’s probably pretty obvious that I went after generating sites and generating dynamic service area landing pages next because I was bored. I guess that is part of why in-house SEO works so well, you have to keep experimenting to keep yourself from losing your mind working on the same thing.

I learned a lot here too and worked with a lot of talented people, but I also learned I needed to work at a digital agency where innovation is expected and not looked at as risky voodoo.

Pros of Site Management

• Full Control – This can be the same setup as the full featured digital agency where your company has a bunch of different capabilities that handle different parts of the site. However being that the company is so invested in SEO you are most likely touching the site directly yourself or at least working directly with a development team that is forced to follow your direction. When I was in-house we were the "Web Team" and while we had an Art Director, Flash guy, a couple copywriters, a link builder and a PPC guy the rest of us were Web Specialists which meant we were responsible for building and optimizing the sites. This is the best place to be in because you can do anything as needed. There’s no writing about what needs to be done, presenting it, and then hoping a third party implements it. It’s done right the first time because YOU did it.
• Knowledge of Niche – This is why every company that is focusing on SEO should bring it in-house. When you optimize for one industry you really begin to master it, know the key players and the best ways to get links and develop content. The goals of the brand have been embedded into your DNA and it is easier for you to apply them to your overall efforts. Your universe is small but you are the master of it.

Cons of Site Management

• Scared of Risk – Brands generally don’t understand SEO but they do understand the New York Times. As we all know SEO has a bad reputation for backfiring on big brands so they don’t want to do anything that Bruce Clay wouldn’t like. That said if you are someone that follows the blogs and is really up on the newest techniques you may get a lot of push back from your boss about applying any tactics that are not vetted by Mr. Clay. Sidebar: I’m sorry Bruce, you’re probably great at what you do but your work has been the cited by the people that have caused me many headaches in my career so you tend to end up in a lot of my SEO punch lines. No hard feelings man.
• Company is Not Knowledgeable – Oftentimes when someone has the brilliant idea to build an in-house SEO team they don’t fully understand that SEO is typically a long-term initiative. They also don’t communicate it to the guys upstairs and further don’t understand that Landing Page and Conversion Optimization are large parts of that process. So what happens is the people upstairs cleared your hiring and then they expect you to work magic on their failed websites in very short time periods. Basically the expectations are often not managed and you don’t really have any control over it. Then your boss starts leaning on you because his boss has turned up the heat. Expect to have to educate the people above you when you get there.

Agency Management

Redundancy is certainly the American way because a lot of companies are hiring in-house SEOs and then subsequently hiring third party agencies to develop their SEO strategy, content and link profiles. I guess the point is for the company to have someone on their side that speaks the language and can verify the work. Good grief! If these companies just want to waste some money make all checks payable to Michael King, I always wanted to buy a Knight Rider car but only sit in it inside of a Mack truck.

I don’t have any experience with being an in-house SEO that manages an agency relationship. I’d love to hear about some experiences in the comments below.

I imagine it’s similar to my dealings with third party agencies in other roles though so that’s what I’m going to base this set of pros and cons on.

Pros of Agency Management

• It’s Easy – You have agencies laying out your strategy, you’re just QAing it and making sure that it fits your brand guidelines and overseeing the implementation on your side. So it’s basically reading some documents, passing them along then double checking if the work was done. I don’t even understand why companies hire an SEO for this anyone that can read can do this.

Cons of Agency Management

• Condescension from the Agency – You’re the in-house SEO, you couldn’t possibly be on the cutting edge of things like an agency — or so they think. You think the agency is pompous, the agency thinks you’re stupid and getting in the way of the implementation of their strategy. They will blame any failures on you and take full credit for any victories. I know because I’ve seen it and I do it.

Those of us who have done anything on a freelance basis know that it’s the most bipolar of them all. In this case I don’t mean contracting for an agency as an employee without benefits; I mean working as an independent consultant.

I’ve done freelance work since I was a teenager in both web and software development (in fact I think Jamie Stevens and I did a freelance site together back in 1995) but lately it’s been mostly about SEO for companies, other agencies and individuals. I’ve been a touring musician for about eight years so this was the ideal situation for me to supplement my income while on the road and clients have come in all shapes and sizes. Some were very cool, easygoing and helpful while others were absolutely insane, unrealistic and unreasonable.

A lot of clients tend to see SEO as a quick fix and don’t understand all the moving parts so client education is absolutely paramount when you do freelance work. Then there are the people that don’t believe you can do what you say and will often stand in the way of their own success. Sometimes clients come to you because they didn’t like how the results of working with a boutique agency went and they think working with an individual is a better idea.

What I love most now about freelance is that is keeps me sharp. This is often the opportunity where I get to implement optimizations myself and test out the new ideas I’m having or that I’m hearing about on the SEO blogosphere.

Writing about SEO is mostly conjecture; my freelance work is what keeps my SEO skill set relevant.

Pros of Freelance SEO

• Freedom – You choose your clientele and make your own schedule. In an agency it’s not your call whether to dump a problem client; at best you can get transferred to another account. When you do freelance you can avoid or fire problem clients.Obviously you and your client must agree on dates for deliverables but if all you do is freelance work then you get to wake up at 3pm and optimize whenever you feel like it. I’ve optimized whole sites on flights to Europe, got off the plane uploaded and then performed a concert. File under: awesome.
• Autonomy – You call the shots! Sure you have to work within the brand guidelines and client goals but aside from that there’s no one dictating your strategy. When you have a great idea for link building or want to build a tool to take advantage of something that applies to the client’s niche there is no boss telling you not to.

Cons of Freelance SEO

• Everyone wants a package deal – Before we even talk goals or keywords most potential freelance clients first just ask me how much would SEO cost for their site. The conversation usually ends at "it depends" but the fact of the matter is that it does depend on a variety of factors. While I know some industry leaders like Danny Dover (in "Search Engine Optimization Secrets") have suggested that SEO prices should be standardized based on the task with a multiplier applied based on experience, I strongly disagree. I price my work based on an hourly rate multiplied by the amount of hours I’ve scoped for the tasks or project. Even still people would much rather hear what my silver, gold, and platinum packages are. Man this ain’t the car wash or McDonald’s I can’t get you the works for $15 or an Extra Value Optimization.
• Lack of Client Education – Typically freelance clientele is small businesses referred to you by a friend or even big business that doesn’t want deal with the headaches of an agency. These people have heard the term SEO thrown around and their knowledge often stops at Meta tags. The biggest part of any freelance job in my experience is client education, I spend more time writing emails and making calls about what I’m doing and why than actually doing it. That’s not to say that SEO education is not a big problem within agencies and amongst their clients as well, but you personally won’t spend as much time educating clients in those roles.
• Ebb and Flow of Work – Peaks and valleys. Feast or famine. No matter how well you network it tends that you will have a time where you have too much on your plate followed by a time when you wonder when you’re next job is coming in. Being that most of my freelance clients are small businesses, I’ve found it difficult on a freelance basis to get clients to sign on for continued optimizations. They typically want some sort of "one and done" situation or just a small amount of monthly link building. The best situation to get around this ebb and flow is to partner with a boutique web design shop that doesn’t have SEO on staff and help them out. 

I’m having too much fun with the Mr. Men meets Dilbert cartoons so I figured it might be a fun guessing game for me to post more memories and have people guess in the comments where they happened. I’ll give you guys the answers after we get enough comments.

Obviously this comes from a bias lens and I’ve been around the block enough times to know I am the big agency type but I hope people find this insightful so they don’t go into any of these scenarios blindly. Also keep in mind these are insights from my experience so you may go into any of these scenarios and never run into these problems. Just like anything in life, every opportunity is what you make of it.

I want to hear from you guys. Those of you with multiple experiences I’d like to know what scenario you think the best. Have I left out any glaring pros or cons? I especially want to hear from people who have worked in-house managing an agency relationship.

Thank you to all the people that I have worked with who can laugh at this post because they know they were awesome and they were nothing like the archetypes I have just described. Hope you guys have enjoyed my first post!

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Posted by randfish

For years, the best way to gain rankings in search results was to have:

1. Accessible pages featuring
2. Quality content
3. Targeting the right keywords
4. In a way that naturally earned external links

But this changes things:

The cupcake post from Everywhereist normally wouldn’t rank there. In fact, unless you follow Geraldine on Twitter, chances are you won’t see much of her site in even semi-competitive results. Here’s a screenshot of a logged-out view.

Not only is Google annotating the listing with a photo, creating social proof and certainly increasing click-through-rate, they’re also biasing to put these results on page 1 that might normally rank in utter obscurity. This isn’t just true for obscure, random searches either, nor is it exclusive to Twitter.

"Web analytics" is a highly competitive query, and though they try, KISS Metrics and Market Motive aren’t normally ranking page 1 for everyone… but they are for me thanks to my connections to Neil on Quora and John on Facebook.

This should be giving everyone in search marketing a huge "ah ha" moment. As Google scales this out, concentrates on getting more people claiming their profiles and using logged-in accounts to search (supposedly this number was ~20% in March of 2010), the reach of your social network and the sharing you do to those networks will have a substantive, possibly massive, effect on your search traffic. The socialization of search is more than just Tweeted URLs or Facebook Likes or LinkedIn Shares having a positive first/second-order impact on generic rankings, it’s about influencing your social graph to see the content you share in their search results.

You can see how you’re connected in Google by visiting this page (while logged into yor Google account)

Suddenly, a huge social reach is a competitive advantage in SEO. If you’re doing SEO today, I think it’s no longer possible to ignore the growth of your social connections as a big part of your SEO strategy. Honestly, I expect in 18 months, Twitter followers, Facebook connections, LinkedIn account size and engagement across these won’t just be social metrics; they’ll be KPIs for our SEO, too.

p.s. I don’t mean to suggest these features in Google are new – they’ve been around a while. But Google’s aggressiveness with showing and the user happiness and CTR that predicts, likely means this is here to stay, and will be a part of Google’s strategy for a long time. Bing’s doing this too with Facebook, and in a much more directly integrated way.

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Posted by salario

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Your landing pages aren’t converting. Sadly, this is not your customer’s fault. It’s your job to tell your customers why your product is awesome and you have fewer than five seconds to tell that story.

Regardless of whether you’re a rookie or veteran marketer, we’ve assembled the following checklist to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls we see all too often with pay-per-click landing pages. The hope being that you can take some of the recommendations into consideration before you go live with AdWords campaigns of your own.

1) Pre-Populate Cursor – Does your landing page have a form field you want customers to fill out? If it does, a great way to reduce friction, and increase conversion rate, is to pre-populate the cursor into the first field. This might sound like a nit, but in all the tests I’ve seen run, this seemingly slight difference has had a significant impact on conversion rates. A great example of this in the wild is what eHouseOffers does with their sign up page.

2) Eye Contact – You’re driving northbound on I-5 (or whatever interstate you drive in your hometown) and there’s an accident in the southbound HOV lane. What do you do? You probably turn your head and look at what everyone else is looking at. This seemingly obvious piece of human behavior is something you shouldn’t forget to talk to your designer about on your landing pages.

What do I mean? Well, the concept is simple. Think of it as the "Look at what other people are looking at" principle, but essentially what it means is that people will tend to look where the subjects in your hero graphic look, not necessarily at your ad creative.

http://usableworld.com.au/2009/03/16/you-look-where-they-look/

As the above heatmap shows, landing pages are no different from highway accidents: you look where other people are looking. So, if you have a landing page creative with people in them, why not take a page out of what PayPal does with their landing pages and have your subjects look in the directions of your call to action?

3) Testimonials – Another tactic that is incredibly effective is including customer testimonials on your landing page. There’s really no better way to build trust with prospective customers than to have existing customers sing your praises. And though you don’t necessarily have to do what Sono Bello Body Contouring does and include the testimonial in the header of your site, you should include testimonials somewhere on your landing page – possibly in the sidebar.

4) Point of Action Assurances – It’d be impossible to create a landing page checklist without referencing Bryan Eisenberg, who was truly one of the first real conversion rate gurus. One of the best tips Eisenberg gives in his book Always be Testing is around the importance of putting trust icons, or "point of action assurances" as he calls them, next to your call-to-action buttons. Put another way, if you put trust icons next to your submit buttons more people will click on them. One of many examples of this principle in action is what Provent Therapy does on their sleep apnea treatment landing pages.

And bizarre as it sounds, it is important that these trust icons, which can vary from McAfee Secure logos, to Visa logos, to industry awards, are as close to your call-to-action buttons as possible. Why? Well, because customers will notice these symbols and feel at ease. Strange as it sounds these logos will in fact reinforce trust and increase conversion rates.

5) Match Headline with Intent – Not to be forgotten when considering landing page optimization is Google AdWords quality score. Having a high quality score will not only decrease your cost-per-click, it will also help reduce overall acquisition costs

And though quality score is comprised of many parts – including keyword relevance and ad copy – you should always make sure you’re getting the most from the headline of your landing page. Specifically, once visitors get to your landing pages, you should make sure you remind them that the site they’ve landing on is in fact exactly what they a) searched for and b) clicked on in your ad.

One startup out of San Francisco who really gets this, and who has seen some early wins from creating targeted landing pages is Red Beacon, which is a site who recently won the TechCrunch 50 that’s dedicated to connecting consumers with service professionals.

6) Drive a Single Call-to-Action – One of the most common mistakes we see is people trying to do too much with their landing pages. If you ask visitors to do 55 things, odds are they’ll bounce instantaneously. However, if you focus on driving a single action, you’re likely to get people to take the action you want.

And even though from hosted exchange to great SEO books there’s no shortage of sites who implement great simple landing pages, the concept is not to be forgotten. Pick something simple and drive people to take that single action. With landing pages the old adage is incredibly true: less really is more.

Ultimately, there is no one size fits all landing page. There are many approaches you can take and some useful gallery sites to get design ideas from, but there’s no substitute for understanding the principles of conversion rate optimization and working with a talented designer to give you exactly what you’re looking for.

And though this is not an exhaustive landing page checklist, hopefully the above examples provide a useful overview of some of the key principles you can apply to your landing pages before you throw too much ad spend at sub-optimal, poorly converting creatives.

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